Page 63 of Choosing Forever
It’s not the kind that makes me want to go to sleep but rather the type that has me debating surrendering just so I don’t have to keep up the effort it’s taking to freeze him out. God, it would be so easy to just let my walls fall and welcome him back into my life. Sitting here beside him right now could feel as easy as breathing if I did. Maybe I’d feel relaxed again for the first time in a decade.
It all sounds too good to be true, which means it definitely is.
“Alright. But the option is there. I’d say we’re a bit overdue for a blowout, don’t you?” he asks.
“What would be the point of that? To clear your conscience?”
“My conscience hasn’t been clear in a long time. I doubt it will be now, even if given the chance. My encouraging you to open up to me isn’t to heal my regret or guilt. I’m trying to get us to start over, Delaney.”
I let his words settle, keeping my lips sealed shut.
He said regret. Is that how he feels when he thinks back to what happened with us? With a stomach bubbling with regret? Because that would be a right fucking delight.
“What do you regret, exactly? Which part?” I snap, heat blasting from my belly up to the tips of my ears. In a motion quick enough to make the ends of my hair fly up and the edge of the seat belt rip at my skin, I twist. “The fighting between us every day or the way you put a concrete end to us because you got someone else pregnant? Or am I wrong? Maybe you didn’t hook up with her until after you broke things off. I don’t know! All I do know is that I offered to remove the distance between us hundreds of times and had to find out after two years of torturous silence that you were engaged and having a baby with someone else.”
“Delaney, that’s not?—”
The tightness in my chest is painful. It’s hard to breathe in here. Like the air’s thinned out and too hot.
I pull my hair behind my shoulders and realize my fingers are shaking and cold. Suddenly, I can’t be here anymore. Panicblares an alarm in the front of my skull, driving me to clutch at the door handle, finding it locked.
“Let me out,” I demand, voice ghostly.
Clicking from the blinker soothes me slightly. The gentling of Darren’s voice worsens the tightness in my chest.
“Okay. Let me pull over.”
I tighten my hold, ignoring the way it slips the slicker my palm grows. One second, I’m buckled into the seat and shoving the door open, and the next, a hand that doesn’t belong to me is releasing the buckle, and I’m diving into the fresh air.
My back is smushed against the door once I shut it behind me and palm my throat. The sunset is fading as the dark is moving in, swift and cruel. There are no frogs out this way, only the occasionalmoofrom a cattle farm or cricket in the long grass along the dirt road. Rocks crunch under my stupid, ridiculous wedges with every step I take toward the ditch, counting each thump of my pulse beneath my fingers.
There was a part of me that knew this was where I’d be right now. It’s the smart section of my brain. The realist that I listen to nine times out of ten. Tonight was the exception.
I shouldn’t be here. Not in that car or on this road, and most importantly, not with Darren. Date or not, this was always how tonight was going to go. We’ve avoided confrontation for a long damn time, and the clock was ticking down to the inevitable blow-up.
That doesn’t make it any easier to handle, though.
My wounds haven’t healed. They’re a long ways from it. How could they be any other way with the both of us in this town? Every unexpected sighting or whisper of his name on the wind has ripped off every scab I’ve managed to grow. We’ve been co-existing in Cherry Peak like friends whose friendship has had a natural die-out rather than exes with a painful past.
I flinch when a door closes behind me. Slowly, I drop my hand from my neck and wrap it around my front instead. It’sboots disturbing the gravel, and a second later, it’s woodsy cologne that floats on the breeze.
“Losing you is the biggest regret of my life, past, present, and future. I’ve made peace with the reality that I ruined the best thing I’ve ever had and won’t be able to change what happened while still feeling guilty for being grateful for the little girl I get to call my daughter.”
My eyes close on their own, the weight of his words too much. “You should be grateful for Abbie.”
“That doesn’t change that it should have been . . .” He trails off, cutting himself off. “If I could go back and change things, I would in a heartbeat. I’d never have been naïve enough to believe that a break would work for people like us or let us lose ourselves afterward. You wouldn’t have spent even two hours without a call or text from me, let alone ten years of silence. I wouldn’t have spent every one of those days missing the fuck out of you, Elle, because you would have still been my girl. I don’t deserve your forgiveness, and I don’t need it to try and make up for what I did and the way I hurt you. I’m just asking for us to talk about everything together the way we should have back then. I only need one night.”
“Is this some sort of healing thing for you? Were you tasked with clearing out your unfinished business or something?” I ask weakly, shivering as the temperature seems to drop with no warning.
He’s moved closer. I can feel his . . . his energy behind me. The maturity and strength that I find more staggering than his outrageous good looks or the confidence with which he carries himself now. Fuck, the knowledge and experience that he lacked all those years ago. It’s like he’s seen everything he’s ever needed to see and learned every lesson in the book.
“I don’t need a therapist to tell me to do this,” he states, low voice unwavering.
Unlike me.
How lucky he is not to have needed a stranger to help pickhim up off the floor when his world splintered. To not have needed instructions on how to find my way back to the land of the living when everything around me was so dark and exhausting.
I shut down those thoughts and bite out, “What, then? Who’s responsible for this sudden desire to make things right?”
