“While all along the reality was that I was literally responsible for your worst nightmares—I abandoned you when you most needed me, I fucked up your life by making the most selfish of decisions—and then I have the gall to attempt to weasel my way back into your life, into your routine, like I had a right to be there.”
“Harris . . .” Tina chose her words very carefully. She wasn’t sure what to say. Did she want to offer complete forgiveness? She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything right now. Did she even have the right to arrogantly choose to forgive him for something that hadn’t been his fault? “The choices I made were my own. I chose to have him. I chose to keep him. And I chose to not to inform you of these decisions. Neither of us can say how you would have reacted to the news of my pregnancy.”
“You’re too generous,” he said bitterly, and she shook her head.
“I wasn’t generous enough. I got to hold him. I got to sing to him, and I got to rock him to sleep at night. You didn’t. And I think . . .” She paused for a moment, gathering her thoughts, before continuing slowly. “I think—callow and irresponsible though you may have been—I feel certain you would have wanted to do those things.”
“I would have,” he whispered, his voice hoarse with repressed emotion. She got up and stood directly in front of him. He towered above her, the height difference between them all the more evident with her in bare feet. “I would have loved him.”
His eyes yearningly ran over her face, cataloguing every detail. “You’re so beautiful.”
He reached out and traced her features with his forefinger: just the barest of touches as he stroked across her cheekbones, down the bridge of her nose, across her jawline where it dipped beneath her chin and tilted her face upward. He kissed her, sweetly and tenderly . . . his lips as featherlight on her mouth as his finger had been on her face.
“You were seventeen when I first looked at you and saw,” he murmured, and her eyes reopened; his face was so close to hers she could see the tiny freckles on the top of his crooked nose. “Wearing a light-green dress with ties on the shoulders; it made your body look lush, and I wanted to touch you so badly. Touch you and taste you. But you were a kid. I was nearly twenty. I didn’t know why I suddenly wanted you; all I knew was that I got embarrassingly turned on every time you were in my general vicinity. I imagine that bet was the perfect justification for me to do a little wish fulfillment. I had the excuse I thought I needed. I was so fucking stupid.
“You were twenty-three when I recognized how brave you were. It was Christmas, and we were having dinner with your family. Your brothers were being assholes about your latest job at that salon. You were convinced that you wanted to be a hairstylist, and they were just laying into you. I was on the verge of intervening when you smiled at Kyle and told him you would be happy to help him disguise his gray hairs at a discounted price. You shut him up with grace, dignity, and good humor, and despite the fact that I could see how much their negativity upset you, you didn’t get defensive. You let it roll over you. It was the bravest thing I’d ever seen. I admired you so fucking much. That was the first time I tried to invite you out to coffee or lunch with me. You refused, of course. It didn’t stop me from trying every time I saw you after that.
“Tina, I don’t know when it happened . . . but I love you. So fucking much.” She gasped at the words, her hands flying up to her mouth. He kept his eyes steadily locked onto hers. The intensity of his stare both unnerving and hypnotic. “And I have to . . . I can’t . . .”
He sucked in a deep, frantic breath and tugged his fingers through his hair as he stalled, looking like he was trying to gather his thoughts. Tina, whose entire world had just shifted on its axis, could do nothing but stare at him in absolute disbelief.
“I can’t compartmentalize,” he continued. “I can’t do just the sex without all the messy emotions that go along with it. I won’t. And if it can’t be all—which I know it can’t be, not after everything that’s happened—it’ll have to be nothing.”
Before she could say a word in response to his astonishing confessions, he dropped a quick, hard kiss on her mouth, turned, and walked away.