Page 107 of A Love Letter to Whiskey
Fear and sadness drained away and my defenses went up. Who the hell did he think he was? After two years of silence, he’d showed up demanding answers I wasn’t sure he had a right to know. I crossed my arms, resting heavy on one hip. “Excuse me?” I scoffed. “No, Jamie, my fucking wedding is not a joke.”
“So you’re getting married?”
“Yes!”
Jamie’s other hand flew to the invitation, ready to rip it to shreds, but he stopped himself, gritting his teeth before throwing the paper to the floor and running his hands through his soaked hair. He shook his head, and then one hand jutted out toward me. “How? How, B? After everything that… after we…”
“You never called!” I yelled, throwing my hands up in exhaustion. My apartment suddenly felt too quiet, only the pelting rain and our harsh words breaking the silence. “What was I supposed to do, Jamie?”
“Wait!” He cried the word out on a breath of desperation, face twisting with the emotion that had forced it out. “You were supposed to wait.”
“For two years?”
“Yes!” Jamie stepped closer then and I flinched back. That reaction seemed to stun him, and he paused. “For as long as I needed.”
“That’s not fair,” I cried. “I tried calling you, I tried calling everyone around you. You never called, you never wrote — you completely ghosted me.”
“Oh, feels kind of shitty when you’re on the other side of that, doesn’t it?”
His words pummeled me, head snapping back with the figurative slap of them. It was the first time I thought of it that way. Jamie had waited for me — for three years, after I left Alder — and I’d never called him. I’d never given him any reason to wait. And yet still he had.
But I hadn’t.
“That was different, that… I didn’t promise you anything.”
“Not then you didn’t,” he corrected me, just as a flash of lightning lit up the darkening sky behind him. “But just less than two years ago, you did. You promised me you’d wait.”
“I love him!”
My voice broke with the admission, Brad’s image assaulting me out of nowhere and reminding me why I couldn’t have this conversation with Jamie. I’d promised myself to another man, one I loved madly, one who treated me right. One who was available — who always had been when it came to me.
“You do, huh?” he mused, nodding. He nodded over and over, small movements, teeth working the inside of his lower lip and nostrils flaring. Jamie looked around then, and it was as if he’d just realized he was in my apartment — for the first time. There were half-packed boxes littered everywhere. It was all there, proof I’d moved on without him, and I watched every second as it settled in. He turned back to me slowly after a moment, and his hazel eyes questioned me before his mouth did. “And do you love me?”
“No,” I answered automatically. I’d trained myself for that one, all part of the twelve-step program. I’d repeated it, over and over. I didn’t love him, I was only infatuated. I only wanted what I’d never had. I loved the high, the burn — that was all. That’s what I told myself.
“No?” he asked. Jamie crossed the room then, and I circled the sofa, trading places with him. I felt like a cornered animal, except I wasn’t scared — not even a little bit. The truth was I was excited. I was a fiend, right on the edge of a high I’d missed, a high I craved — and every nerve in my body was buzzing to life at the possibility. “You don’t love me.”
That time he said it as an incredulous statement, not a question.
“No.”
My back hit the window he’d just been standing in front of and I had nowhere left to go. My hands pressed into the cold glass behind my thighs and Jamie moved slowly, closing in.
“You don’t love me,” he asked again when his breath was close enough for me to feel it on my lips. Rain tinged on the glass behind me, my heart pounded in my chest, and Jamie moved slow and easy, confident and possessive. He was there to take what was always his. “You don’t want me, right now, right here?”
He whispered the last words, still damp hand running up my arm to cradle my neck, thumb lining my jaw.
I took a shaky breath, eyes fluttering closed, and said no again. At least, I thought I did, but I couldn’t be sure. Every sound was morphed, every sense focused on the point of contact where Jamie’s skin touched mine. My only goal in that moment was breathing, and it was damn hard to accomplish.
“Say it,” he croaked, stepping even closer. The wet fabric of his shirt brushed my tank top, coating the lower part of my midriff just above my shorts hem. “Say you don’t love me. Say you don’t want me, and I’ll go.”
