“And what about mine?” I shot back. “I needed you, Manning. I felt like nothing and nobody without you.”
The radiator groaned, shuddering to life suddenly before it shut down. Manning also seemed to kick on, his face reddening as the muscles in his jaw ticked. “Does it make me happy to see you living like this? No.” He looked around the room for what must’ve been the tenth time, as if committing all the details to memory. Only now his brown eyes were full of something I couldn’t quite place. Pain? Regret? “I worried all the time, and apparently, I was right to.”
“It could’ve all been different. I would’ve done anything you’d asked.” I swallowed the lump in my throat in the silence that followed. “I would’ve stayed at USC and waited for you and loved you. It might’ve cost me my family, but look around. I lost them anyway. They don’t feel like home anymore. I don’t have a home. All I have is what you see here. Why did you do it?” I asked. “Why didn’t you stop it?”
“You know why,” he said.
“No I don’t. You kept telling me it was for the best. That it was to protect me from you. But when you married her, you shattered my world.” I gestured around at my things. The textbooks I’d worked overtime to afford, which sat on the bottom shelf of an IKEA bookcase I’d built myself. In the sink were wineglasses that’d seen many parties with friends I’d made when I’d just wanted to live under the covers and give up on people altogether. “These are the pieces, and they might not look like much to you, but they’re all I have. I’ve found a way to be happy. You can’t come back into my life and tell me it’s a mess when you’re the one who created it.”
“I knew it would hurt you,” he said, his posture sagging, “but I thought you’d pick up and move on and experience everything I would’ve held you back from.”
“I did. This is everything,” I said, shrugging with as much nonchalance as I could muster. “Look around. This is what you wanted for me.”
He pursed his lips. “You have to know I never thought you’d leave. That everything I do is because I … because—”
“Because what?” I got in his face. “If you still can’t say it after all these years, then get the fuck out of my life. You treated me like glass, but I’m made of more, Manning. You missed out.” My downstairs neighbor’s dogs barked, as if cheering me on. “You really missed out.”
“I know that.” He took a step and ducked to avoid hitting the ceiling lamp, the wood floor creaking under his massive frame. “Why do you think I’m here?”
I hesitated, caught off guard by the question and his nearness. “For work.”
“Wrong.” He towered over me. The intensity in his eyes bordered on heat, the kind I’d seen before, the kind I’d tried—and failed—to convince myself I’d imagined. “Work was an excuse to get to New York.”
No part of me thought Manning would come to New York and not check on me—but was he saying he’d come just for me?
I struggled for a deep breath I couldn’t seem to get. I’d pushed Manning many times over the years, but only that night on the beach had he ever let his emotions get the best of him. If I asked, would he really tell me what I’d wanted to hear back then? I’d figured out what I was made of over the years, but my heart hadn’t turned to stone. Could I even handle it? “You have a wife,” I said. “Go home to her, and don’t ever come back.”
“That’s what you want?” he asked.
My heart raced from being close to him again, all my instincts telling me to flee. “Actually, part of me wants you to stay … so I can call Corbin and give him the pleasure of kicking your ass.”
He winced. “Don’t say his name to me.”
“Corbin, Corbin, Corbin. You must be thrilled such a worthy man was my first kiss, my first love, my first …” I chickened out. “Do you get off on it, Manning? Do you fantasize about pushing me right into his arms, about all the ways he touches me, kisses me?”
As Manning’s eyes darkened, the room seemed to as well. He took up enough space to make it feel as if the apartment’s walls were closing in. “You act like I wanted this for myself,” he said. “I wanted it for you, but you don’t have to rub it in my face—”
“Why not? You forced me to stand there and watch you with her.” I pushed past him and started gathering up the assortment of tools, tossing them back in their cardboard box. I grabbed his blazer and coat from the loveseat and held them out to him. “Here.”
With his eyes on mine, he came toward me. In what felt like slow motion, he took his things, but I didn’t let go. He splayed his hand, and his fingertips accidentally brushed mine—except that he didn’t pull away.
Maybe it wasn’t an accident.
Goosebumps traveled up my arm. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m leaving, like you told me to.”
It wasn’t what I’d meant. Why are you touching me, I wanted to ask, but I was scared if I acknowledged it, I’d be unable to resist touching him back. “Where will you go?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He paused. “My hotel. For now.”
I held on—to his things, to his warm presence in the cold room, to the love rising inside me. He was standing in front of me again, as I’d often hoped for, but I didn’t know if I was allowed to want him here.
He tried to take his coat again. I clung to it. My chin wobbled. It wasn’t fair that she got him, that I had to kick him out when I wanted to get closer to him. After a few tense seconds of tug-of-war, he pulled the coat hard enough to bring me with it. “Lake.” The warmth of his presence turned to undeniable body heat. “You don’t really want me to go.”
“You can’t tell me what I want,” I said, my voice hitching as I stared up at him. “You can’t tell me what to do. I’m not sixteen anymore.”
“No, you’re not, are you?”
I froze, caught off guard by the way his voice noticeably deepened.
His pulse quickened at the base of his neck. “All the ugliness I tried to spare you was for nothing. You’re not safe. You’re not loved, not the way you should be. Your family is gone. You’re not soaring.”
“I am, though.” It was a pathetic protest, but it was true. It’d taken me a long time to get to this place, and things were finally going well. A few days earlier, I’d graduated quietly with Corbin and Val and some other friends in the audience. They’d taken me out to an expensive dinner and we’d brought home cheap champagne. “I’m starting my career. I’ve got good friends, an apartment, and most importantly, a life of my own. I’m happy, Manning.”
We were face to face now, just the coat between us. He frowned. “Then tell me there’s not one thing in the world that can make you happier,” he said, “and I’ll go. Tell me you are truly content with all this. With him.”
I needed to lie. I needed Manning to go and stay gone if I had any chance of making it through this life. There was no point in dragging everything back into the light. What could it serve, except to break me again?
I couldn’t lie, though. Not to him. “I’m as happy as I’m capable of being,” I said.
“That’s not good enough.”
“It’s all I can do. It’s what you left me with. Maybe one day down the line, ten years, twenty, I can be truly happy, but without you … I don’t think …” His expensive shoes touched the tips of my ragged boots. We were closer than we’d been in more time than I could measure. My heart pounded in rhythm with an ache between my legs I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel again. No part of my body wanted him to go.
Now, I could read the emotions in his soda-pop brown eyes—regret, pain, anguish. But under it all, I recognized something else that turned my legs weak. The day Manning had been released from jail and I’d stumbled into the foyer in front of him, the heat in his eyes, the hunger, had haunted me. I hadn’t understood it then, but I did now.
He’d wanted to fuck me. Badly.
He’d been locked up a year-and-a-half and seeing me had inspired some kind of carnal reaction in him. It was
the fantasy, the one that got me off like no other. Imagining he’d put me over his shoulder and carried me right out of that house, past my dad, past Tiffany. He’d take me in the backseat of Tiffany’s car because he couldn’t make it longer than that. I’d masturbated over and over to that, and to the night I’d found him at his kitchen sink in nothing but his boxer-briefs. That rawness in his face, his terrifying grip on my wrists, the way he’d pinned me to the counter with his hips—it was the stuff my dark fantasies were made of.
My heart raced, lust and memories coursing through me. I moved into him a little, and his hand tightened around the fabric. A horn blared outside, and as if startled, Manning bent his head, coffee and toothpaste on his breath, and lessened the great height disparity between us.
There was so much unsaid. So much that needed to be said. Whatever was happening had to be stopped, but only heat existed between us at that moment, unleashed after years of being bridled.
Manning tossed his coat out of the way, scanning my face. When he touched the hem of my sweatshirt, I flinched. He lifted it slowly. Underneath was the little black dress I’d worn out to the bar the night before, bunched around my hips. He ran his hand up the cheap satin, stopping under my breasts. With that one touch, my nipples roused, my skin pebbled, my hairs stood on end.
I was putty in his hands, but I didn’t want to be. I didn’t know if I could have him, so I didn’t want to look at him, much less feel his hands on me. “Why are you here, Manning?”
“I never stopped thinking about you, not for a day. I needed to come here and see with my own eyes if you were better off without me.”
I shivered. And if I wasn’t better off? Then what? The answer scared me more than his thumb pressing into my rib, setting free a kaleidoscope of butterflies inside me.
“I’m here because you … this …” His voice lowered and scraped from his throat as he slipped his other hand under my sweatshirt to take my waist. “It keeps me up at night. It makes me insane. And some days I think I’d kill for it.”
With the word kill, my insides pulled deep. This was it, the carnal side of him I’d seen glimpses of. My focus wavered with his hands on me, but I only just remembered what a mess I was, wearing a dress I’d partied and slept in. I hadn’t shaved my legs in days. “Manning …”
His hands moved slowly, hidden by the sweatshirt as they explored me. “Want me to stop?” he asked.
Like that night on his kitchen counter, I still couldn’t believe Manning was just touching me. I wanted it, but I was older now. Smarter. I knew how dangerous his hands were. “I …”
“Just say the word. Say stop.”
I breathed hard. I quivered. I thought about the times I’d felt him hard against me and hadn’t been able to do anything about it.
I didn’t tell him to stop.
He cradled both sides of my ribcage, moving his hands upward until I was forced to raise my arms. When he pulled off my sweatshirt, one of my thin dress straps fell over my shoulder. He touched my hair, drawing the long strands through his loose fist and over his palm. He still hadn’t kissed me. It’d been over six years since the day we’d met, and he still hadn’t kissed me. What was he waiting for? He looked anywhere but into my eyes, clearing my hair from my neck, running a thumb along the hollow of my collarbone. He pulled down my other strap and wet his lips, undressing me the same torturous way he’d dismantled my heart, piece by piece, slow and painful. It felt simultaneously natural and unnatural. I’d spent years telling myself, being told, this wasn’t allowed. I gripped his dress shirt. “I hate this suit.”
“Why?”
Was Manning really here? It had to be him. The man in front of me bore a small scar on his upper lip and the faintest crook to his nose, evidence of his time in prison. But now he looked like he belonged on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. “It’s not you. It’s not the man I knew.”
“What if it’s who I am now?”
Maybe it’d be better that way. He was different, and so was I, and if anyone needed to be different people in order to continue down this path, it was us. I didn’t want polished Manning, though. I wanted his roughness, the man who’d been to hell and back, who had callused hands to match his hardened heart. “It’s not you, I know it isn’t, please, Manning … just—”
He put his arms around me, hovering his lips above mine. “Just what, Lake?”
Take it off. Kiss me. Love me. Choose me.
I couldn’t do this. I’d asked him for all of this before, and he’d denied me. It would destroy me to have him and lose him again. My heart raced as much out of fear as desire. “Stop.”
He tightened his hold on me, but then, he did as I asked. Manning let me go. “You’re right.”
My nipples, hardly sheathed by my little dress, hardened with the loss of his heat. I hugged myself. Knowing I was right didn’t ease the hurt. “It’s better this way,” I said quietly.
Without looking at me, he shook his head. “It isn’t. I know that now. But I can’t expect you to let me in just like that.”
“Let you in?” If Manning was here to do more than check on me, he had to know what that meant. He and I could never just be alone in a room. We could never touch and kiss and then walk away unscathed. “You need to go before I make a huge mistake.”
“My being here is not a mistake, Lake. I came to see, and I saw, and now I know.”
There was only one thing to say to that, to a truth I couldn’t accept, despite how desperately I wanted to. “You came too late. You wasted your time.”
“Time is never wasted on you,” he said. “You told me that once, the day I—”
“Got out of jail,” I finished. “Did you think I could forget? You barely looked me in the eye after all that time apart. Why was that, Manning?” I asked, even though I knew.
He blew out a long breath. “Because I wanted you,” he admitted. “And I was ashamed.”
“You didn’t need to be.” I picked up his coat and handed it to him. “But you were, and you made decisions you can’t take back. So go. Go home to her.”
He withdrew as if I’d slapped him. “You think I can return to that life after this?”
I crossed my arms, not to make a point, but because my hands shook. My stomach churned like I was going to be ill. I wanted nothing more than for him to break down all the walls between us, but what I needed was for him to be sorry he’d ever stepped foot on a plane. To feel the unrelenting sting I had when the one person I didn’t think I could live without had rejected me. “After what?” I asked. “What could seeing me have possibly changed for you? You’ve been here less than an hour.”
“I’ve been here years,” he said. “Sick over losing you. Tortured that Corbin might make you happy. Wondering if you might still want me. I’ve been stuck in this place, unable to move on. It’s not my feelings that’ve changed, but—”
We jumped apart at a knock on the door, as if we’d been caught doing something wrong—because we had.
“Lake?” I heard from the hallway. “Is everything okay?”
Corbin.
Manning set his jaw. “What’s he doing here?”
“I’m coming in,” Corbin said.
Manning looked from me to the door. “Lake, tell him to go.”
I yanked my sweatshirt back over my head. “He has a key.”
Corbin breezed into the apartment the way he had hundreds of times before. This was as much his domain as it was Val’s. Considering Val spent so much time either with Julian or at work, Corbin was here nearly as often as she was.
He stopped in the hallway as his eyes landed on us. “What’s this?” he asked me.
I cleared the grit from my throat. “Manning’s in town.”
“I see that.” Corbin looked between us. “We were supposed meet for brunch half an hour ago, Lake. I called, but …”
The tension in the room thickened. It might as well have been Tiffany who’d walked in, because if Corbin suspected anything, he woul
dn’t let Manning get away with it.
Tiffany. I’d gone this long not thinking of her as a real part of all this. Not letting the reality of her, my sister, into the room. But I couldn’t ignore the facts any longer—Corbin made everything real. I had almost kissed my sister’s husband.
I wiped the heel of my palm over my warm hairline. “Corbin and I have plans,” I said.
Manning shrugged into his suit jacket. “I could eat.”
“Didn’t you just have breakfast?” I asked.
“I’m hungry again.” He glanced at me from under his lashes. “Starved, even.”
Starved. Food had been, over the years, one of the only ways I could show Manning I loved him, and he knew that.
I should’ve told him no, but I knew Manning would find a way. I didn’t want to make a scene in front of Corbin anyway. Even though he and I hadn’t talked about Manning in years, I was almost certain Corbin had suspected my feelings for Manning before, during, and after the wedding. He had to have known, deep down, that all my suffering when I’d moved here wasn’t simply because of the fights I’d had with my dad leading up to my departure.
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Better change,” Corbin pointed out. “Can’t go having breakfast in what you slept in now that you’re no longer a college student.”
“What?” Manning’s face fell. “You dropped out?”
“Graduated.” I straightened my shoulders as I glanced from him to Corbin and back. “Last Thursday.”
“But it’s December. Your Mom was planning on flying out for the ceremony next June.”
Since I’d made my decision to leave California right before fall, I’d missed the first semester at NYU and started in the spring instead. I wasn’t sure I would’ve been able to handle school anyway on top of moving to such an overwhelming place with no money and a battered spirit. “I didn’t tell Mom,” I said. “I knew it would hurt her that I didn’t want any of you there. Not even her.”
“You had me and Val, though,” Corbin said. He came and threw an arm around me, turning to Manning. “Tell Cathy not to worry. I was there every step of the way.”
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