Truly(129)

He waited for that to feel like too much, too fast, but it didn’t. It felt excellent. Big, but excellent.

“I think it’s a great plan.”

She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. The sun lit one side of her face, and her smile lit everything.

“New York likes you a lot,” he said.

“New York really hurt me.”

“That wasn’t New York, May. That was me.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I am, too. I should have called Dan right away, and I should have stood up for you. I was being a people-pleasing weenie-coward.”

“Weenie-coward?”

“It’s a thing. I invented it. But I’m done with that now.”

“Good to know.”

“If you catch me backsliding, stop me, okay? Call me a weenie-coward.”

“I’ll try to remember, but it’s not a very manly phrase.”

“Fine. You don’t have to use the phrase, so long as you’ve got my back.”

“I’ve got your back.”

They rocked. Her slippers scuffed over the boards of the porch.

“What made you come here?” She turned more fully toward him. “Because if you tell me that it’s only because you forgot your knives—”

“There was nowhere I wanted to be but with you.”

She looked away. Ben stroked his hand over her temple. Her neck. He ran his palm down her shoulder and over her arm, and she said, suddenly, “Don’t. My mom’s right, it’s really quick. I don’t need you to say it if you don’t really mean it.”

“I mean it.” He took a chance and turned her face toward his. Then he took another chance and leaned close to kiss her. A different sort of kiss this time—one that was more about his sweaty palms and all the trouble he was having stringing words together than it was about lust and reunion  s and night after night of hot, sweaty sex. “I love you.”

“You do.”

“I do.”

“Because you just met me. We had kind of a weird week. I don’t really expect—”

Ben kissed her again, more insistently this time. Hot and deep, until her fingers found the hair at the back of his neck and pushed hard against his scalp.

“That’s so good,” she said after a minute. She kissed his chin and his neck and his jaw. She kissed his mouth again. “Why is that so good?”

“I always thought it was you.”

She laughed with a soft exhale of breath through her nose. “Did I hear you say in the kitchen that you went home?”

“Not home. To the farm.”

She studied his expression. “That bad?”

“Worse.”

“Why did you go?”

“Because … because I didn’t trust that I could be any good for you.”

“Something about us scares you.”

He didn’t want to admit that. He wanted to tell her he was totally confident. That he had the future all mapped out, and his palms weren’t sweating.

But he wanted her with him more, and assuming she stayed close, she’d figure out all his secrets soon enough.

“Yeah,” he said. “Because I feel too much. I don’t trust it—that passion or whatever it is that makes me fly off the handle or get so excited about something I give my whole life over to it. I can feel it happening, and I want it, but it’s hard for me not to worry that it’s … I don’t know. Something I need to cut out before it gets too big.”

“Before you lose it, or before it hurts you?”

“Does it have to be one or the other?”

She shook her head.

“Both, then,” he said. “Jesus. I think both. And before it hurts you, too.”

“So you ran.”

“I tried to. But the farm, when I saw my dad … He’s a miserable old man. His kids are terrified of him. They were scared of me, too, and I hated that. I hated that they saw him when they looked at me, but even worse—it wasn’t even that I saw myself when I looked at them. It was like I was them. Only from the outside, so I could see clearly that they hadn’t done anything to deserve it.”

He took a deep breath, gazing across the porch and over the yard. “They’re only kids,” he said.

“So were you.”

He would have agreed with her, but the lump in his throat took a minute to ease up, and by then, he thought it was more important to tell her something else. “I decided I’m not going to be like him. Or like my mother, either. Life isn’t some zero-sum game where you have to be either the aggressor or the victim, right? So I don’t have to keep attacking what I love just because I’m afraid if I don’t, I’ll get hurt. It’s not a genius strategy.”