She did want him to stay here forever.
But the truth was...what if he did? What then? For a start the world would end up viewing him as some kind of hermit mental case—just like they probably did her, if they ever still thought about the girl she’d been. And then there was the question of what they would do together, with eternity.
Watch movies for the rest of their lives? Maybe at some point he’d manage to inch her out onto the sand, but she couldn’t see herself going beyond that. What kind of life would that be for him, living with a girlfriend who couldn’t go beyond a beach? He was used to flying at a moment’s notice to fancy restaurants in Paris, and she would never, ever be able to do that.
Not ever. God, no. No, not that.
So really it wasn’t a surprise when she answered, “I want to say yes, but I think it’s better if I say no. I think it’s better if you go—at least to sort yourself out.”
She immediately wanted to take that last part back. It sounded like such a cop-out, like such a lame excuse for something she wanted rather than anything that might benefit him. And she could see he knew it too. For the first time, he looked at her with something other than affection or desire. He looked at her with disappointment.
Like I let him down when he needed me most, she thought, and wanted to poke out both her own eyes. Without them she wouldn’t be able to see this—though alas she could still hear it. His voice sounded just a touch dull, when he answered her.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said. “My agent is pretty much beside himself—not to mention the preproduction meetings I’m supposed to be turning up to on Tuesday. I guess it just makes sense to get back to reality.”
“It definitely does. If you’ve got contracts and obligations...”
“I do. I have a lot of them. A lot of people relying on me.”
“And so many fans out there must be worried.”
“They probably are. And I hate disappointing my fans,” he said, and she came very close to offering him another sensible platitude. She came so close in fact that she actually spoke the first word aloud, before realizing how poisonous it sounded. How gross and unhelpful and most of all untrue. He hadn’t missed anything. He wouldn’t be glad to get back into it.
That was the whole fucking point of this.
So instead, she said what she should have done from the first.
“I know you don’t really mean any of that. I know how much your life is killing you. I saw it killing you on my living room floor. And if you don’t want to go back to it, then for God’s sake don’t, please don’t. I would die if you were hurt because I couldn’t say how I truly feel.”
“And what do you truly feel?”
She looked away at something else, anything else.
She had to just to get the words out.
“Like I can never really be what you deserve. You know I...I’ll never be able to go on a date with you. I won’t be able to go grocery shopping or antiquing or any of the other things normal couples do.”
“You think I want to go antiquing? I thought you knew me inside and out, Al. That’s scarily off base for someone who understood I liked having my ass licked before I even knew about the fucking thing.”
“It’s not...you know what I mean.”
“I don’t. Try explaining a little more clearly.”
“I’m not enough. I will never be enough.”
“Shouldn’t I get to decide that?”
“You can. You can decide it while you’re away,” she said, but it was clear both of them knew what that really meant. He wasn’t going to decide at all. He was going to see the only possible way things could be, because he was able to walk out the front door and she wasn’t. He would go on with life—maybe as a movie star, maybe not.
And she couldn’t.
“I don’t have to. I don’t have to go anywhere to know how I feel about you. To know that it doesn’t matter to me whether we go on dates or not. I’ve been on a lot of dates, honey. None of them have ever made me think, yeah, I could live in this woman’s basement for the rest of my life.”
God, her heart was beating so fast—probably because it had two reasons to.
The first was how wonderful and romantic and loving he was.
The second was terror, oh Christ, it was incredible fucking terror.
