Thick & Thin (Thin Love, #3)(7)
“I’m ready,” Aly told Ethan through a nervous smile before she glanced at me. “Can you give me a second?”
“A quick one, yeah. I’ll bring the car around.” He stuck out his right hand at me, again, the bin hanging from his left. “Ransom, man, it’s good to meet you. I’ve got you in my bracket. Do me proud this season.”
“I’ll do my best.” I shook his hand, grinning with a humor I didn’t quite mean as he kissed Aly’s forehead and disappeared through the door.
The room had gotten colder somehow, just in the small minutes since Ethan had entered. Maybe it had been cold before. Maybe I’d only just noticed it. She stared at me as I watched that door close, sure that the entire evening had been some f*cked up nightmare.
“Are you okay?” Aly’s voice softened, missed the harshness it held just a few minutes before.
I answered her truthfully because she was the one person who’d know my lies when they came. “No.”
Two steps and I felt her behind me, smelled that delicious scent of her hair, her skin. “I’m sorry.” Despite her protest that she didn’t want my kiss, Aly didn’t keep her hands to herself. The touch, when it came, was sweet, meant to give me comfort, not entice me into something that would only lead me on. She pressed her cheek against my back and I held her fingers when she circled my waist with her hands. “It was…I was surprised.”
“Did you mean it?” A glance over my shoulder and I caught her gaze. “The yes?”
There was a long moment when she seemed only capable of staring, watching my features like she hoped there was an answer she’d find in them. When she didn’t, Aly looked away, resting her forehead on my shoulder.
“Aly?”
“I don’t know.” Her sigh warmed my back, heated my skin through the linen fabric of my shirt before she pushed away from me, standing near the door. “I know he’s solid.” I hated how she seemed more interested in her nails, in the pattern of tile on the floor, anything but the expression on my face. “I know he doesn’t expect anything from me. There’s zero pressure.”
I tilted my head, wondering if what I heard was what she actually said. Aly wasn’t timid, said nothing she didn’t mean and that pissed me off. “I pressured you?”
“That’s not what I meant.” We met in the middle of the room, not touching, just on the verge of needing to.
“Then what the hell did you mean?”
“I don’t have time to get into this and you probably have to get back.” She glanced behind me at the clock and pressed her lips together. “Don’t you have a flight to catch?”
“We can table this for now.” She arched an eyebrow at me but I ignored that expression. “I still think we need to have a conversation.”
“We really don’t. There’s nothing left to say.” I saw the decision to brush me off the second she made it. How many times had she done that to me over the years? A hundred? She was done, there would be no arguments and as she clicked off the light on the dressing table and headed out the room, I followed her. It’s what I always did. It’s what I’d likely always do just to hear her out. Just to make sure she heard me. “What happened between us in the past. I’ve moved on.”
That’s when I stopped her, pulling on her arm as she pushed it through her thin cardigan. “Thought that wouldn’t happen.”
Right there in her pause, in the breath she held, Aly told me everything: what she remembered, what she felt, what she tried to hold back from me.
It had been late back in Miami four years ago, the night everything fell apart. The first night after months of us not touching, not saying or doing more than was necessary to keep ourselves sane. Emails and texts that informed each other of groceries running low or maintenance needed for the condo; updates on friends’ birthdays, the birth of children or who had broken up, what weeks my family would visit. But there had been little in the way of time spent between the two of us.
Relationships fall apart when we stop tending to them. Aly and I let our lives happen without paying attention to each other. We’d become selfish, needy for the things we wanted apart from each other.
We forgot what we wanted together.
So that night, with the warmth of her body still heating her pillow, with the exertion of our
love making still dotted in the sweat of my forehead, Aly left the bed and in one sentence, sent my world spinning.
“I’m leaving. I…I’m moving back home.”
I’d known it was coming, but had somehow convinced myself that she’d never turn me loose, that what we had together was too comfortable, too important to cast aside.
“This is home, Aly…”
She’d shaken her head, refusing to acknowledge that. She didn’t want me fighting. “Before you start trying to convince me how wrong I am, remember that I’ve always given you whatever you needed. I’m…I’m alone here, cut off from the life I had in New Orleans and you’re gone all the time, you don’t see it. And…when you are here, you’re just, not yourself.” She’d waved at my head and I knew she’d meant the injuries, how different the concussions made me act. “I never tried to stop you from being who you are. I just can’t watch you do this to yourself anymore and I won’t let you go on pretending I’m invisible.”