She’s neither cold nor heartless.She never was.I’m angry at myself for getting her so wrong, and pissed that she didn’t give me a chance to get it right.
She stands under the lamplight, her eyes and dress sparkling, and I’m caught in this awful battle between wanting this to be over and never wanting it to end.
“Whatever you need to say to me,” she says after a beat, “go ahead.Tell me.”
“I’m not okay, Venus.I understand why you did it, but it still hurts.You say you’re cursed because you fear commitment.Icravecommitment, and can’t have it.My relationships crash and burn because they aren’t… well, they aren’tyou.”
Her brow pinches with my confession.Maybe I shouldn’t have said it, but it’s the truth.And my last chance to say it.
She nods, encouraging me to continue even as her green eyes glint with building tears.
“… I’ve been with other people, obviously.I have a son I wouldn’t trade for anything.I tried so hard to love his mother the way she deserved.I wanted us to be a family.That didn’t work.No one hasworked.Damn, Venus, you’re the smart one.Why can’t I let you go?That’swhat I should want.Thatwould make it better.”
“I understand.”She nods, catching tears as soon as they slip from her eyes.“I feel it, too.It’s because we’re unfinished.We never even… that’s the problem, Henry.”
“How do we fix it?”
Her brows knit studiously as she considers the question, though I meant it rhetorically.There is no fixing us.We’re the past.Not the future.With Olly, my career, and now the museum, my cast is set, and Venus would be the last woman on earth to mold herself to it, not that I’d want her to try.
It’s like Dr.Blake told me when he found me passed out drunk in the greenhouse after she left, and I’d destroyed the remains of the herb garden we’d started in our corner bed.He sat with me, made me drink a lot of water, and said,“Venus is a sunflower who believes she’s a cactus.I’m sorry, son.”
Nothing he said then made sense to me.
Not that she’d left.
Not that she’d been struggling.
Not that it might be a long time before she returned.
And not that she didn’t want to talk to me.
At that moment, I didn’t give a fuck about sunflowers or cacti.All I wanted then was for her to sneak into my bedroom, curl against me, and apologize for prom by whispering, “My bad,” fromClueless.Thatwould’ve been enough for me.
But you can’ttellsomeone what they are—I see it now.This unwitting sunflower bobs on her boots, looking desperate and believing she’s too prickly to love, oblivious to how much I long for her.Still.She fiddles with her jewelry, one hand and then the other, and her cheeks flush with her rising nerves.How do you tell the most intelligent, confounding, beautiful, brave woman you’ve ever met that she let fear get in our way?That she didn’t trust me?Thatshedidn’t give us a chance?
“I have an idea,” she says, breathless.
Pages of memories flip through my thoughts, all the times those four words led us to something great, all the times they landed us in trouble.I wonder which it will be this time.
I have an idea… let’s build a lean-to and test it in the storm.
I have an idea… let’s start a controlled burn.
I have an idea… let’s hide all of Dale’s ashtrays.
I have an idea… let’s?—
“Let’s fix it by finishing it.”
“What do you mean?”
“One night together,” she blurts, while her soft green eyes darken and flicker with hope.“We deserve a more satisfactory ending.We could get each other out of our systems and move on to an amicable closure.It would end some of the mystery and satiate this constant yearning for what might have been.We could stop idealizing each other.Or, better yet, we might discover that we aren’t as compatible as we imagined, making our dissolution easier.It’sonething that we never did that we still could without adding complications.”
“Since when is sex uncomplicated?”
She sighs softly.“Why does it have to be?”
“Says the girl who ran the two times we came close,” I say with an unintentional scoff.
