And then I do some online shopping.
Finally.Finally. It’s my lucky night.
Not my night to get lucky—to clarify. I’m not the kind of cocky that assumes I’ll be blessed by the gods of sweet, sweet release anytime soon. Not with the girl in front of me at least—the only one I have any interest in, the only one that matters. Nope. So it’s just her (in my imagination) and my hand for the foreseeable future. Butwow,is my imagination about her something special every night when it’s just me and said hand, alone in my bed, or again in the shower each morning before I bring Gem her morning coffee with that same hand.
Ever since my awakening, as I’ve come to think of it as, I can’tnotsee her raw beauty every time I look at her. Her delicate features twist my insides with this fiery desire every time I look at her. It’s fucking distracting. That little nose of hers is so damn cute, and the way she’s got the lightest freckles that go across it, out to her cheeks on either side—you’d never notice them unless you’re just inches from her face, and then you can’t miss them. It’s like an optical illusion or something. But it’s her top lip that I find my mind wandering to the most. It’s always been a little larger than her lower lip, but I’ve never been so obsessed with it in my life. It looks so damn soft, so full and plush, I need to know how it feels against my skin, my mouth, wrapped around my?—
“Hello.” Her voice sounds formal, detached, almost cold when she uses said lips to interrupt my train of thought before it hits the tracks of no return, but I know she’s putting this air on to keep distance between us. That’s good for me. That means she’s warming up to me, but she isn’t ready to yet. And that’s okay. I haven’t gotten to tell her hardlyanyof what I need to. That night, after my mom smashed me into a million pieces beforeputting me back together again, when I came to see her and beg her not to shut me out…I hardly said a thing of what was on my mind. Just the bare minimum for her to not kick me out forever. I’ve been waiting for my chance to open up to her, but she hasn’t been ready. And that’s okay. Now that I know what I want, what my life should look like, I’m a patient man. I’m going to keep putting in the work until she hears me out, and beyond that. Forever, if she’ll let me. And if she won’t? Well, I’m not ready to consider that possibility yet.
So tonight, that looks like hearingherout. Letting her tell me her side of things. I’m not sure I’m ready, not sure I can handle the blows that will hurt so much more than physical ones to my gut at hearing how badly I hurt her, all the ways I ruined what we had between us. But I need to, and I know that.
So here I sit. On one of two cheap, flimsy, white plastic chairs that sit on her back stoop, a sorry excuse for a patio. But no neighbors are out, so it feels private, and we’ve got the cool, autumn air of the early evening to keep us company, along with the breeze rustling the leaves in the trees bordering the shared yard for this building. The distant Blue Ridge mountains far beyond are fading with the sunset, no color visible in their silhouette, just shadows against the pinkish orange sky, but the sight is a comfort all the same. It grounds me, makes me feel like I’m home, just like she does.
When she plops down in the other chair, not two feet from my left, my eyes latch onto hers and don’t let go. “Hey.”
She takes a deep breath, eyes scanning the horizon, hopefully taking comfort in that mountain view, just like I do. Gem’s gorgeous, impossibly soft brown eyes come back to mine and she could break my heart with the look in them alone. But her words don’t help that situation, either.
“I’m going to talk. There’s a lot I haven’t said to you, and some stuff you might need to hear again, or maybe I just need tosay it again.” There’s a break in her voice that hints at how much pain she’s holding back right now, and I don’t have the words to tell you how much I loathe myself in this moment. “I need you to listen. I don’t want you to say anything to me, just let me get everything out, okay? There’s things I haven’t had the courage to say for ten years, and I’m going to try to get it all out tonight. But I need you to realize how hard this is for me, and just…let me talk.”
I lick my lips, pressing them together to hold back everything I won’t be able to say tonight, and just nod my head, silent assent. I promise to be what she needs tonight and always. I just pray she lets me prove that to her.
“I fell in love with you a long time ago, Aaron. I couldn’t tell you when, what day it was that I realized it, because I don’t think there was really a time where I wasn’t in love with you. As kids, that looked like something else. But as we grew up, went through puberty, matured, so did the way I felt about you. What started out as just a constant desire to be around you, be with you as much as possible, turned into this…longing. You’ve always been my happy place, you know? You were the constant in the storm for me. Where I could go for comfort, for a little bit of joy even if other shit sucked, you know? And that wasn’t something I was willing to risk rocking the boat on. I didn’t want to lose what I had with you for anything, even if it meant all of my dreams maybe coming true. The chance of me scaring you off, of you telling me you didn’t see me like that—you didn’t want me in the same way I wanted you…nothing was worth that risk to me.
“But there were so many times where I thought ‘this is it. It’s going to happen today.Thisis the day he’s going to tell me he wants more from me. He’s going to look at me and see everything I’m not saying, and make a move.’ And you never did. I can’t tell you how many nights I fell asleep to that dream. It just became my way of life. Pining after you. Waiting for ourforever to kick in. I kept hoping I’d work up the courage to tell you myself, in case you were just as scared as I was. But after the time you freaked when I wore something revealing for the first time…”
My stomach churns, turns over on itself at the wistfulness, the worry in her voice, and what makes me the sickest is knowing she was right. I really didn’t see her like that. Never noticed her in that light. I wouldn’t have wanted her back. Had she confessed her feelings to me years ago, I probably would have gotten spooked. Of course I would’ve tried to maintain the friendship, I know she would’ve too, but there’s no doubt in my mind that we would’ve been irreparably changed after that. There would’ve been a distance between us after a confession like that, a fear on my part of getting too close to her, leading her on. To say nothing of how the embarrassment, the letdown, the devastation of an admission like that not being reciprocated might hurt her, affect how she felt around me.
“I knew I didn’t have it in me. I wasn’t brave enough to be rejected by you on something as big as how I felt, what I wanted for us. And I vowed to wait for you to make the move. I just didn’t realize you’d wait until it would hurt the most to do it.”
She scoffs, turning her head away from me, staring off for a few heartbeats where I’m positive mine isn’t beating at all. Her voice is smaller than I want to hear it when she continues. “I couldn’t bear the thought of that kind of rejection from you. So I took what I could get from you. Gladly.” A sad smile graces her lips. “And then…you started dating.” She lets out a big exhale, her chest falling with the motion. “It wasn’t easy to see you with other girls, I can’t lie about that. But we still spent so much time together, you were so good about splitting your time. We still hadourfriendship, and it was still sacred. And for so many years, I watched. I watched you with these girls, in and out of your life, and I tried not to take it too personal. I knew theydidn’t come close to what you and I had. I think I always kind of had this belief that one day, things would change with us. This weird kind of certainty that we’d end up together, somehow, some way, someday.”
She keeps talking like she isn’t ripping my chest open with every line, every confession that leaves her lips. The fact that she’s talking in past tense isn’t lost on me, and those are the claws that pierce into me the sharpest, doing the most damage to my vital organs. Not just my heart, but my guts, my lungs, too, because it feels like I can’tbreathewith what she’s saying to me.
How long she’s gone through this with me—she’s felt exactly this kind of longing I’m stuck with now for a fucking decade. I have no clue how she’s survived it. She’s goddamn amazing. It’s been less than a month for me, and I’ve gone certifiable over it. It smacks into me with unerring aim how many opportunities I missed to have everything I ever wanted, and how fucking stupid, how completely blind I was to never have noticed. Now that I finally have? I know I’m too late, but that’s not going to stop me from trying like hell anyway.
“So I tried to pass the time by dating myself. Except… I couldn’t.” She brings her eyes back over to mine, searching my gaze for a few seconds, looking for something she must not find, because she looks away again, back at the horizon before continuing. “Every guy I looked at, I compared to you. His arms felt wrong, because they weren’t yours. He didn’t laugh at my jokes, couldn’t make me smile the way you do. He wasn’t the right kind of nerd for me. He didn’tgetme the way you did. Nobody compared. Nobody was…you.” Her eyes meet mine again, and I know mine are wet, but I can’t help that. I stay silent, just like she asked, despite the unspoken wordsroaringup my throat, demanding to be heard by her, but I don’t let them out.
“Plus, when I had a ‘boyfriend,’” she uses air quotes on the term to show she was never serious about any of them, “it took away from my time with you. And at the end of the day…I always would’ve rather been with you than any other guy. There was no doubt in my mind, we were supposed to be together. You were it for me. So I stopped trying to pretend, stopped trying to force something that was never going to happen. I just…waited.”
I swallow heavily, my eyes slamming shut. All those times I wondered about her relationships, even pondered her sexuality, all because she was single for so damn long. And that was all because she knew all along what I’ve only come to realize in the past few weeks. I couldn’t feel like more of an idiot if I tried. But I have a feeling she’s about to help me with that.
She lets out a depressed sort of chuckle, looking back at me, eyes dropping down my frame, snagging on my chest, my stomach. “I even thought…these past couple of years, I thought maybe you were realizing it, too. That time you got the call forRough and Tumble, and you had me pressed against the counter…” Her voice trails off.
I fight the urge to bite my fist, knowing exactly what she’s referring to. How I backed her up against the cabinets, the kitchen counter, flirted with her like I’d never done before. And then I just walked away, like it meant nothing to me. Didn’tletmyself see what she saw between us.
She drops her head and gives it a sad little shake. “I thought maybe you were fighting the same thing I was. That you wanted me, too, but were too scared to ruin what we had. For so long after that, I thought we might’ve been on the same page. We had this routine down, it was so comfortable, it felt right. Our lives were completely intertwined, but it was so smooth, so good between us. The only thing missing was that last little bit of ourselves.” She brings one arm up from where it’s been perched on her knee, holding a fist over her heart. “Giving in, givingourselves over to one another. I was sure once that happened, that would be it for us. And that morning we woke up on your couch, feeling you behind me…” A tear must drop from her left eye, because while I can’t see that cheek from where I’m sitting, staring at her, fixated, her left hand comes up to wipe at that spot almost angrily. I have never wanted to hold her so much in my life as I do in this moment. What I wouldn’t give to have her cradled in my lap right now, my hands on her cheeks, holding her steady as she spills all of her truth to me.
“I was so stupid,” she whispers. “I thought that was it for us. The turning point. Where we’d both finally give in.” Her head tosses back as she lets out a dark laugh, staring at the sky for a moment. “I’ve never felt so stupid, Stone. Never as when you took that moment to tell me you’d foundthe one. Someone who wasn’t me.”
My stomach bottoms out through my asshole, and I could puke. I’m not sure how I haven’t yet, truth be told.
I plead with her silently to look at me, read my mind, anything it takes to know how sorry I am. I never thought Kayla was the one. Yeah, things were going pretty good between us, but I was just fucking nervous that morning, freaking out that I woke up with a hard-on pressed into the ass of my best friend, and I hadn’t eventoldher I had a girlfriend. I was seven kinds of fucked up that morning, feeling so disgustingly guilty for all of it, and I regret so many things about that time period of my life. Taking Gemma for granted and pushing her away were the worst of my sins, by far. And it feels like that morning was the start of my downfall. How I ruined us.
“Anyway,” she shakes her head again, like she wants to forget the memory, how it made her feel. She looks back at me, her eyes a little red now, and I want to die. “I can tell you I’m sorry for never taking a chance on us sooner. For loving you so deeply since we were twelve and thirteen, for half our fucking lives, andnever being brave enough to tell you about it. But I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for kicking me out of your life, for the things you said to me.
“When you made me doubt my role in your life, in the life we shared, I lost that confidence. Not just in us, but in me. And I doubted everything we’d had, because I could never have done that to you.” Her voice wavers, and this time I see the tears that drip down her face. She turns to look at me. “I already had the whole world telling me I wasn’t good enough for you. I didn't need you to tell me that, too.”
If she keeps talking I might actually die. She does.
