So we ate.
He washed up.
I stayed sitting, watching him.
He sat back down. “You haven’t called Cade,” he said, observation more than a question.
I shook my head.
“You’re not going to.” Another observation.
Another head shake. “I’m not dragging them into this.”
He regarded me. “They’ll be upset, to say the least, if they find out about this. If they find out you didn’t tell them,” he said.
I narrowed my eyes. “Since when do you care about my family being upset?” I snapped.
“Since I realized they’re an extension of you,” he said quietly. “So them being upset is hurting you.”
“You just realized that? It’s not been a secret,” I said, my voice harsh. “Especially not in the years that you tried to destroy everything I know and love.”
His face was blank. “Yeah, and that’s something I’m going to have to pay for. Rest of my life.”
“What is this?” I whispered, not understanding where these forever promises were coming from.
His face was no longer blank. It was so full of something I thought I’d dreamed up. It hurt to look at. “You know what this is, Rosie. What we’re meant to be. What we should’ve been all along.”
I let those words swim in my soul for a little before I hardened myself. “It can’t be. We can’t be,” I said, wishing my voice was firmer, more resolute.
His jaw hardened. “Yes, we fuckin’ can. We tried it that way, that other way, for all these years. That way, that’s what we can’t be. Not anymore.”
“What? So you bury a body for me and that counts as going steady?” I snapped.
He grinned. “You could say that.”
I let the grin bounce off the shield I’d constructed in those moments, the one I had to construct or else I’d melt, thinking pretend promises and grins were all we needed to make things right. “It’s not that fucking simple, Luke. I pushed you into this choice. You’re here because I fucking trapped you. Stopped you from being who you are.”
“That’s bullshit,” he growled.
I tilted my head. “Is it really? Because I don’t know what the truth is anymore. All these years, you were so blinded by hate that you didn’t see….” I caught myself before saying ‘you didn’t see I loved you.’ “Me,” I finished lamely instead.
He pushed out of his chair, kneeling beside me so his hands were clutching either side of my neck. I thought he was going to speak some more. Say those beautiful words that hurt so much.
He didn’t.
Instead he did something much worse.
He kissed me.
Years of running around each other, of lies and pretending and other people who meant less than nothing. That’s what that kiss was.
And so much more than that. So much more painful than anything he could’ve said. Because it was magnificent. Perfect. Taunting me with what I couldn’t have.
“Yeah, I was blind,” he said huskily, pulling back. “Don’t think the phrase is ‘hate is blind,’ though.” His thumb moved over my bottom lip. “I see you, babe. I saw you. In black motorcycle boots at five years old. Beautiful and unique, even then. I watched you blossom into an incredible beauty, the most spectacular individual. But in the middle of something I could only see as violent and bloody and dangerous. Something that endangered my spectacular individual.” He paused, watching me, drinking me in. “And I hated that,” he continued. “Hated my visceral reaction to that. Because the idiot boy inside me thought that gave me purpose. To be the hero. And to be a hero, I had to create a villain. And I did that. Just didn’t realize it would turn out to be me in the end.”
I blinked rapidly, trying to recover from the life-shattering words. The life-shattering kiss. Trying to gather all the broken pieces of me together so I could make my escape.
“And that’s just it, Luke,” I whispered. “You’re not meant to be the villain. We’re not meant to be anything, period. I’m not living my life blaming myself for turning you into that. I can’t.” I shoved my chair back, ignoring the hurt in my body and my soul as I did so. “I don’t know what this is now, this change of heart.” I waved my hands between us. “But it won’t last. You’ll stop seeing me as the victim the second my bruises fade, and then you’ll see me for what I am, or what you’ll come to think I am. Just like my family. Which is something I’m proud of. And you’ll make me ashamed of that.”
I sucked in a breath, waiting for him to say something, to tell me I was wrong, anything.
The words didn’t come.
“La douleur exquise,” I whispered, almost to myself, in the moments that came afterward. “The heart-wrenching pain of loving someone completely unattainable.” My eyes met Luke’s.
And then I walked out of my own house, barefoot and bruised.
Hotwired my own car and drove around for hours.
I was hurting, hungry and exhausted when I got home.
To an empty house.
Though it wasn’t empty. The emotional muscle memory of the past twenty-four hours pulsated from the walls.
So I packed a bag.
And left.
And ran.
Again.
Luke
He let her leave.
It would haunt him for two hundred and forty-four days.
That knowledge.
Knowing that while he stood paralyzed by her words, shocked at the pain in them, he’d missed the pause. That moment, that lingering moment every woman gave the man she loved before she left him. Truly left him.
That chance.
That pause in the middle of the storm to give him a chance to grasp on to them, to her, fight for what they had before it was all too late.
Now it was.
Hindsight being 20/20, that pause lasted a lifetime, the memory of it taunting him with his failure.
He tapped at a thick file sitting on his desk in front of him. The one he’d been staring at, unopened, since the moment he got there at 7:00 a.m.
There was something beside that file.
His resignation letter.
He’d hand it in, but he’d given himself a few months leeway to train a replacement. Really, it was to utilize whatever meager resources he had to find Rosie. Hopefully it wouldn’t take a few months.
He’d written the letter at 7:15 a.m.
Then he’d stared at them both, not really seeing them. No, instead he was staring at the memories that were both trapping him and out of his grasp at the same time.
“La douleur exquise. The heart-wrenching pain of loving someone completely unattainable.”
At the time, he’d missed the moment, the pause. Barely saw it pass him by because he’d been blindsided by her words. The passion in them. The fucking pain and heartbreak.
All of that, he’d caused.
He would’ve utilized that fucking pause, fought until his last breath for them. That was, of course, if he hadn’t been so blind.
It would haunt him, that last moment. Because it cost him a year. A year that had a thousand lost lifetimes crammed into it.
Not that he could know that while sitting in an office that felt cold and foreign, tapping at a file that contained his life’s work.