Thou Shalt Not(70)

“I know what happened,” she said. “With Carrie.”

I had assumed she probably had heard something, but having her say it out loud kind of hit me like a punch to the gut. And, I knew she would probably want to talk about it. Women always wanted to talk about things that guys had no desire to speak of.

She took my silence as permission to continue speaking.

“When everything happened with Robin, and you were gone, Principal West mentioned in the staff meeting for everyone to keep you in their thoughts and prayers. He said it was probably going to bring up a lot of emotions for you. He didn’t tell anyone what had happened, but I knew there was more to it than just what he said.”

“So he told you?”

“Sort of,” she nodded. “I mean, I asked him. You seemed to take it so hard, I knew there had to be more to it, to your relationship with Robin. So, I asked him and he told me.”

I nodded absently, processing it all.

“I’m sorry,” she said, squeezing my legs with her hands. “I wanted to know how to best handle it for me, for us in a working environment. I guess I wanted to know what made you and Robin so close. I didn’t have any idea it would be that.”

“It’s okay,” I said, liking her touch, her warmth. “It’s not some big secret.”

“How old were you when you got married?”

“I was nineteen. She was eighteen. Just out of high school.”

“We were the same age!” she said.

“Well, technically when I was nineteen you were still knee-deep in high school.”

She smiled.

“You make yourself sound so old.”

“I am a widower,” I said. “The word alone makes me feel ancient.”

We sat in silence for a minute. She took her hands off my legs and leaned back into the couch, nudging herself into my body. I lifted my right arm up so she could wedge in further, and then lowered it onto her shoulders.

It felt right, holding her like this.

“Do you regret it?” I asked. “Getting married so young?”

“Do you?” she responded.

“Sometimes.”

“Why?”

I had thought about it a lot, the whole idea and concept of getting married at an early age. But I had never had someone to share my thoughts with that would understand them quite like I did. April was different, and I knew she would get it. So I spilled.

“I think when you are young, you think mostly good and happy thoughts. You don’t see very much bad in the world, in anything. Or at least you refuse to see it. You think all your plans will work out and that you’ll live happily ever after. Then you reach a certain point in your twenties and you see the bad that you never thought was there. You see it in the people you’ve loved your whole life; you see it in the world around you. And I think you really start to see it in yourself. And that changes you. That changes what you want. It changes who you want. What you thought was good, what you thought was good for you really wasn’t. And then you start looking for the good, and if you find it, you fall for it. And you fight for it until it’s yours.”

My arm was around her, and her head was nestled into my body so I couldn’t see her face. She sat in silence, not moving. I actually wondered if she had fallen asleep.

“I don’t know if that even makes sense,” I said. “I tend to ramble.”

She separated herself from me and twisted her body toward me. Her eyes were watering.

“God, Luke,” she said. She was shaking her head, and somehow looking like she was nodding simultaneously. A tear broke free and descended down her red, wounded cheek. My finger instinctively rose up to meet it and brushed it away. She closed her eyes.

“What is it?” I said.

She just kept shaking her head.

I lifted my left hand back up, and this time ran it through her hair, holding, steadying the right side of her head. Her chin nestled into my palm.

“You just,” she started. “You just put into words what I’ve felt for the last year or two. God, I had thought about it so much, but I couldn’t make it make sense in my head and you just did. It’s like you were reading…”

I pulled her toward me, cutting her off. And I kissed her.

I got chills all over my body as our lips met. She leaned her body into mine and let out a soft moan that I actually felt as we kissed.

Her lips were warm, and full, and her bottom lip was even more wonderful to feel with my lips than it had been to look at.

My right hand took the other side of her face, and my fingers slid through her hair, pulling her even closer.

I took her top lip between mine and kissed it slowly, repeatedly, before taking her luscious bottom lip and doing the same. I kissed down to her chin, then further down her neck. I was actually kissing her neck! I had promised myself I would and damn if it wasn’t better than I had dreamed.