Page 81 of Lose Me In The Shadows

She could hear the catch in her own voice when she said, “Please don’t avoid the question.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out how best to answer you.”

“How about honestly? Authentically, and without artifice? Don’t give me the answer you think I need to hear, to do what you want me to do. Give me the answer you believe below the machinations and manipulations. I need that from you, Micah.”

He returned to the island, taking the pan with the shrimp off the stove, turning it off.

“I regret hurting you,” he said as he began to assemble her salad. “Truly. I never wanted to hurt you, or make you feel used or exploited or objectified. I believed that being with us was the best thing for you. Still do. And I respect you hugely, I hope you know. It just didn’t occur to me that to you caring means having the freedom to choose to be with us, and by taking that from you, it meant we didn’t care.”

She gaped at him. “That’s a pretty basic part of caring, isn’t it?”

He shrugged. He’d finished chopping the mango. “It’s egotistical, I know, but it’s hard to train myself that I’m not necessarily the one who knows what’s best for you—you are.”

“Does that mean, if I wanted to leave after all of this, you’d let me?”

Micah’s eyes were such a clear blue, when he said, simply:

“No.”

Kara felt like she was experiencing Pandora’s Box: every emotion that had ever existed came flying out at once. She was so hurt and angry and shocked by that one word. She’d thought she’d been getting somewhere with him.

“Well,” she said. “At least you were honest.”

She got up to go.

“Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

Turning back, she glared at him. “Why?”

“Because.”

He finished up the salad, returning to the sink to wash his hands. Wiping his hands off on a kitchen towel, he moved toward her, standing over her, his chin tilted down so they could meet eye to eye. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t have to. She could feel him, everywhere.

“You are one of the three most important things to me in this world, and I don’t think I could breathe without knowing you were close enough to pull into my arms or on my lap. You’re ours, Kara. We can’t function without you,” he said.

“You used to,” she argued, heart pounding.

He lifted one lip in a sad smile. “It was like a half-life. I never should’ve left you that night in New Orleans. I shouldn’t have run from what I was feeling.”

His mouth hovered over hers.

“And what were you feeling?”

He brushed his lips against hers, a barely-there touch she felt deep in her chest. “That I’d met my bashert.”

“Your...” Kara’s parents were completely secular, and she’d never been taught any Yiddish beyond what everyone knew.

He spoke against her lips. “Bashert. My soulmate. I love all three of you, but Kara, no one understands me the way you do. That night we met in New Orleans, you saw through me immediately. Not that I was tailing you, or that I was a SEAL, but you saw me give money to a veteran and quickly pieced together why. You saw that I was lonely. Just like I’ve seen how lonely you’ve been the past two years.” His tone turned fierce. “I won’t go back to living a half-life, and I won’t let you go back to one, either.”

His soulmate.

She remembered that night—the spark between them, the heady feeling of connecting so quickly with someone, the pain when she woke up in the morning to find him gone. The realization that it was probably no more than she deserved, after basically doing the same thing to Conor.

She didn’t want to live a half-life, either.

She wanted him. Not just for sex. For arguing, for mind games, for being fed, for teasing, for being held and holding him. For the ways he made her feel safe—and like she belonged.

Kara, who’d never once belonged to anyone, and had told herself she never wanted to, wanted to belong to this man.

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