“Stop,” I tell her eventually, grabbing her by the arm.
“What you were saying earlier,” she blurts out, spinning around and shaking me off, “you caught me off guard. You surprised me.”
“I know.”
We stare at each other, searching each other’s faces in the dim light. I can hear her breathing, short and rapid.
“But it shouldn’t have surprised you,” I tell her, “because it turns out everybody knows how I feel about you. How I’ve felt about you since…” Since I saw you again in Camden? Since you came back to Timpton? “…since forever.”
I swallow, willing my beating heart to quiet down.
“I haven’t been honest with you,” I continue, “but I want to be honest with you now. I didn’t just come to find you again so that I could say sorry for how I behaved in the past. I also came to find you so that I could move on from you. Because I hadn’t moved on. You and I, that was the closest, most meaningful relationship I ever had, and since then nothing’s been able to touch it. Nothing’s even come close. And I’d given up. I’d stopped trying. I thought that maybe if I saw you again, saw that you’d changed, that you’d grown up and moved on and weren’t the same person anymore, then I could move on, too. But instead I just fell in love with you all over again. That’s the real reason I didn’t want you around. Not because you brought up bad memories, but because you brought up so many good ones. Because it was just too bloody hard, seeing you all the time, knowing you were with someone else.”
She wraps her arms around herself and stares at the ground, silent.
“And even if things had been different,” I plough on, “even if you hadn’t been with somebody else, I would never have told you how I felt, not all the time I was convinced I didn’t want the same things as you, that I couldn’t give you what you wanted.”
“But how has that suddenly changed?” she asks, risking a glance at my face, shaking her head like she doesn’t believe me.
“Because I’ve changed,” I tell her. “Things that I believed or told myself for a long time… I see it differently now. I feel differently now. I’ve never been able to see myself having all that with someone – a home, a life, a family – but with you…”
I let this hang in the air, wondering if it’s too much. But I’m already halfway there.
“…I can see all that with you. And it doesn’t feel scary. It feels right.”
She puts her hand to her mouth, covers her lips, but doesn’t speak.
“I don’t know how you feel,” I say, “but I think you feel something. And even if it’s only a fraction of what I feel then—”
“How can you not know how I feel?” she asks. “I mean, I was trying so hard to hide it, but I felt like I must be transparent.”
“I didn’t know,” I tell her. “I still don’t know.”
She looks at me, and in the weak light, I can see her eyes are watery.
“Since you barged your way back into my life,” she says, her voice shaky with nerves and a hint of anger, “I have tried so hard – I mean, so hard – not to think about you, not to feel anything about you. I kept telling myself that it was fine, I was happy, I was going to get married, and maybe I didn’t feel like I thought I should feel, but nothing’s perfect, right? And then you came along and ruined everything. You made me feel the way I used to feel when I was with you, feelings that I’d almost forgotten existed, you made me question what I wanted, what I was doing… but I thought that if I could just ignore all that, if I could just be your friend, then that would make everything okay…”
She takes a deep, shuddering breath.
“I left here because of you,” she says. “I lied. Harmonie never had a business opportunity that we moved away for. She moved us on because she knew I couldn’t bear to stay here, wondering when I might bump into you. I left because of you and I came back because of you.”
I watch her struggling and it takes all I have not to reach out and put my arms around her.
“You know, you actually made it easier when you said you didn’t want me around. Because just for a while I could feel hurt and angry at you…”
She shakes her head forlornly.
“But even then, it didn’t stop me feeling all the other things I was trying not to feel.”
I watch her closely, waiting, as she wipes at the outside edge of her eye with shaky fingers. She takes a deep breath as if she’s about to add something more, but I can’t stand it any longer. I step towards her, taking her by the shoulders. She shivers.
“Please don’t do this unless you really mean it,” she says quietly,
“I mean all of it,” I tell her, firmly, “I would never be saying any of this if I didn’t.”
I lay my forehead against hers.
“I want everything with you,” I whisper. “I always have.”
We stand silently for a moment, the sound of our shallow breathing mingling with the distant beat of the music. I squeeze her shoulders and she lifts her hands to grip my forearms, her chilled fingers clutching me tight. I close my eyes, breathing in the scent of her. I can barely dare to believe she’s here beneath my touch, that she’s saying these things to me.
“I kissed you first the last two times,” she mutters, and I can hear the smile in her voice.
I laugh quietly, pulling back and searching her face, seeing tears in her eyes.
“Then I guess that makes it my turn,”
