Page 87 of Our Hearts Knew Better

I can feel the strain building, and I don’t want to be a breaking down, crying woman, cracks in my voice as I plead with another man. So the rest comes out almost robotic, breathy, in my attempt to stop that.

“I was still here for a year after. Why didn’t you try harder to keep me closer? It was no risk to you, right? You didn’t feel anything for me,” I say in an almost mocking way, and he winces, his jaw a little bob around a silent response. “Then when I was gone…why didn’t you push me more? Why didn’t youactuallymake up for being an asshole?”

“I’m making up for it now,” he pledges, like he’s been teetering and is finally balanced in another resolve. “We’ll be the friends we were.”

He could’ve stumbled over the label that became hard for us to be. I sense with everything that I could hear a lightning righted stumble.

“Because that’s what wehaveto be?” I might as well be naked in front of him again, testing and searching, one foot over the line.

But he’s meeting me there, a scuff at the barrier, his own testing and searching, the first being before we even made it to this tower.

“You have a life with my best friend,” he says, every word chosen carefully, like a reminder, and a warning. And a question that’s not up to me to answer, as his gaze holds to me, holding me here to be more careless.

“And who’s to blame for that?” Words pointing at him, shaping his face into lines of shame, a pinch of an apology he’s given me times before and nothing more. “And no, you can’t openthisup, then try to use Adam to close it.”

I grab the doorknob, the jostling of it as loud as my pulse through the sudden quiet outside, needing to leave with these messy feelings, because I can’t put them here, on Levi, even though he’s who half of them belong to.

Thisismessy. No matter how washed we get by storms, by the bay, we’ll never be clean.

I’m half out the door, half still with Levi, when I meet his waiting eyes again, my traitorous and tired, rejected and yearning heart still a step over that line, grappling for him to keep this promise. Damp tendrils of hair stick to my face, other areas slowly drying to a frizz, as I try to appear not as disheveled and sound stronger than I feel as I say something maybeIshouldn’t.

“If you need me in your life,reallyin your life…prove it.”

You’re Not the Only One

Summer

Levi didn’t ask me to stay, and I’m trying to reconcile with having wanted him to, and trying to pace back to my boyfriend through something tight and tumbling deep in my stomach, my emotions almost as wild as the passing storm.

A Summer storm.

My breathing is heavy in the room, competing with the fan, when I rush back in, the door clicking shut loud enough to stir Adam. The one I should be running away with.

My body bounces with the feeling to run.

Adam’s stirred groan fades as he presses his head into his pillow, and I practically pounce on him, kissing up and squeezing along his back, as the desire chants through my head.Run, run, run.

He groans again, this one sounding closer to a moan the more I explore winding paths of his skin.

He shifts when I reach his shoulder, pushing at the bed. “What—” I’m shoved away in his flip to lie on his back, his hands patting at the bed, then his face twisting down at his palms. “Why are you wet?”

My laugh is crazed at the question, at how suggestive it sounds with how I’m trying to touch him, to get him to touch me.

“I went for a walk,” I breathe out, bending down to kiss his chest. “There was a storm.” Another kiss from me, another slight recoil from him, from getting myweton the bed.

I stand at a slow pace in my seduction, staring down at Adam’s hooded attention, and strip for him at the same slow pace. Untilmy impatience catches up to my fingers and I speed up. He also starts to fall back to sleep, and the faster I go, the more clothes I let fall to the floor, the more I see the whites of his eyes again.

He reaches his hand out to me and I sigh into the grip of it, falling into him in a straddle through the sheet, crashing into his chasing kisses, tasting the loss we’re always trying to find again in these moments.

We’re moving, his hands in my hair, my hands in his hair, then both scraping down each other’s skin, when I realize he’s not getting hard.

My mouth, fingers, and hips are doing too much for him not to be hard right now.

Then he’s slowing, his mouth and fingers coming to a stop before they’re off me completely, a sigh deflating his chest as his head leans away into the pillow.

I watch his eyes slide off to the side, that tight and tumbling feeling in my stomach, that I realize hasn’t disappeared, now a deeper plunge when he tells me two simple words that are too complex for us.

“I’m tired.”

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