Page 92 of The Spark Between Us

“I faced reality is what I did. Which is that everybody leaves. And even if she thinks she wants to stay here, eventually she’ll come to her senses and resent me even more for all the lost opportunities in her life. And then she’ll leave. I saved us both the trouble. I love her too much to see her sacrifice her life for me.”

“She wanted to stay?” Mitch asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, believe it or not.” I huffed out a hollow laugh.

“What I can’t believe is that you’d let her go. That’s not what you do when you love someone.”

“It’s what I do.”

Mitch rolled his eyes and hauled off and punched me in the arm with his fist. Hard.

So I tackled him to the ground, and pretty soon we were rolling around like a couple of middle schoolers, trying to throw punches and wrestle each other to offset their raging hormones.

Because I’m bigger, I got him into a headlock, but the little fucker was fast and landed another punch to my jaw.

“Fuck!” I threw him off me and sat up.

“Yup. You think that hurts, you should try being me and having to look at your ugly face.”

“I should deck you again.” I lunged for him but he moved.

“No, you should not. You should pour me some damned wine and work your shit out. Whatever you did, man, fix it.” Mitch got up and brushed himself off. “You deserve to be happy, and that’s not me telling you as the son of the same dad who fucked everything up with our moms. I’m saying it as a guy who sees that you’re a better man than him.” He wagged a finger in my face. “If you choose to be.”

His words hit me hard. Almost as hard as his damn fist.

But they were just words. I still wasn’t sure I believed them.

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