Serious Moonlight(72)

Silence.

I continued. “What you went through . . . what you survived? It’s upsetting and painful, and I can only pretend to imagine what it was like. Or how hard it still may be at times. But I’m so glad you told me—that you trusted me enough to share it. And none of what you said scares me off or makes me want to stay away. Not for the reasons you said.”

“But for other reasons?” he asked, his face scrunching up.

“No!” I blew out a hard breath. “None of this is coming out right. It’s only that . . . I’m worried, just a little, that I may not be what you need, and now your mother is threatening to maim me if I break your heart—”

“What?”

“But then she hugged me after dinner, so I don’t know if that still stands.” I laughed, but it sounded way too forced. “So, anyway,” I said, rubbing my palms on the knees of my jeans. “I was thinking about all of this, and I found that Elvis card, remember? And it’s basically saying relax and go forth and have an adventure. Just do it! Run the gauntlet! So I thought, well, maybe I’m overthinking everything. That first afternoon we met in the diner, we just went with our instincts, and it was all great until I started thinking about what we were doing too much, which made me freak out and leave your car. And Mona is always telling me to relax and enjoy the moment—to stop worrying about the future and consequences and every possible bad thing that can happen. So maybe we should just do that?”

“Do what, exactly?”

“Sex. It will be so much better this time. I’m sure of it now. I won’t freak out.” It will be great, and everything will be so much better between us, and Daniel won’t get depressed, and I won’t fail him, and he won’t leave me.

Right?

More silence. One of the birds chirped.

He wasn’t saying anything, but the confused way he looked at me told me everything I needed to know. I buried my face in my hands and groaned. “Now that I say it out loud, I realize how dumb it sounds. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m really tired, so all of this is sleepy-brain logic, and that’s never good logic, and—”

“Birdie? Stop it. Look at me.” He tugged my arm until I faced him. “You’re just freaking out about everything I told you yesterday. And that’s okay. It’s natural.”

“I’m not spooked—if that’s what you’re thinking. I mean, I’m worried, because I always worry.” Because I can’t handle anyone else leaving me. “But I don’t want to be that way anymore. I want to stop worrying.”

“And that’s why you want us to have sex again? You want us to run a sex gauntlet?”

“Elvis said that, not me.”

He almost laughed. Not quite. “You know an actual gauntlet is punishment, right? You’re basically equating us having sex with surviving some sort of horrible punishment.”

“I didn’t mean that!”

“Are you saying that if we have sex again and it’s not perfect, you’re done?”

“No! But we don’t need to worry about that, because it will be great. Like sushi.”

He squinted at me, brow lowered.

“The wasabi burned my nose and I wanted to spit it out, and then I tried it again, and it was really good.”

“I see.” He was quiet long enough to make me squirm and then said, “I confessed a really big part of my past to you yesterday. I’ve been sitting around, waiting for you to absorb it. Worrying that you would decide I wasn’t worth the trouble. Hoping that you wouldn’t. And now I’m not sure, but I feel like you want both of those options. You want a way out.”

“That’s not what I want!”

“Are you positive?”

“I’m just saying that maybe if we relax and have fun together, then neither of us will get hurt.”

“So you want a friends-with-benefits sort of thing?”

“No. Maybe? No!” I threw up my hands. “Honestly, I don’t know what I’m doing. Everything you told me yesterday scared me a little, and it shouldn’t. So, I thought the problem must be me. That if I lived in the moment and quit being so cautious, that everything would work out. But the truth is, I don’t know how to have a relationship. Not friendship, not friends with benefits, and not anything else. I feel like you’re light-years ahead of me, and it probably wasn’t like this with other girls.”

“Jesus, Birdie. How many other people do you think I’ve been with?”

“I don’t know. I just assumed—”

“One.”

“One?” I repeated, not quite believing him. He was Daniel. He was beautiful and charming. Talking to people was as easy as breathing for him. He only had one girlfriend? How?

“Her name was Emily. And what do you want to hear? That it was great? It was—” He stopped. “It was someone I had a crush on before the incident. Afterward, she felt sorry for me. I’m not saying she wasn’t attracted to me, but her need to . . . comfort me was greater, if that makes any sense. I didn’t understand that at the time. I thought she liked me. Imagine my surprise, after we saw each other for a couple of months, when she moved on to someone who had their shit together, and I had to sit around with my heart broken, trying not to fall into another black hole.”