Never Have I Ever(60)

His eyes were so sorry and so sweet, and in this light, except for those deep-cut parentheses scored around his mouth, he could have been the boy I’d known. I could see it, too, how the boy in him wished he hadn’t talked to the cops. The story turned his hard pain into heroism, and I could see why he still liked it. There was a lot of boy alive inside him still. Not married, no kids, a life of cars, guitars, and weed. Still so charming. I wondered if this was on me, too, that Tig had not grown up. If he’d graduated from Brighton, colleges all over the country would have fought to give him a full ride on his math scores alone. He might have a family now, be someone who designed cars instead of fixing them.

“Why are you sorry?” I said. “It’s fair. I was the bad guy, Tig.”

His head shook in an instant no.

“Oh, Smiff, naw,” he said. “In my story there’s no bad guy. There’s just stupid kids who do a lot of damage. One pays for it, because, you know, he kinda loves the other.”

“Did you?” I said. Because I had to know. The love-starved girl I used to be, so hungry, she demanded that I get her this answer.

He smiled. “Of course. When I came to Brighton, Jesus. I was lonely as fuck-all. Even before. I mean, back in the neighborhood I had friends, girlfriends, my mom. But no one like you. Of course I loved you. I still sold you out. I been waiting years to say I’m sorry.”

It was sweet, but it wasn’t fair. All he’d done was tell the truth.

I leaned in, urgent. “No, I am. You have nothing to be sorry for. It was me.”

We stared at each other, our gazes both so gentle, and this, this forgiveness, it was what I’d tried to buy seven years back. Now I’d come here and found that I’d already owned it. It had been here, waiting, mine all along.

He leaned in, too. Not much. Only an inch, but I recognized it as an invitation. It was for the fifteen-year-old girl who was still alive inside me. That girl had had the best first kiss. The best. But what came after had sucked the sweetness out, ruined it, made it shameful. Shame on top of shame, but no matter what that girl did later, she had deserved that kiss. She hadn’t done one damn bad thing wrong then. Not yet.

I wanted, in that moment, to reclaim it. If I leaned in, too, Tig would meet me in the middle. It was in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders. I understood that this was not about true love. This wasn’t about breaking my family in half and claiming some old, other life. This was only about right now. This morning. This moment.

There was another mattress somewhere in the house behind us. Clean, probably with at least three books tumbled in the bedding. I looked at his face, so dear and so familiar. I looked at his ink-smudged hands, clutching his map-of-the-world mug in a house where no woman lived. I could have this. Have him. Just for a single half hour, outside time. I could have it if I wanted it. And God help me, I did. I did want it.

I stood up abruptly, almost knocking over the stool. I passed him, hurrying around the counter to the coffeemaker, even though my mug was still nearly full. I almost ran, like a woman who was desperate for a warm-up. It was too dangerous to stay close to him.

Right now Davis was home, playing with the baby we had made together. Oliver was a morning person. He would be paddling his feet, gurgling, and chatting nonsense with his father. Maddy, not at all a morning person, would be stomping down for coffee with her hair in crazy tufts. The night he had proposed, I’d told Davis, I’m not the kind who’ll ever leave you. Those words had held more than their legal meaning. I’d been saying I was his, that I would not betray him. I wouldn’t make those words a lie. I was getting too good at lying already.

I was sorry for that girl who had loved Tig, but she was gone. I’d tried to bury her in her own meat, I’d tried to starve her out, tried drugging her to death in California. Before I’d found a way to kill her, she had gone into the water. She’d gone into the water, and I’d come up, new.

“I’m married,” I told Tig. I was blushing hard.

“Okay,” he said, smiling.

“Happily. With a baby.”

“Okay,” Tig said, holding his hands up again, palms forward. An easy surrender. “It was just a thought. Nostalgia. Look, I’m letting it go.”

He held the thought up in a pinch between two fingers and then blew on it. I could practically see it fly away.

Still, I stayed where I was, the counter between us. I didn’t want to smell him, so familiar. I was already bargaining with that dead girl in my head. No sex, she told me. Just a kiss. But that was a hard no. I would not play chicken with betrayal, trying to get right up to the line. If I kissed him, I would be no better than Tate Bonasco at a barbecue.

“So why are you asking about Ange? You clearly know her,” he said, changing the subject. He was making it easy for me to be decent, and that was damned attractive, too.

“It’s complicated,” I told him. I set down the coffee I didn’t want by the sink. “I need to leave in less than half an hour, and I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to explain it all, even though I owe you that. I’ve done this morning all wrong. I even sat here and let you apologize to me, which is crazy. You can’t know how much it’s meant to me, to come here and see that you’d already forgiven me. But now I need to apologize.”

He looked almost alarmed. “That’s crazy. For what?”