“Not when I know that’s just something you’re telling yourself. Something you’re using to try and convince me. Because I remember now. I remember you kneeling next to me. I remember you saying my name,” she said, half sure it was just a thing to say. Half feeling it flooding back.
She’d thought it was Christian who had been there.
But behind her eyes, the image was shifting.
Still, it stole her breath when he didn’t deny it.
“You were completely out. I had to try something.”
“And then you lifted me into your arms.”
“The ambulance was taking too long, they wanted to put you in a cab.”
“You carried me out to your truck, laid me in the passenger seat,” she said, and oh, the memory was strong now. Rich with sensation. She drifted into it all, as if on a wave. “I knew that smell, you know. That warm cedar smell that is still in it now, the shipping forecast on the radio, the stars going by outside the window. I think you said something to me. I think your voice broke in the middle when you did.”
“I was scared. It was just your lip, but it seemed like so much blood.”
“It was all down my dress, like an apron.”
He swallowed thickly. “Yes. Yes.”
“And your words were—” she started.
Then listened to him finish in a voice made high and wavery by the strain.
“Please don’t leave me alone in this hell,” he said. Heconfessed.
Because that was what it felt like, a confession of his guilt.
Instead of her own.
“But I did leave you alone anyway, didn’t I.”
“Don’t say it like it was your fault. You can’t leave someone you don’t love.”
“But that’s the thing, darling. I do. I love you, Caleb. I always have. I did from the first moment I saw you, I loved you through every moment since. It’s why it crushed me. Not because you were so awful, you weren’t. I just longed for you so much that everything that said you didn’t love me back was like a knife in my heart,” she said, all of her knowing she had him. She had him. His expression was so open, so suddenly struck by wonder, by hope. All she had to do was finish the thought. All the terrible messes he thought he had made with his love, making something more lovely than anything she had ever known. “Feels so strange to know it’s no longer there. I’ve lived with it so long I’m used to the ache. I don’t know how to be, with it healed.”
“I don’t even know how to be, hearing that it is. Hearing that you love me.”
“Hopefully happy. You deserve to be happy, my dearest one. My Jim, turning himself and everything he knows upside down, just to save me. Just to save his Selena.” She reached forward then. Touched his face, gently, and watched his eyes drift closed. “Because you’re wrong, you know. Your love isn’t out of control and cruel. It’s a thing people have forgotten. Fierce, in the face of injustice. Ready to fight, if the fight is for something good. You love the way I wish everyone did. The way I wished you would, when I didn’t know.”
“What if I lose my way again?”
“We’ll find you together. We’ll always find our true selves, together,” she said, then watched him not even hesitate. He reached down, and drew her into his arms. And he kissed her with everything in him. All the love lost, all the love found. Everything forgotten and not. Each regret, each passion he’d forced himself not to indulge—she felt it all.
She gave it to him right back.
Epilogue
On Wednesdays, after they had met their word count on the book they were writing together or had his sister over for lunch and the love he should have known was always still there, they went out. Not to the diner, although secretly she was starting to love it more than he did. And not for a walk in the woods that usually wound up with them doing some very inadvisable things while surrounded by poison ivy. No—they went to the theater, in the center of town.
The one that was not seventeen blocks away.
She could walk it from their house, no problems at all.
But it was better on Wednesdays when they went together. Like in college, only without the three rows between them. Hell, sometimes they didn’t even let the arm rest stay between them. It really depended on how bad the film was.
And how much better they could make it by making out.
