I sucked back a breath, quietly, trying not to take what he was saying personally and freak out. He was opening up. I knew this was hard for him. I knew this was rare for him. I also heard what he just said, about how hard it was to put his feelings into words. So I tried, really hard, not to be hurt by his words.
Then he reached across the table and took my hand. “Unless it’s like it is with us.”
“Us?”
“Yeah. With you… the pleasure is so intense… I crave it. Because I’ve never felt anything like it. It’s not just physical pleasure. The emotions are overwhelming, even if I don’t fully understand what they are. That’s probably why I fell for you so fast.”
“You… fell for me?”
“Yeah. I fell for you. Hard.” He squeezed my hand and I couldn’t hold back my smile. “Even that first time we kissed… I probably could’ve fallen for you way back then, Angie. But even so, I really should’ve apologized to you for that. I would’ve, maybe, but I didn’t want to upset Shayla. Or upset you. So I just went on pretending it didn’t happen. I thought maybe you’d assume I was just being a drunken asshole that night and let it go. But it wasn’t like that for me.”
“What was it like?”
“It… overwhelmed me. Whenever something bad happens, I have these two coping mechanisms. I run. Or I reach out for the nearest distraction, if there is one available. And the distraction has to be all-consuming enough to work. Occasionally that means getting stupidly drunk. Or stupidly high. Or smashing up a hotel room. Or… sex. When I got the news about my mom that night…” He sighed shortly. “I grabbed on to you. But when I kissed you, I don’t know… something happened. It got to me. It bothered me, when you pulled away. I thought it was because I was so raw about what happened to my mom. But it was more than that. It was disturbing how much I wanted you.”
“Yeah. Well… that was how it felt for me, too.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, sincerely, with all the regret he’d obviously felt about it since that night.
“I’m not.”
We stared at each other as that sank in, for both of us.
“You had a boyfriend. I should never have fucked with you like that.”
“Honestly…” I swallowed, admitting the truth to him that I’d never admitted before, even to myself. “If you’d pressed it that night… I would’ve broken up with Flynn a lot sooner.”
Johnny got up and came around the table to sit right next to me. His hands slid into my hair, holding me close. “I’m sorry, Angeline. I never, never meant to hurt you.”
“I know. But if you’d really wanted me… I would’ve been yours.”
We breathed together for a long moment, our eyes tangled together. “Angie.” He breathed out a heavy sigh. “I really wanted you.”
I sighed, too. “Fuck.”
He kissed me, lightly.
“We’re stupid,” I whispered.
He smiled. Then he looked deep in my eyes. “I would’ve hurt you,” he said soberly. “If we’d hooked up back then. Without meaning to. I would’ve hurt you… much worse.”
“So, maybe… things happened how they were meant to happen.”
“Yeah,” he said, though I could feel his lingering regret. Thatwhat if…?feeling. I felt it, too.
What if we’d gotten together sooner?
“Flynn was good to me,” I told him gently. “So, there’s that. I don’t regret my relationship with him. At all. I just regret hurting him.”
“Yeah. I get that.” Johnny sat back and took a sip of his almost forgotten drink. Neither of us seemed all that interested in the food. “I’m not good at relationships, Angie. The ones I keep in my life… they’re sort of calculated. They serve a purpose. There are very few people besides my dad, my stepmom and my sister, who I really trust and call a friend. Noah, Lex, Shane, Dane. Lamar, too. Yash. I feel safe with them, maybe because they know a version of me that I let them know. But even they think I’m a jerk. That asshole the world knows as Johnny O is basically the only way I know how to function in the world.”
“There’s so much more to you than that, though,” I told him. “I hear what you’re saying. But just because you have a hard time expressing your feelings doesn’t mean you’re not capable of them. Your fear of abandonment is a driving force in your life, I get it. But what happened to you when you were eight years old is a part of who you are, forever. It didn’t make you a bad person. Maybe it just made it harder for you to connect with the good person you are. And to connect with other people.”
“Yeah. Definitely.”
“You’re so protective of that part of you that got hurt. But working so hard to protect that boy… it comes at a cost, Johnny. I know it does. I’ve seen your nightmares.”
He gave me that haunted look, the one I’d glimpsed in his eyes a few times now. “So… what if I open up, tell people everything there is to know about me, and they don’t like who I really am? Or what I’ve done?”
