Page 76 of Merry Me
Her eyes lifted to mine, and for a moment, we just…stood there. Wrapped in quiet and all the things we weren’t sure how to say.
“Levi kept you out late,” she said eventually, turning back to the stove to stir the cocoa again.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Apparently, he thought it was a good idea to get lost on purpose and ‘see where the trees took us.’”
She laughed under her breath, and that small sound loosened something in my chest.
“I came back, and you weren’t in our room,” I said, not accusing. Just honest.
“I needed to think,” she replied, just as honest.
“About last night?”
A pause. “About everything.”
I nodded, stepping to the counter beside her, careful not to crowd. I leaned my hands on the edge, facing the opposite wall, breathing in the warm chocolate-sweet air like it might ground me.
“Can I ask what conclusions you came to?” I urged after a beat.
Natalie didn’t answer right away. Instead, she filled the second mug slowly, set the sauce pan aside, and slid the mug toward me.
I took it, my fingers brushing hers.
“I don’t have any conclusions,” she said finally. “Just…feelings. Conflicting ones.”
That hurt more than I wanted it to, but I kept my voice even. “Okay.”
“I wasn’t expecting…anything,” she said, clutching the edge of the counter. “And I definitely wasn’t expecting you to say what you said.”
“That I haven’t been with anyone else?” I asked quietly.
She nodded. “It kind of knocked the wind out of me.”
“I didn’t say it to make you feel guilty.”
“I know.”
Her voice was quiet but steady, like someone walking a tightrope in the dark—careful, measured, trying not to slip.
But I felt it. She wasn’t just talking about what I’d said. She was talking aboutus. About the weight between us. The ache of time. The fear that maybe too much had happened to go back.
A beat of silence passed—thick, but not cold. Just real.
And beneath all of it, I felt the sting of what I didn’t ask:
Who held you when I didn’t?
Whose name did you say when I couldn’t hear it?
The pain lodged like a splinter in my chest.
Another beat of silence passed between us.
Then she took a breath—small, steadying—and added, “I just didn’t know how to sit with it. And maybe I still don’t.”
“That’s okay,” I said, and I meant it. “You don’t owe me anything. Not even an explanation.”
She gave me a look at that, one of those sharp, half-skeptical stares she used to give me in high school when I’dsay something too profound for someone who’d once used duct tape to fix a broken shoe. “Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t make it too easy.”
