Page 44 of Ebbing Tides
“You couldn't letthisgo though,” she fired back, thrusting her hand in the direction of Charlie's cottage door. “You couldn't let last night go. You … you just showed up here and—”
“I was making sure you were okay!” I shouted, shaking my head. Then I turned away from her, squeezing the back of my neck as I muttered, “Jesus Christ,” before facing her again. “You did a complete one-eighty last night and ran out of there like I had done something to hurt you. And I was worried that I had. That's why I'm here. I just wanted to make sure you're okay. That's all.”
There she went, diverting her eyes again and biting her lip to keep it from wriggling. “Oh,” she whispered, her voice choked by another onslaught of emotion.
My arms hung limply at my sides as my jaw shifted, and I stared as she shriveled away once again. “I gotta say,” I began, my chest heaving with every breath, “from the looks of it, you don't seem very okay at all.”
Her face crumpled as she shook her head. “I'm not okay.”
The floodgates opened, and she clapped a hand over her mouth to catch the sob that erupted from her lips.
She had held me back multiple times. Kept me at arm’s length, stopped me from going to her, from comforting her. But now, a little voice in my head told me that what she needed was for someone to read between those lines, to push through the walls she kept building higher and higher around her heart. To do the one thing every fiber of my being wanted to do and hold her.
So, I took the remaining steps separating us, closing the distance between her and me, and wrapped her body in my arms, cupping the back of her head with my palm and holding her to my chest as she cried. She didn't move a single muscle, didn’t wrap her arms around me, but she also didn't pull away, and that felt like a good enough reason to hold on.
She cried and cried against my body, and the harder she cried, the more I wanted to cry with her. For what reason, I wasn't sure, other than knowing that the broken pieces of me were dying to glue themselves to the broken pieces of her, and maybe, together, we could somehow make something whole.
Moments went by before she muttered something unintelligible against my chest, her voice muffled by my coat.
“What was that?” I asked, my chin moving against the top of her head and my hand continuing to stroke her hair.
She unburied her face from my coat, burrowing her cheek against my chest. “I said,” she said, her voice so quiet and strained by tears, “I had never been with anyone else before.”
My stomach dropped the moment she made the insinuation, and still, I said, “So, your husband was—”
“The only man I had slept with,” she clarified, then quietly added, “Until you.”
Shame crashed against me like a tidal wave in the middle of a hurricane, and I lifted a hand to cover my eyes and rub against my temples.
Melanie groaned and pulled from my arms, stepping away to wipe her palms against her face before sitting on one side of the knee-high stone wall surrounding the perimeter of the yard. I took a hint and sat across from her, glancing at my truck to find that Lido wasn't eagerly awaiting my arrival.
I supposed I'd guessed correctly when I said he was taking a nap.
“Why didn't you say something?” I asked, looking back at her. “You know you could've told me.”
“That would've ruined the moment,” she said.
I tipped my head, hating that she might've caused herself discomfort and pain to spare a moment of lust … or whatever it had been. “Melanie, do you honestly think that's the kind of man I am? Do you think I'm the kind of man who'd get mad at you for being honest with me?”
She took a second to bite her lip, then quickly shook her head. “No. But do you not see, that's part of the problem?”
I leaned forward, pressing my elbows to my knees, and raised my eyes to look into hers. An invitation to continue. Because I did see a problem with what was happening between us. A glaring one. But I wanted to be sure we both felt the same thing before that problem was addressed … if it was at all.
“You want me to lay it out for you?” she guessed, and I gestured toward her, as if to say,Go on.
She pressed her lips together, devastation and determination warring within her eyes, and she nodded. “Okay. I like you, Max. There. I said it, like I'm sixteen fucking years old. I like you.” She spit the words out as if they were vile, poisonous. As if liking me was the worst thing to happen to her … and hell, maybe it was.
She sobbed and rolled her eyes toward the sky. “I liked you so much twenty years ago—somuch. But I thought it didn't mean anything. It was a moment in time that felt like seconds in comparison to … to the rest of my life. But Ilikedyou, and I never stopped wondering about you, but I could live with that. It wasokay. That was all it was supposed to be. Luke wasn't supposed to die, I wasn't supposed to be a widow, I wasn't supposed to ever see you again and have a chance to do something about this.”
“Death doesn't give a fuck about our plans,” was all I could say, my voice rough and fractured.
She sniffled and nodded. “I know. And I know you know that, too, and, God, I hate it all. I wasn't supposed to be doing this,” she said again, wiping the tears from her sodden cheeks.
I glanced toward the house, wondering what Charlie and his wife could hear. What Melanie's kids could hear. If they were watching this scene unfold and what they were thinking of it. But the curtains were closed without a sign of life behind them. They were respecting our privacy—at least for the time being—and I appreciated that.
“But here we are,” she said, laying her hands against her knees once again. “And, God, I like you, and I wish I felt bad about it, but I don't. I just don't know what to do about it.”
I cocked my head. “What do you mean?”
