“Are you okay?”
“Do I have a choice?” He let out a heavy breath, ran a hand over his face and through his hair. “Scratch that. I know I don’t have a choice.” He sighed again. “I was just sitting here thinking about that. And you.”
She tilted her head. “Really? Why me?”
So many answers to that. “I was thinking that I don’t know what I’m doing. How much I hate that and how you were always the one that made me feel like I was doing okay.”
Understanding eyes met his. “I wanted to.”
They both knew she hadn’t been able to that last time. The most important time. “I know.”
“You have to let her make her own decisions, though. Making choices and living with outcomes is how you learn. It’s life.”
He almost said how much he didn’t want to talk about living with outcomes.
“I know it’s hard for you. I know you worry.”
He nodded, zeroing in on Mia’s voice and her soft words for him. Amazing that she had soft words for him after all this time. “How did you know where I lived?”
“It was Hannah’s address. I’d seen it and…I remembered it.”
He nodded, waited. The years or circumstances or both had scraped out new people, and now there was all the distance between them.
On second thought, he would have that beer. Abruptly he turned, strode to the refrigerator, and pulled out the bottle he’d recently put back. “A beer?” He held out a second one. “Or you can wait on the coffee. Or there’s water.”
“No, thanks.” She wandered across the room, stopping in front of one of two bookshelves that bordered the red-brick fireplace. He took a long swallow from the bottle, trying to gather himself and the fact that the only woman he’d ever loved was standing in his living room.
It was one big space. Kitchen, eating area, and den with fireplace and TV. A certified man space, Hannah called it. Plain, no color. A small, ranch-style home built in the late seventies, as was evident with the dark-paneled walls. He hadn’t done much more than replace the maroon carpet. Hannah had done her best, but she’d taken the colorful heirloom quilts with her. The only color in the room was Mia, which was fitting, given the way his life had gone from gray to color when he met her.
Slowly she picked up an old and yellowed snow globe. The Statue of Liberty in murky water. “You kept it.”
Chapter 16
“YES.”
She jerked at his voice, not noticing that he’d come to stand right behind her, close enough to bury his nose in her hair, trail his lips along her shoulder if he lowered his head.
Neither spoke for the longest time, just watched the few bits of white swirl and sink. Pieces of their past.
“It was a good memory,” he finally said, speaking softly like if they stayed quiet they could keep that moment from their past in the here and now.
“Yes,” she whispered. “We had a lot of those.” She replaced the snow globe carefully and turned, a real smile on her pretty lips. “I don’t think I’ve ever gone so long without getting dressed.”
He smiled too. Their first shared smile in so long. Longer than the ten years they’d been apart. “A damn good memory.” The two of them locked away in that hotel room oblivious to the world outside buried in white. Going from bed to shower to wall, making love, eating, making love again.
It seemed they could step right back into that, but bizarre that they’d even have to step back. He’d concluded over the years that there was never one reason things ended between two people who loved each other. It was rarely simple or one sided. Looking back, it wasn’t clear. Nothing had been clear to him then.
Maybe it had been clearer for her.
A moment passed, searching her eyes, all the feelings of the past and present welling up inside him. It might not be the same, but it was all still there. There was something there for her too. She couldn’t hide her feelings for him; they rolled off of her in waves. There was desire in her eyes too, he could see it, but with it there was also pain and anger. And sadness.
She swallowed nervously and looked away. “I’m not even sure why I’m here.”
Funny, it didn’t matter. It was enough that she was. “Do you want to sit?”
She didn’t answer but followed him to the couch, sitting on the opposite end with enough space for a third to sit between them. They looked at each other several times, then away. God. Where did they even begin?
She huffed out a brittle laugh and shook her head.
He shook his, too. “I don’t know where to start.”
She looked down at her hands in her lap. “Neither do I.”