“Please …” I begged, bowing my head until it touched his chin.
“I’m not the man you need,” he said gruffly, and the sadness in it didn’t go unnoticed.
“I don’t need a man,” I said, daring to look up at him. “I’m going to law school; you’re going back to Kentucky. I know that.”
“Then why?” His brows furrowed.
“Because I have wanted you my entire life,” I said out loud, while inside, I told him it was because I loved him.I love you so much.
“We’ve both had way too much to drink.” He stepped back.
“Luke …” I started, my hands trembling for a completely different reason.
“I have a girlfriend,” he repeated.
I shook my head as I told him, “She doesn’t deserve you.”
His eyes penetrated mine, and we were silent, but it wasn’t awkward. In the silence, there was a force field keeping us both in the same place, not letting us move.
I closed my eyes and said again, “She doesn’t deserve a man like you.”
“You don’t deserve a man like me, Ava. All those romantic notions you have about me are not reality. When you tell me you want me, I know damn well you want what you think I am. You sure as hell don’t want me.”
“Do so,” I said and quickly realized I sounded like a spoiled little girl.
“I’m a soldier. I fight. I breathe for my country, and I will die for my country if need be. It is who I am. I am not walking away from who I am to play house with a girl who thinks she knows me when, in reality, I never knew who I was until the United States Army brought it out of me.”
“I’m not a stupid girl,” I told him.
“Never said you were. But if I fucked you, it would be a fuck, not a relationship. No wedding bells or picket fence. If I fuck you, Ava, it’s purely physical.”
“What about your girlfriend? Do you love her?”
He shook his head. “Don’t know. I loved the promises she made to me when I got home and that, if I wanted her to come with me, she’d come. I loved the letters she wrote when I was in the field, loved that she would marry me tomorrow.”
“But …”
“I don’t anymore. She doesn’t want me to stay in. She’s doing nothing here with her life. The first time I came home, I told her she needed to do her thing, that I had changed. She didn’t listen.”
“Then why not just break up with her?”
“I like having someone at home. I like getting letters in the field.” He looked back up. “I’m a fucking asshole.”
I shook my head. “You’re not. She’s stupid.”
He sighed and shrugged.
“I’m not stupid. I’m going to be so busy at school for seven years, Luke. Seven. Break up with her. I’ll write you.”
“Ava …” he said in a tone that made me feel like he thought I was stupid or maybe not worthy.
“I write you letters, anyway,” I told him immediately. “And when you come home, I’m always here.”
“This won’t always be home for me.”
“Pft, like it will be for me,” I said, acting like it was no big deal. And it wasn’t. He was my home. He just didn’t know it yet.
“Sex isn’t a once a year thing,” he told me.