by Ace Gray
“You’re really going to storm out of a bar, again, instead of talk to me?”
That voice. That ever loving voice! I’m trying to forget it. Forget how it makes me feel. How can it still claw at my heart and lash at my knees? Particularly when he’s using it to be a jerk. No, a bastard. A jerktard. I growl as my shoulders tense all on their own.
“I’m sick of this shit, Mina. Tell me why you’re mad at me. Tell me what I did.”
I want nothing more than to scream how don’t you know?
“I mean you’re acting mildly insane. Between your snippy attitude and that moron you slept with it’s like I don’t even know you.”
The bottom line is he doesn’t. Haven’t I been reminding myself over and over on pain of death that he never did? My temper bubbles up and over when I think about it.
“You wanna talk, James?” I spin to face him in the street. The moon casts shadows across his stupid gorgeous face and I’m grateful. “What do you want to talk about?” I know I’m being far too loud, far too late at night but it feels good to yell at him.
“What went wrong? Why can’t we be friends?”
“You know damn well why we can’t be friends!” I throw my hands up and roll my eyes, whether he can see them or not.
“Not anymore. I get why you needed space, but—”
“Space?” The word projects me forward. Toward him. Like I’m powered by rocket fuel. “Space?” I repeat, my voice ratcheting up further until I break. Like I’ve been meaning to since he showed up. “You broke my heart!” I yell an inch from his face and it echoes off the quiet buildings of the street.
“What?” His voice hitches a little. My ragged little breaths betray my truth.
“You broke my heart.”
“I… How?” He folds in on himself, the boy I wanted to care for all those times, all over again. And seeing that boy instead of the man that made my heart ache, splits the dam that holds my words and they just start pouring out.
“I lost my friend, James. One of my best friends.” I make a small explosion noise to signify how it felt. “You made me jump through hoop after hoop to be your friend, and I did it. Over and over again. I wanted to. But when you questioned my character, like you didn’t know me, like all the days we sat and talked you never really listened—”
“I questioned your character?” His quiet anger rolls at my accusation.
“Like I would have ever cheated on Tanner. Particularly with you.” I push my finger into his chest.
He clasps his long fingers around my pointed one.
“You’re telling me that you never once imagined us? Never once thought about what it would be like if I kissed you.”
I swallow. Hard. I can’t help it.
“It doesn’t matter.” The crickets of the warm summer night are louder than me.
“It matters to me.” He shuffles closer.
“I wouldn’t have left him. No matter how many people called you my work husband. No matter how many great conversations or small shared moments we had. I wouldn’t have.” I try and step back.
He follows.
“But in the end what I said was true. And I was right.”
The clouds shift just enough that I can see his face. His eyes match the color of the moonlight. I know that shimmer, each facet of it, and I can’t lose myself in it. I won’t.
“You think you were right to break my heart?” The words help me fortify myself again.
“That’s not what I meant.” Every sharp line of his face softens.
“That’s what happened though. Whatever you thought you were doing, you can’t erase the fact that’s what you did. You broke my heart and I just figured out how the pieces fit again.”
It’s his turn to swallow. Hard.
His throat bobs and I can’t help but think about all the times I watched the same banal movement, enrapt. I watched his golden skin stretch across defined muscles and move in that way that was so utterly his that they showed me things about his soul.
I let my arm go limp and he lets it fall from his chest. “I couldn’t talk to you. I couldn’t text you. I couldn’t even say goodbye to you.” I step back and wrap my arms around myself to hold my fracturing pieces in place. “All the things I wanted to say…”
“Say them now.”
“I spent the past three years accepting that I’d never get to,” I whisper.
“Say them,” he repeats, and I can tell by the lines of the body that I knew better than my own, for that brief and shining moment, he wants to step toward me. But he doesn’t.
“James…” I sigh, hoping it hides the knot swelling in my throat. “When I put myself back together, I made sure I put myself back together without you. Until you came back… I thought I was whole.”
I turn and start walking away from him, trying not to choke on the emotion that’s welling back up and crashing into me. I think about burning those letters. About letting him go. I think about the gravel softly crunching beneath my feet as I walk away from him. By choice this time.
Courtney’s been trying to tell me; it has to be this way this time.
With each step, each breath, I remind myself that the only thing I’d write to him now is a thank you note. Thank you for making me stronger. Thank you for making me face my demons. Find my own worth.
Thank you for the days that are long gone—
“What if I broke your heart because every fucking day with you, broke mine?”
I freeze. Those are the only words I don’t know if I’m equipped to fight. I know the rational answer—the one that goes something like you don’t hurt the ones you love—but those words, those stupid, awful, no good, what I always wanted to hear words aren’t rational. What they make me feel isn’t either.
I take one shaky step.
“It’s not a good reason but what if it’s the truth?” His words are the warm breeze blowing against my face, my heart, my soul.
“What if it is?” I ask myself every bit as much as I ask him.
His feet crunch against the gravel, heavier than mine, and I can still perfectly imagine how he looks walking toward me. That long stride, those sure steps.
“You were engaged. I couldn’t tell you.” I feel the heat of him behind me. I close my eyes, expecting him to reach out, to touch me. Expecting myself to run. Or sag back into him. “I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t touch you. My life was full of off limits when it came to you. That’s the way it had to be.”
My head is spinning. The rational war has so many buts lined up. I think about the words I didn’t care to say to him anymore gone up in smoke. The beautiful and the broken ones. Why am I sharing them? I want to walk away. I want to feel the burn of that lighter against my thumb.
“But now…” His voice trails off, and the burn is there as if I’ve summoned it. The burn of his whispered words against my ear. His fingers slowly moving up my bare arm.
My heart beats in my chest in a new pattern, one that spells James Larrabee while it makes the shape of his lips, his smile, his hands. He turns me to face him full in the moonlight and his hand travels down to mine. That’s new. The feel of his hand in mine. The way our fingers twine together. I look down as my fingers roll against his, uncomfortable and home all at the same time. I don’t know if I can even feel it; I can just feel him. Everywhere.
I can’t breathe.
“These past few weeks I thought I could smooth it over easily but there was your anger and that asshole. It wasn’t until I saw you jealous over that girl tonight that I wondered if…” He doesn’t finish and I can’t figure what is falling into place behind his eyes. Not even when he looks me full in the face and lays himself bare. “Mina…” James breathes new life into my name, into me when he says it, and my eyes dart to meet his. My heart races in my chest, thundering like the storms I weathered for this man.
I know he’s going to kiss me a moment before he does. His body does just what I imagined it would, flinches just the way I always guessed. Min
e responds to him in real life, just the way it did in that particular fantasy.
All too quickly and not nearly fast enough, his crooked smile is pressed to mine. My insides flip at the touch. At the dream now reality. Fire races across my skin, spreading anywhere he’s touching me. Or may touch me. The plump of his bottom lip coaxes mine to dance.
Dance like the flame of the lighter as I burned first my life then my pain to ash over this man. I gasp. James moves from my lips to the small space of skin below my ear. I take a few deep breaths. Well as deep as I can manage when the man I was convinced was my soulmate is kissing me. My skin. Working his way down…
Down like I was for days, weeks, months, because of what he said. What he did. Because the pain pinned me to the ground and made it impossible to push myself up.
Until now.
I shove against his chest with all the force of feeling it again. All of it. The love, the lust, the want. The self-doubt, the guilt, the utter agony.
“How dare you,” I manage.
“You were begging me.”
Begging? Is he delusional now too? Probably. Selfish? Of flipping course. How could I forget? Even for a moment in the moonlight? Selfish and stunted. This kiss wasn’t about us. When his lips touched mine, he was thinking of himself. Of his puffed-up ego. He was thinking that it was fine because he can’t communicate like a normal person—his words, not mine. Because it was never my words. Ever. I said them. Over and over. If only he ever bothered to listen.
But he hadn’t then.
He still didn’t now.
And since I don’t have any more letters to burn, I cock my free hand back and slap him across that beautiful jawbone as he keeps hold of my other hand. I slap him so that pain vibrates through my hand and up my forearm. Hard enough the boy that broke my heart three years ago feels it.
“Court!” My bellow is punctuated by my banging fist. “Courtney, open this mother f-ing door right f-ing now!” I bang again. When I don’t even hear footsteps in answer, I yell the only think I can think to get her sweet ass moving. “I kissed James last night.”
“Holy shit,” she squeaks, filling the open door that was definitely not open a minute ago. “You kissed him?”
“Well he kissed me, but I didn’t…”
“Stop him?” She sighs. “Why would you?” She gestures for me to come in and, a second after she clicks the old door behind me, she heads straight for her tea kettle and starts water to boil.
“You know why.”
Her shoulders slump even as she reaches for mugs. “I would have thought you did too.”
“Fair,” I say as I settle across from her at the long barn wood table that has heard far, far too many words about James Larrabee. “And for the record, it started out with me giving him a piece of my mind.”
“And ended with you in a tongue tango under the moonlight?” She cocks her eyebrows to punctuate the sentence.
“My tongue and his tongue are not intimately acquainted. Swear.”
She settles into the seat across from me and slides a mug my way before snugging her robe around her shoulders. “Does that really matter?”
I fold my lips in on themselves. The answer is no. I know it, Court knows it. But I can’t bring myself to say it.
Instead, I pick up a silver teaspoon and try and spin a sugar cube into the hot liquid without touching the edges of the porcelain. My thoughts follow the swirl, down and down and down. Until I stop them. And my spoon.
“I told him that he broke my heart.”
“Finally.” She nods.
“I told him that he questioned who I was at my very core when I thought he knew and that was what hurt most of all.”
“Good.” She takes a sip.
“I want to believe it.” I can’t bring myself to sip the tea to warm my insides.
“A few weeks ago, you did. I know you did. You burnt the letters.”
“Courtney, one, Mina, negative three hundred and forty-two.”
“Oh come on, you’re just at zero.” She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand.
“He makes me feel like a zero.” I blow out a puff of air that ruffles my stray hairs before I lay my head down on the table.
“You let him.”
“Ouch, dude.” I wince against the tabletop, even if she can’t see.
“I can’t baby you because you tripped and fell back into James Larrabee’s orbit. I’ve been tiptoeing enough around it the last few run-ins.”
I rock my forehead back and forth against the table. “I didn’t mean to.”
“I know.”
“I want to put him behind me. I do. But that kiss…”
“You want to put him behind you, do it. You did it before, do it again.” She cups her hand to the back of my head.
“But that kiss…” Those words play in a loop in my head, an amplified heartbeat all its own thumping through my veins. The memory… Oh shit. Knee deep shit.
“There has always been and will always be some but with James Larrabee, Mina. You were the one that decided to stop giving it any credence. You’re the one that has to do it again.”
She’s right. She’s always right. That’s why she’s my best friend, she’s bloody brilliant. And she’s using my words, my sentiment, against me. I can’t fault her in the least for either.
I stared at the shadows on my ceiling for too long last night. I watched how they shifted with the moon itself. I tried not to think of how they looked like James’ eyes.
I tried not to feel that kiss sear my lips.
But I did. Over and over and over again.
The dark bruise-like bags hang from my eyes after two sleepless nights. I tried to cover them up before work, and once during. I’ve been trying to sip on tea like Courtney served yesterday but everything is in shambles. I can’t find direction let alone a teacup.
“‘Scuse me, another jack n diet please.” The woman’s thick Southern drawl pulls me from the recurring nightmare. The waking dream.
My customer service smile pulls into place. “Of course.”
“And can I talk to the manager? This romaine lettuce has dirt on it.”
Well, jeez lady, the lettuce that farmers grow a few miles from here IN THE GROUND has dirt on it? You don’t say! “I’m so sorry to hear that,” I say instead of the snap inside my head. “I’m the owner, and I’d be happy to take that off the bill. My apologies on behalf of the kitchen.”
My smile softens as if on cue just before I turn to the terminal and make the adjustments to the bill. I walk toward the kitchen—I am going to tell them to double check the lettuce—but it’s nature and I’m exhausted. I lean against the wall in the hallway for a moment and close my eyes.
I swear to God I try not to hear his voice echo through the quiet spaces.
“Can we please talk?”
There it is. In all its sultry, dark, and smoky glory. That voice that plucks a chord inside me so real, so raw, that I can’t fight it. But I can try. Try and pack it back up into the tiny memory box where I was so desperately trying to keep it for three full years.
“Hello,” he whistles sharp through his teeth, “Earth to Mina.”
My eyes snap open—only now realizing that the voice is not a dream—to find James leaning against the wall just in front of me.
“I brought something special in case you were interested.” He holds up a dark bottle of beer. The tumult of emotion that accompanies that bottle is a lot like the one that accompanies him.
I sigh as I look both him and the bottle over again.
The exhaustion threatens to pull me under. As does he. Standing in front of me he’s all arms and legs and man and such—all man and arms and legs and such that kissed me. I jerk my chin toward the private dining room in the back. I feel him following before I double check.
I grab a few snifters as I take a seat across the large table from him. “You sure you want to waste a good bottle on round two?” I can’t help but reach up to rub my temples de
spite the worthy peace offering.
“There’s no one else I’d drink it with.” He sets it down on the table between us with the same confidence that he does everything—quiet, unassuming yet powerful.
“Why?” I pick it up and admittedly, it’s a good beer. No, great beer. My favorite in fact. And he was the one I first tasted it with. His answer is already sinking in the pit of my stomach.
“I always think of it as our beer.” The word our tries to sucker punch me. “We had it the last night things were good between us.” The way he finishes his sentence though, that is a roundhouse kick to the temple.
“You think that night was good between us?” I ask, incredulous.
“Wasn’t it?” His face squinches up, bringing his sharp features to life and somehow making his lips even more plump then they already are.
I close my eyes and lean back into my seat. We’re even more lost than I thought we were. He’s clueless and I’m adrift. That’s the bottom line and the massive disconnect between the two of us. I lift my hand even though it seems to weigh a thousand pounds to rub my aching temples.
“You don’t know anything, do you?”
“I honestly have no idea. Care to fill me in?” His words lack condescension, he’s honestly asking. “That night was the second night you completely ignored me in favor of your phone.”
He sucks in a deep breath. “Really? No way.” His pause is heavy to match the weight on my shoulders. “I remember the beer…”
“See I remember that we were already walking on a tightrope because you’d told me I was too much—”
“How many times did I tell you, I didn’t word that right?”
“How many times do I have to tell you that what you meant and what happened are two very different things?” I sigh and drop my hand, staring him in the eyes—he has no retort, no smart remark for me. “You told me that the contact, that my friendship, that who I was with you was too much. Those were your exact words. I can probably find the text.” My eyes fall from his. I can’t watch him as I say what comes next. “It made me question every text, every conversation. It made me question who I was and what I said. Not just to you. To everyone.”