He stood slowly, crossing the space between them and making his way toward her. “Why don’t you deserve to move on?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know how. Everything inside me is all walled off, put in these different sections. So that I can function without... I don’t even know how to explain it. But you know what makes me angry? When I see him on TV?”
“What?” She didn’t say anything for a moment and he pushed. “What makes you angry, Lane?”
“His family. The fact that he moved on. The fact that he got married, that he has children. That he doesn’t... That he probably doesn’t even think of me. Of everything that I went through. That he somehow feels like he deserves all of this and I just... I can’t.”
“Honey,” he said, his tone soft, “isn’t that the entire point of giving a child up for adoption? So that everybody can have the best life?”
She swallowed visibly. “I gave him away. And what if I could have made it work? What if I could have...”
His chest clenched tight. “Lane, you didn’t give him away. You gave him up. You gave him up so that he could have a better future. And so you could too. And take it from somebody who really was abandoned by his mother. Not so he could have a better life, but so she wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore... It’s not the same thing.”
She looked startled, looked like she wanted to ask questions. Well, he didn’t want to answer them. He gritted his teeth, ignoring the voice inside him that labeled him a hypocrite. For wanting her to share everything, for wanting to share nothing himself.
But this was different. It was different for her. She thought that she was beyond redemption somehow, thought that she deserved to live defined by her past.
It wasn’t too late for her to move forward, and she damn well deserved to.
His situation was completely different.
“I just wish...” She trailed off, looking out at the lake.
He bent down slowly, searching for the smoothest, flattest stone he could find. Then he curled his fingers around it, testing the edges for imperfections. “What do you wish?”
“I wish I could be certain I made the right choice. Or at least, accept the choice I made.”
He pulled his arm back, then let the rock fly, watched it skip three times over the surface of the lake. “Okay,” he said, “that’s wish one. And now you get two more.”
She looked at him, her face crumpling slightly, tears sliding down her cheek. She wiped them away, took a deep breath that sounded halfway between a gasp and a sob. “I wish... I don’t wish that he would forgive me. I wish he would never think of me at all. That there was never anything for him to forgive. That his life is so full, so full of wonderful people that love him, that he can hardly spare a thought for the teenage girl who gave birth without her family there. Without his father there.” She stopped talking for a moment, another tear chasing the first. Her shoulders shook, her whole body shuddering.
He wanted to move closer to her, wanted to wrap his arms around her, but he had a feeling if he did, she would shatter completely. She seemed so fragile right now. Like she was made from spun glass. But she was also strong.
The wind whipped up over the water again, invisible, but changing everything around them. That was Lane, he realized. Soft, sweet. But with the power to move mountains inside of him.
No, she wasn’t breakable. No matter how she might seem now. She had been carrying this impossible weight for more than ten years. And for all that time, it had raged inside of her.
Now she was caught up in the last gasp of the storm.
He wanted her to lay every single one of her burdens down here at this lakeshore. Wanted her to give them all to him. Because he could carry them. He wanted to. He had never wanted to be that for somebody, had never wanted to know someone like this. But with her... He wanted everything she had to give.
“I wish that I could be one person,” she said, looking over at him. “I wish that I didn’t have so many pieces of myself, all kept hidden, kept separate. I wish I wasn’t hiding here. I wish I was living.”
Then he did close the distance between them, wrapping his arm around her waist and pulling her to him. “You’re not hiding with me,” he said, taking hold of her chin, brushing his thumb over her lower lip. “You don’t have to hide anything from me.”
It was a desperate kind of offer more than a generous one. He needed it. Needed her stripped bare in every way. He wanted to possess her, to own her. To know her. He didn’t know what the hell made that desire so intense, what the hell made it so necessary; he only knew that it was.
He had been fine with the idea that maybe they would sleep together until it burned out, but he knew full well that wasn’t good enough anymore.
He wanted more than that. He wanted all of her. Possibly forever, because he was never going to be able to accept her being with another man. He would have to kill that man, and he didn’t particularly like the idea of spending the rest of his life in prison.
He wanted her in his bed. Maybe even in his house, which he knew was going to take some convincing on her end. But that was what he wanted. In this moment, he wanted it more than his next breath. He didn’t know where that fit with his vision for his life, what he’d always thought about himself. He didn’t know if it could ever work. He only knew he wanted it. Right now, he couldn’t imagine the end of this.
If he could just stay in this moment.
She looked scared, terrified, actually, all the color drained from her cheeks, tears glistening on the ends of her dark lashes. “I don’t know how. I only know how to hide.”
“I know where we can start.” He moved his hands down to the hem of her shirt, pulling her top up over her head, leaving her standing there in the sunshine in her bra and a brief pair of shorts. Then he reached behind her and unclipped her bra, exposing her breasts.
“Leave it to a guy,” she said, laughing shakily, “to decide my emotional healing requires showing my boobs.”
“No,” he said, reaching out, sliding his thumb over her nipples slowly until she shivered beneath his touch, “it’s going to take a lot more than that.”
He wasn’t going to let her joke her way around this, wasn’t going to let her ramble about French fries or pumice stones or mice named Robert.
“It isn’t that I don’t want things,” she said, her voice a whisper now. She pressed her breasts against his chest, rested her palms on his shoulders. “I want what everybody wants, I guess. I’m just afraid I shouldn’t have it.”
He gripped the back of her neck, then slid his hand up to her hair, pressing her face against the curve of his neck. “Stop punishing yourself, honey,” he said, his voice almost unrecognizable even to his own ears. “You don’t deserve it.”
“But what if I...”
“Let me tell you something,” he said, the words torn from him. “I know what it’s like to watch your mother walk away because she can’t cope.” He gritted his teeth. The reasons his mother had walked away were entirely different from Lane’s. It was him. It was always him. But he didn’t need to have that discussion with Lane. He was already fucked-up. And saying that, knowing her, she would try to reassure him. Would rush to tell him it wasn’t true, no matter what he’d witnessed in his life.
But he would be damned if he ever threw any of his shit down on her. “That hurts. When you’re left behind and there’s no one there to take care of you. That’s not what you did. And maybe you could have raised him, Lane. Maybe. But that’s not the life you chose. It doesn’t make you bad. You did the very best you could with the situation you were in at the time. You were alone. You were afraid. You hadn’t lived life. Of course you feel now like maybe you could have taken care of him. You’re almost thirty years old, you own a business, you own a house. The life you have now, the woman you are now, has nothing to do with the girl you were then. That girl, she could only do what she did. Don’t be mad at her.”
A sob shook her frame, and she let it all release. Started to cry right into his shirt, leaving her misery all over him. And he just held her right through it. Not because it was what a friend should do. But because it was what he had to do for Lane. What he had always wanted to be for her. It was clear to him in that moment. Why friendship had never been enough. Because he never wanted only part of her. And part of herself was all she ever gave to her friends. He wanted all of her. All of this.
He made quick work of the rest of her clothes, and then took care of his own. Then, he picked her up, holding her against his bare chest as he walked down into the water. He held her tightly as he went deeper. “Ready?”
She nodded, and he submerged them both up to their shoulders, paddling out farther from shore. She wrapped her legs around him, tangling their bodies together.
She shivered slightly, but didn’t ask him to take them back out to land. She lifted her hand up out of the water, touched his face, droplets trailing down his skin. He didn’t know why he was doing this. Or maybe, just maybe he did. Maybe he was trying to wash it all away.