Cool gold against my flushed skin.
The hand in my hair, the wedding band on his finger, Rose’s ring against my face while her husband kisses me in a barn she spent years in.
He feels it at the same moment I do.
I know because his whole body changes—a full-system flinch, like being shocked awake from a dream.
The hand in my hair freezes.
The hand on my hip drops like my body burns him.
He pulls his mouth from mine and the absence of it—the cold, the emptiness, the sudden void where heat used to be—is a like a punch to the gut.
He steps sideways. Out of the wall. Out of my reach.
One step, two, creating distance with the frantic efficiency of a man putting out a fire.
His face.
Self-loathing. Pure and absolute and devastating.
The mask isn’t back—it’s worse than the mask.
This is him looking at me like I’m the worst thing he’s ever done.
Like kissing me was a crime and the evidence is on his mouth, and he can’t wipe it off fast enough.
“I can’t do this.” His voice is wrecked. Hoarse. The voice of a man who just pulled something loose inside himself that was supposed to stay nailed down. “She was your best friend.”
A knife. Straight through the center of me.
Not because it’s cruel.
Because it’s the one thing he could say that uses the truth as a weapon.
She was my best friend. Rose.
The girl I loved more than anyone on this earth, the person who made me worth something, the sister I chose.
And I just had my tongue in her husband’s mouth and my hands on his chest and my body pressed against his while her ring touched my face.
She was my best friend and I wanted him so badly I forgot to feel guilty about it, and the fact that the guilt hit him first—that he’s standing there drowning in it while I was still burning—makes me feel like the worst person alive.
For one second he was here.
Present. Wanting me.
His hands on my body, his mouth on mine, the sound he made when our tongues touched—that broken, hungry sound that I’m going to hear every time I close my eyes for the rest of my life.
For one second Lee was a living man kissing a living woman and the ghost between us was just a ghost.
Then the ring touched my cheek and he went back to the shrine.
I should crumble.
That’s what a softer woman would do—cry, or apologize, or chase him as he backs toward the stall door.
But I am not a soft woman.
