“Thank you. We are waiting for DNA results but I’ve accepted what I’ve always refused to accept. My little girl isn’t coming home. Not in the way I had hoped for, anyway.”
“You should be with Dawn right now, not me.” I feel so guilty that he’s here with me during a time like this.
“I care for Dawn. I always will but we have to deal with this separately, in our own ways. Things have been pretty rocky between us recently and right now it’s best to have some distance. I don’t know if you recall the night at the hotel when I seemed off. The night I didn’t want to talk? It wasn’t work bothering me. I met with Dawn that day to try and come to some kind of agreement with the divorce. It was an unpleasant meeting. We don’t communicate well at all anymore. She’s become bitter toward me because I didn’t reconcile our marriage.”
He drops his head and rubs both of his legs with his hands. “I’m sure you already know all of this if you’ve read her book.”
“Most of it, yes. The divorce stuff, no.”
He stands up and walks over toward the sofa. My eyes flit up and meet his gaze. “Can I sit here beside you? It’s hard being so close yet so far from you.”
I nod and as soon as he sits down I feel the warmth radiating off his body. We aren’t touching but our energy is mingling in the air, doing a seductive dance with one another.
“It feels wrong to have you here; like I’m betraying Dawn.”
He turns his body in to me slightly, his knee brushing against mine. “You’re not betraying anyone. She agreed to the divorce last night. We’re meeting with our attorney’s tomorrow. We have came to a mutual decision regarding everything.”
His hand is resting on the sofa just between his leg and mine. The cotton fabric of my old boxer shorts is peeking out from under my t-shirt. His pinky finger extends and begins tracing my thigh back and forth subtly. Chills dance across my skin instantly. I look up at him and he’s staring right at me.
“I know things are crazy. I know we’ve had a lot thrown our way in a rather short time.” His finger continues its slow torture. “But none of it changes a thing. I’ve denied myself of a lot over the past two years and I’ve made tons of mistakes. I’m not denying this. I’m in love with you, Candace. I know it with certainty. When I look at you, touch you, get near you, or even when we’re apart and I think of you, love is the only thing I feel. Last night I didn’t want to put a label on it and scare you but as soon as I got home and I read your letter, I just knew. The very thought of never seeing you again shook me.”
His hand moves and each finger glides up onto my leg one by one. The skin of his hand on my skin ignites the flame that always burns when I’m with him. The slow, torturous burn grows hotter with every second that passes. Methodically he moves his hand over and across my lap. Our hands meet and intertwine. My chest is moving up and down rapidly. I’m chewing the hell out of the inside of my cheek and huge butterfly wings are fluttering in my stomach. The sick feeling is gone, replaced with something else; nervous and amazing energy.
He reaches up and cradles my face. “I know we don’t know a lot about each other. But I want to know everything. I want you in my life.” His thumb rubs back and forth across my cheek bone. “Please tell me everything’s not lost for us.” My eyes search his for the right response. Janette’s words surface and I choose to speak what I feel.
“I want you, too. Nothing’s lost.”
After staying up half the night talking about our lives like where we grew up, went to school, and a few other basic things people usually learn through a normal dating process, we fell asleep arm in arm on my sofa. He’s in the shower now and I can’t help but feel weird knowing there’s a man in my shower. It’s all so strange, yet I feel comforted having him here. Coffee is brewing and I’m attempting to make a small breakfast for us. Making coffee for him feels oddly natural and I smile remembering our first night together and how nervous I was. Lost in my thoughts of how bizarre everything has been since the day I made the crazy decision to do something so unlike myself and go on a sex hook up website, I can’t remove the smile from my face. Even with the twists and turns things have taken I feel happy having him here with me. Is that love? What does falling in love really feel like? I loved James. I’m certain I did. Maybe love can never be duplicated. Maybe love can reincarnate itself in a person’s life more than once. What if one love never resembles another but still contains the one ingredient that tells us all we love someone; the desire to put them first and make them happy, in turn giving you your own sense of happiness. When James cheated on me it was the first time I felt a hole being punched through my happiness with him. It was a betrayal to my love for him. Once the hole was there, happiness continued to seep out of me and I couldn’t continue loving him in the same way. He left me and I don’t know if we could’ve made it if he had wanted to stay. I’ve asked myself so many times how I could’ve fixed it. The fact is one person can never fix a broken relationship. It takes both.