I don’t regret it, though. That was the sweetest kiss. She starts to shift back, and my arms come up like they’re on springs. “No, no. I didn’t mean it like that.” A warm wind whips a strand of her hair across her face, and I push it off her cheek, skin soft under my palm. “I just don’t want it to be awkward.”
Her eyes squeeze shut, and I follow the track of her tongue over her lips. “Do you still … You were going to marry her.” Her voice falters.
I laugh. “God, how bad would that have been?” I stare over her head at the strings of lights on the bridge, all leading back to shore. The relief is overwhelming. I no longer feel as if I did something wrong with Jane, that it was somehow my fault. The vast majority of this is her doing, and tonight was the culmination of something that’s been building ever since that night on the roof. When I test my feelings for Jane, the soft feeling I had for her, the understanding, it’s gone.
“She’s treated me so poorly, torched my trust in so many different ways: her thoughtlessness, breaking it off in the way she did, the meal tonight. She was communicating with Kevin for years while she was with me.”
She pulls back. “Are you serious?”
“I know. God, I’m sorry to talk about her …” I don’t want to talk about Jane, I want to focus on what we just did, but as I gaze down at Sadie, I know that this conversation is too important to let go. I lift my hand and rub my thumb over her lips as a smile curls across my face.
“I asked,” she says simply.
“Jane’s been such a large part of my life for so long. She’s like a friend who let me down really badly. I’m tired of feeling cut up about the whole thing. She’s moved on, and tonight I realized I have, too. I miss what I thought we had, what I thought she was. But she’s not that person. I still feel some obligation toward her, and affection for the time we had together, but that’s it.”
“Twelve years of trusting someone and then finding out all that … I’m surprised you’re not angry.”
“Deep down, I’m so angry. But I also don’t want to throw it all away, as if it really was a waste of time, if that makes sense. I was standing here mulling it all over. Thinking about what it all means.”
She nods and leans into me. Is she okay with what we just did? What about her? She said she didn’t have time to date when she was younger. “You’ve never talked about your relationships. You told me you always had to work, but … no one?”
She shrugs. “They were nothing special, believe me. You’ve seen where I grew up in Queens; it’s rough, and school was no different. It was difficult. I used to fantasize about being a hero and taking them all out.” She laughs. “It sounds so childish when I say it out loud. Books were myescape. I had some processing problems that weren’t diagnosed for a long time.”
Quiet people are bullied in school. And processing problems … Wow, she made it through all that and got to college. That explains what her mom said to me a bit more.
“I had a couple of boyfriends, and because of that, the mean kids stopped picking on me, so, in some weird way, things improved a little when I got older.”
“Were they good to you?”
“No. I don’t think the boys there knew what being good to someone meant.”
I swallow down how hot my blood gets when she says this.
“They didn’t …”
She’s pink now, and she moves away suddenly, pressing her hands to her cheeks. “God, I hate how I blush. I’m not even that embarrassed by you asking that!”
I laugh, stretch out my hand, and pull her arms down. “Can I just say how much I like the blushing?”
She rolls her eyes, face still scarlet as she looks away, but a smile is curling over her mouth, nonetheless.
“So coming back to these guys who weren’t good to you …”
She places a hand on my forearm. “It’s not what you’re thinking, James. They were just dicks. A lot of people in my school were dicks.”
I step forward and rub the pad of my thumb across her lips. “I want to treat you well,” I say quietly. “Perhaps a guy who treats you well would be another first.”
Her eyes widen on me. But I know what I’m saying here. IlikeSadie. I don’t know where this will go. There’s a possibility I’m on the rebound. But I want it. God, do I want it. Sadie is the best thing that’s happened to me in a long, long time. I don’t think I’d realized just how narrow and grinding my life had become.
“This. Living with you …” I stare out over the river again. “… It’s been so good for me,” I say. “I hope it’s been like that for you.”
Her eyes are a bit glassy as she nods. “Yeah, definitely.”
I wrap my arms around her again, and as her hands curl into my chest,something roars through me. Just her pressing up against me, trusting me, sharing this; it’s like warm water filling me up from the inside.
I don’t know how long we stand like this on the bridge, but after a while she mumbles, “We should head back. I left your dad staggering off to bed. I didn’t tell him I was going out after you.”
I laugh. “He likes his whiskey. He must have had a few more after I left.”
