We’re both quiet for a few breaths, and then he smiles. “The miracle,” he says, “is that Portia never talked to the press about the time I called her Kim in bed.”
My mouth drops open. “You didn’t.”
“Yes, I did,” he says sheepishly. “She slapped me and dumped me right then and there.”
Not that I love hearing about his post-divorce sex life—I’ve done my best to think about it as little as possible—but this makes me happier than it should.
His smile slips, and he looks down at our joined hands. “What about you? Were you in love with Roger?”
I wonder if I sounded like that when I asked about Simone—so tentative. I probably did. “I wanted to be,” I admit. “Roger was great to me, and he really loved me. I wanted to get over you, but I never could. So no, I wasn’t.”
He nods, but he doesn’t look particularly happy about it. Does he wish I had been? Does he want me to have moved on, even if he does have feelings for me? Maybe he still knows that ultimately he can’t be happy with me, and the only thing that’s changed is now he knows why.
“He asked me to marry him,” I continue quietly. “I thought about it.”
“Why didn’t you?”
I remember the look on Roger’s face when he asked me, and then later when I’d turned him down. I also remember the stark difference between how I’d felt during his proposal and how I’d felt during Blake’s. “He was a good man. In the end, I decided it wasn’t fair to him. I was never going to love him, not the way he wanted me to. And maybe he was okay with that, ultimately, but I never was.”
“You deserve that,” Blake says. “To be with someone you love.”
The breath catches in my throat, and I meet his gaze. “Do I?”
His eyes are are a shade more blue than green right now, and his face is so close to mine. “Of course you do.”
It takes everything in me not to lean in and kiss him.To feel again (and again) that completeness, that intense bliss of being with him.
Except I don’t know if that’s what he really wants, deep down. Not after what I did to us. He was the one who left, but he had good reason to.
“It took me a long time to figure it out,” I say after a moment. “Why I pushed you away.”
“What did you figure out?”
It was hard enough telling him about the OCD.This, somehow, is worse. “I wanted you to fight for us. I knew I was making you unhappy, even though I couldn’t stop myself from doing it. But I wanted to know that I was still worth it to you. I kept floating the idea of splitting up because I was desperate for you to tell me you didn’t want that.”The tears start to build again. “I wanted so badly for you to want to stay together.”
His face pales. “I’m sorry, Kim. I’m so sorry. I understand if you can never forgive me.”
“Forgiveyou?” I shake my head, disgusted with myself. “I just finished telling you how it’s my fault. How could you have known if I didn’t tell you? You’re the one who shouldn’t forgiveme.”
“Because you wanted me to fight for you?” His brow wrinkles. “God, Kim, I should have. I hate myself that I didn’t.”
“But I shouldn’t have gone about it like that. It wasn’t fair to you.” I’ve gone over this time and again. With my therapist, with my own brain in the middle of the night. So many regrets, so many things I’ve wished I could change.
“Maybe not,” he says, his tone angry. As it should be. But then he continues with, “but me walking out on you was hardly fair, either.” He closes his eyes, and I know it’s not me he’s angry with. It’s himself.
God, how did we screw this up so badly?
“I suppose it doesn’t matter now,” I say, mostly in answer to my own question.
Blake turns to me, and there’s this vulnerability in his expression that breaks my heart all over again. “Doesn’t it?”
I don’t know what to say to that.That growing hope that I’ve been trying to avoid flickers again, and I’m so afraid to stoke it, to give it any more life than it already has.
Blake looks back at our hands. Still joined, fingers entwined. “What do we do now?”
My throat is dry, and I don’t want to make any assumptions as to what he means. Clearly I’ve not been the expert on Blake’s mind that I once thought I was. “About the film? I guess we just get through it as best we can.”
He shakes his head. “No, I don’t mean about the film.”
