by April Fire
“What are you doing here?” he asked, and he managed to inch out his good hand to me to wrap his fingers around mine. I knew I should have pulled them back and cut this off before it started, but I couldn’t.
“I don’t know,” I replied, shaking my head.
“Couldn’t resist me,” he teased, wincing slightly as he tried to push himself up in bed.
“Hey, don’t move,” I ordered. “You don’t want to hurt yourself any more than you already have.”
“So you do give a damn about me,” he remarked, cocking his head and looking way too pleased with himself for my liking.
“Well, I don’t want you crippled for life,” I replied. “If that counts as caring.”
“I’ll take it,” he replied, and his gaze softened and his fingers tightened around mine. “You know, I was hoping that you’d come.”
I leaned down, putting my head in my spare hand.
“You shouldn’t have,” I shook my head. “I shouldn’t even be here. I should be back at the set -”
“But you’re here,” he pointed out gently. “You’re with me. You came.”
“Yeah, and?” I shot back, already regretting coming out here and giving him the chance to speak to me like this.
“You still care about me,” he replied triumphantly. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”
“Yeah, I guess I don’t hate you anymore,” I conceded with a shrug.
“It’s more than that, isn’t it?” he pressed, and I shifted in my seat. “After we fucked last week, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Tennessee, I think we’re – shit, I don’t believe in any of this crap normally, but I think we might be meant to be together.”
I snorted with laughter, unable to keep it in.
“Do you hear yourself?” I pointed out. “Who are you? I’ve never heard you say anything like -”
“I know,” he grasped my hand tighter, and suddenly he was serious, utterly and completely serious, all that playful energy that usually inhabited his face vanished all at once. “But I never felt it before. I never felt it till I saw you again the first day on set.”
I stared down at him, this man whom I had dropped everything to be with, the man holding my hand and telling me that he wanted to be with me and that he believed we were destined to be together. And my stomach curled into a hard knot inside me. I couldn’t do this again. That’s what the logical part of my brain was telling me, that I couldn’t possibly go through all of this again, that letting him convince me to would be stupid. I would only end up getting hurt just like I had the last time. But my heart was swelling with need for him, my entire body drawn towards his like an irresistible force was yanking us together. It always had been. After all these years apart, I still wanted him as badly as ever – physically, emotionally, mentally. I had loved Dominic, and I knew just how good it would have felt to slip back into that warm, comfortable place of love and acceptance once more.
I pulled my hand away from his, forcing myself to focus on that logic once more.
“It doesn’t work that way,” I snapped. “Not after what you did.”
“I was a kid, I was stupid -”
“You weren’t too young to know how much you meant to me.” I realized I was tearing up, right here in the middle of the hospital like some kind of idiot. “I loved you like fucking crazy, Dominic. And you – you just fucking left me. I never even got a chance to say goodbye. Do you have any idea how bad that feels?”
“I’m getting there,” he replied grimly, his face sinking as he finally seemed to accept what I was saying.
“I can’t put myself through that again,” I looked away from him. “You, breaking my heart.”
“I won’t,” he promised me. “This time I know better. I won’t go.”
“You can’t promise me that,” I shook my head. “I don’t want you to.”
“Please let me try,” he asked once more, and his voice was soft and I looked up again to see that he was staring at me with this imploring look in his eyes. I was so used to a Dominic who would dick around and play stupid and fail at being serious, but now I could see that this was something he really wanted, something he really meant. But it wasn’t enough. I was too strong for all of it now, no matter how tempting it would have been to fall back into his arms. He would have just left again, and I would have been back to square one, and I couldn’t face that again.
“I should go,” I got to my feet.
“No, stay,” he begged, but I turned away.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come,” I apologized, heading for the door. “I hope you start doing better soon.”
I pulled the door shut behind me, looked at the floor, and let the tears began to fall, as I walked away from the one man I had ever really loved for what I was sure was the last time.
Chapter Eleven
Dominic
I stood there, at the gate of the studio lot, scuffing my foot back and forth over the earth below. My heart was pitter-pattering in my chest as I tried to figure out just how stupid this was, on a scale of one to ten. Probably landing somewhere around the “very fucking extremely” end of the scale.
I should have left the day before. I had been released from hospital over the weekend, all but recovered, but had returned to set to have an awkward conversation with the director where he told me that thanks to my injuries I was a liability and they couldn’t have me working on the movie any longer. I couldn’t act like I was that surprised, but it felt like another fucking kick to the teeth after what had happened with Tennessee a few days earlier.
I was still a little battered and bruised, but I was getting better – well, everything except my leg, which was still strapped up. I was on crutches and would be for a while, which would put me out of commission on stunting myself for a while. Any other day, that would have been bad news, but while I’d been laid up at the hospital, I’d gotten an offer. The kind of offer that people like me dreamed about landing their entire careers.
A studio across the country, Tamblyn Executives, had offered me a position as a full-time stunt coordinator. It wouldn’t require me to do anything too strenuous while my leg healed up, and it paid better than any job I’d ever had before – plus, it was full-time and the contract extended for a full year with options to renew if I wanted it. I’d have been crazy to turn it down. And yet, here I was, standing at the entrance to this damn studio lot and waiting for the one person I wanted to see.
I hadn’t turned it down yet, but I hadn’t taken it either. It just echoed too strongly everything that had happened between us before, when I’d up and left and gone across the country without a moment’s notice and left her behind once more. This time, I could play it differently. I could show her that that wasn’t who I was any longer. It was a hell of a long-shot, but it was one I would take if it meant that she would even consider giving me the time of day once more.
Because I loved her. There was no doubt in my mind that I loved her, more deeply and more crazily than I’d ever loved or would ever love anyone else. And I knew why she didn’t want me back – hell, in her circumstances, I’d probably have felt exactly the same way she did right now. Which is why I needed a big-ass gesture to win her back. Something she couldn’t ignore. Something that proved to her that this time, things would be different, that I wouldn’t push her away and leave her behind. That I would drop everything to be with her.
Suddenly, I spotted her, and grabbed my crutches from the spot they’d been leaning against the faux-stone wall and propped myself up on them. She was chatting to Natalie, laughing about something, and then they split off and Tennessee headed for the gates. And that’s when she laid eyes on me.
She came to a dead halt right there and then, staring at me for a moment, before she approached, walking slowly like I might be a mirage she might chase away if she went too quickly. She arrived in front of me, and reached out to touch my crutches before she spoke.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you on a p
air of these,” she remarked, looking up at me with something like a sly smile on her face. I returned it, and my heart flipped in my chest. Okay. It was now or never.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, glancing around as though I was about to play some kind of prank on her. “I thought you got offered that job, at Tamblyn. Shouldn’t you be there?”
“Yeah, I should,” I nodded. “I should have been there yesterday, actually. That’s when I was due to get started with everything.”
“So what are you still doing here?” she asked, but her voice dropped slightly and I was pretty sure that she knew what I was about to say.
“I fucked up things so badly between us last time,” I began haltingly, not used to admitting my mistakes – they didn’t feel natural in my mouth.
“Yeah, you did,” she agreed, never one to back away from a little bluntness. I smiled and looked at my hands and then back up to her. God, this woman.
“And I want you back, Tennessee,” I went on. She opened her mouth, but I continued speaking, determined to get my piece out before she could turn me down once more.
“I’ll do anything,” I went on, and reached into the satchel bag I had slung over my shoulder that contained the contracts Tamblyn had sent me. I held them up in front of her.
“I haven’t signed these yet,” I explained. “And if you don’t want me to, I won’t.”
“What the fuck are you -”
“Wherever you’re going next, I’ll come with you,” I promised. “I don’t care where it is or what the job is or what you need from me. I’ll go. I’ll turn down the Tamblyn job and follow you.”
She stared at me, her eyes completely unreadable for a moment, and for a second I thought she was going to shoot me down. My heart dropped to my shoes, but I forced myself to keep my eyes on her. I had to know. If she turned me down now, I would do my best to forget her, I would move on with my life and do everything I was supposed to – but I didn’t want to. I couldn’t think of anything worse in the world than going through life without Tennessee by my side.
“You’ll turn it down?” she repeated, as though she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. I nodded.
“I’ll do anything,” I replied, and the two of us just stood there for a moment, staring back at each other, as though both waiting for the other one to blink. Well, I would be the one to do it first, if that’s what it took – because it felt as though for our entire relationship that the two of us had always been playing this game of chicken, this back-and-forth where neither of us wanted to be the first to come out with how we felt or admit how deep our feelings for each other ran.
“Tennessee…” I stepped towards her, and slipped my hand over her face. “I love you.”
She sucked in a sharp breath, as though that had been the last thing she’d expected from me, then closed her eyes. It was like she was reveling in the words, getting used to the feel of them in her head. I hadn’t said them in years, and hadn’t meant them since the last time I’d shared them with her, when I kissed her goodnight before I abandoned her and walked away from the best thing that ever happened to me. I still couldn’t believe I’d been that stupid.
“If I could go back in time and change everything, I would,” I promised her desperately. I knew it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but I had to be honest, had to tell her everything that had been cluttering up my head since that day at the hospital.
“Well, you can’t,” she replied bluntly, and for sure I thought that was it – until she reached her hand up to cover mine and looked me dead in the eyes.
“But you can start trying to make amends for it,” she went on, a smile cracking out over her face at last. Under her grin, I felt as though the sun had come out, wiping away the clouds of doubt that had plagued my head for the last few days. I laughed out loud, and she leaned in to press her lips against mine.
The kiss was perfect, the kind that comes at the end of the movie and has the entire audience throwing their hands up in wild applause. Instead of filling me with urgency, with the desire to grab her and throw her down on the nearest surface and fuck her senseless, the kiss calmed me and centered me and seemed to pull me back down to Earth, letting me actually relax for the first time in what felt like weeks. Months. Since the first time I had seen her again.
She pulled back and looked at me intently, and I knew that everything wasn’t over just like that, much as I would have liked to make that the last thing we said on the matter of what had happened before.
“I don’t want you to turn down the job,” she cocked an eyebrow. “But I might have landed something down in that area myself. So we wouldn’t have to be apart for long, just until I finish up here and I can head down and join you.”
“I can’t wait,” I grinned, and she returned my smile as though she couldn’t help herself. That was a good feeling, sharing in this little explosion of joy between us. I couldn’t wait to do it a dozen times more.
“It’s going to be different this time, isn’t it?” She looked at me, and I could see that flicker of doubt pass over her face, the one that told me that she was still the same old Tennessee I’d always known, the one who looked before she leaped.
“Of course it is,” I promised her. “It’s going to be better.”
She stared back at me for a moment, and her brain went to work. I recognized that expression anywhere, the one she got on her face when she was crunching numbers and facts and figures, and this relationship was no different.
“I’m sorry,” she shook her head, laughing at herself. “I just can’t stop thinking about everything that might go wrong. I spent so long trying to keep away from you, and now…”
“Now you can’t resist me anymore,” I teased, looping an arm around her waist and pulling her in close. “You’re allowed to be nervous. I am too.”
She looked up into my eyes, and then, finally, the words burst forth from her mouth, like she couldn’t hold them in any longer.
“I love you,” she murmured, and she kissed me again – and, as the cast and crew headed out of the studio for the day, I lost myself in the kiss of the only woman I was ever going to truly need.
Epilogue
Tennessee
“You almost done for the day?” I asked, as Dominic broke from the little huddle of stunt-people he’d been working with to come and steal a quick kiss from me.
“Nearly, I promise,” he replied, but I knew he’d be here all night if I let him. That was how dedicated he was to getting this right, to proving that he was the man for the job. It didn’t matter how many movies he coordinated for, he always put his all in, spending long days and nights making sure everyone was safe, in control, and totally nailing everything they were meant to be doing.
But we had plans tonight – we were going out on an actual, no-fooling date for once, and I couldn’t wait to see what he had planned for me. Dominic always put together the best dates for us, even living in a smaller city like this one. He always made the effort.
As I watched him return to his group and round things up, I couldn’t help but smile. I had taken such a big gamble on getting back together with him, even I knew that – everyone around me seemed so totally set against the idea that I wound up having to defend myself at pretty much every turn. My family, my friends – they’d either been there through the first break-up or had heard enough about him that they knew for sure that they didn’t want me back with him. I made that very clear to him, that everyone around me was deeply skeptical of everything he’d done to me the first time and that he would have to work his butt off to prove that he wasn’t about to pull the same thing all over again.
“You think I don’t know that?” he assured me. “I know where I’m starting from, trust me.”
It had been six months since we’d gotten back together, since I’d moved across the country to take that job on the TV show not far from where he was working at Tamblyn. It didn’t take long for us to get an apartment together, finding somewhere
halfway between our two workplaces and reconciling there at the end of every day. It was a lot bigger than the place we’d had back when we were training, but I still felt just as crazy in-love with him as I had back then.
How could I not? All the time that I had spent fighting my attraction to him back on set wasn’t because I didn’t adore him, didn’t feel something deep and profound inside me drawing me towards him. It was because I truly thought he was the same man he had been when the two of us had been kids, that he hadn’t grown up and that he was only interested in me because he couldn’t have me. I had never really believed that he was a grown-ass adult now, the kind who wanted commitment and a girlfriend and an apartment and… all of it.