Spots of pink glow under her freckles as she takes a step toward me. “What are you doing here?” she demands, keeping her voice down. She casts a quick look around to make sure we’re alone, which we are—mostly. Shoppers mill around us, but they’re too preoccupied with squirming children or their phones to pay us any mind.
I try to think of a good answer to her question. I used to be good at answers, I used to be better at answers than almost anything else.
I’m all out of answers now; all I have are formless, urgent questions.
Find something, Church. Find something to say.
“Last night wasn’t enough.”
It’s the wrong thing to say, and if I thought Charlotte looked furious before, it’s nothing compared to now. Her cheeks are red and her chest is rising and falling fast under her shirt. “Notenough?” she repeats in a low, dangerous voice. “You don’t get to eventhinkabout having more with me. Exactly who the hell do you think you are?”
The answer comes faster than any answer has in four years. “Nobody. I’m nothing and nobody, but I don’t even care about the nothingness when I can see your face. I’ll be nobody forever, Charlotte, if it means I can touch you again.”
Her lips part and purse and part again, like she doesn’t know what to say to this, and I don’t blame her. What is there to say? She shouldn’t let me touch her, she shouldn’t let me near her. We both know what I’ve done. But losing her has carved me up and scraped me clean, and I’m beyond doing the right thing now, I’m beyond everything but total honesty and raw need.
Anger settles back over her face. “Do you remember what you said to me when I returned the ring?”
The invisible knife between my ribs jabs at me. “Yes.”
“You said you couldn’t marry me, but you wouldn’t tell me why.”
Because I knew it was a shitty reasoneven then, I want to tell her.I couldn’t bear seeing your face when I told you that I’d chosen our careers over our worship.But I don’t tell her this. Maybe I’m still a coward.
“And then you said,” Charlotte continues, and there’s a thickness in her voice that betrays the tears she’s pushing back, “that we could still fuck. Do you know what that was like to hear? That you’d condescend to screw me, but not to marry me? For some reason you wouldn’t bother to explain?”
Knife, knife, knife. Right into the heart.
“I couldn’t fathom giving you up,” I admit. I’m not proud of how hoarse and desperate my voice sounds, but pride was the first thing to die after I realized what I’d done to myself and to her. I drowned it in gin and hours-long runs; I strangled it nightly as I fucked my fist to memories of her. “The idea of being without you was beyond contemplation.”
“But you wouldn’t marry me?After you asked me to marry you?God, do you even hear how fucked up that sounds?”
“Yes,” I say, almost angrily. “I’m well aware.”
Her eyes blaze like molten silver. “And now here you are, four years later, wanting...what, exactly? To berate me for not surviving you? To tie me to your bed when you still won’t tie me to your life?”
“Charlotte—”
“Thisis why I told you I was going back to America,” she says, spinning half away from me and yanking on her ponytail in frustration. “Because if you’d found a way to say that shit to me again, if you’d shown up with this whole ‘we can still be lovers’ line, I would have torn out your tongue and thrown it in the river.”
“Charlotte.”
“And I’m better than that. I was better than being left embarrassed and hurt in a church. And I’m better than being your hookup girl now.”
“Charlotte.”
She finally turns and looks at me, tears shimmering over her glare. My heart kicks and bleeds and aches, and my cock gives a lazy, yawning stir and starts lengthening down the leg of my trousers. Her tears always did get me hard, but to be fair, they were usually tears from a good spanking or a deep, mascara-smearing blowjob. Tears that we agreed to.
But we didn’t agree to these tears, and I caused them anyway—and I’m hurting for her and hard for her and so fucking ashamed and also so fucking obsessed and there’s nothing that can break this miserable, muddy tide between us, nothing that can ease her tears and my hunger for her at the same time. Nothing that can make me deserve her and nothing that can make me stop wanting to deserve her.
I take her hand and pull, and she’s off-kilter enough that she lets me, she lets me drag her back to the hallway that leads to the break room and staff toilet, and it isn’t until I’ve pulled her into an empty manager’s office that the murder threats start coming.
“I’m going to kill you,” she says. “Let go of my hand so I can kill you.”
I kick the door shut and let go of her hand—so I can plant my own hands against the wall on either side of her head. “Twenty minutes,” I say. “I need twenty minutes.”
She glares at me. “Twenty minutes before I kill you?”
Four years ago, I would have spun her around and seared her bottom pink with my palm for a comment like that. But I’m immediately and painfully distracted by the track of a lingering tear on her face as it rolls down her cheek to the corner of her mouth.