I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE. I just can’t. This hot-and-cold shit with him. Me suddenly forgetting how to act like a normal adult around him. All of it. I’m just so tired of it all.
I’ve always known he would be stupid to love. I’ve known it since before I made that last tumble ass over elbows and landed in a mass of limbs. I knew before the fall that it would be a painful tumble¸ but I still jumped and fell in love with him regardless.
“Dani, look at me,” he implores when we step in to my room and place the boxes on the floor of my walk-in closet. “Please,” he adds.
With a deep breath, I turn and look him in the eye. Gone is the boiling lust, and what’s taken its place is acceptance that we won’t ever be.
“Talk to me,” he pleads.
“What do you want me to say? You know how I feel, Cohen. I’ve told you before. I know you heard me in my sleep when I was sick. Plus, there is this . . . thing between us. Bottom line—you know how I feel and it isn’t your fault that you don’t return those feelings.” I sigh and sit down on my chaise lounge, which Nate and Lee just placed in the middle of my room. “I’m tired of feeling like I need to run or act a certain way around you. It used to be easier to hide the way I feel.”
“I don’t want you to hide. Not from me.”
I feel my brows pull in at his words, confused by the mixed signal.
“I don’t want you to be anything but yourself around me,” he continues. “I just don’t know what to do about this, Dani. I know what’s right here. I know what I should and shouldn’t do when it comes to you. It’s just getting harder to keep those lines from blurring.”
“What are you saying, Cohen? Spit it out in plain terms so I don’t get your words mixed up and seek hope when there isn’t any to be found.”
His face hardens, and he takes a step towards me, leaning down, placing his hands on either side of my hips, and not stopping his body until his face is level with mine. His harsh breaths hit my lips, and I lean back, only to stop when his body follows the movement.
“When you were fifteen and you sat in my parents’ basement, you told me that, one day, I would see you the way you see me. You told me that you would be waiting, Dani. Waiting for me to become yours and you mine. I wasn’t ready, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t see you and haven’t seen you every day since and thought about what it would be to have you. You told me you would be waiting. You sat there with all the courage in the world and laid it out there, Dani. Are you telling me now that you take it back?”
“You remember that?” I gasp.
When he starts talking next, I swear that my heart stops. Shock. But complete wonderment. His voice, a pitch higher, whispers the words I said to him almost ten years ago verbatim. I should know—I practiced them for weeks in the mirror before I worked up the courage to actually say them to him. They were words I would never forget. Especially since he treated me with the indifference of a good friend after—until recently.
“I’m going to miss you, Cohen. I know you don’t look at me like I look at you, but one day, you’re going to come back and I’ll still be waiting for you. Waiting for you to see me like I see you. Mark my words, Cohen Cage. One of these days, you’re going to be mine. And until you’re ready . . . I’ll be here. I’ll be waiting.”
Holy shit.
“Holy shit,” I repeat out loud when he stops talking. “I can’t believe you remember that.”
“I will never forget it,” he vows.
“What does that even mean?” I throw back. Once again, here he goes with his hot-and-cold shit.
“That means exactly that. I won’t ever forget it. Just because I haven’t acted on this chemistry between us doesn’t mean I don’t want to. Back then, I couldn’t. You know that it wouldn’t have been appropriate with our ages. And now . . . Now, I don’t even know what it is because my head is in a million different places right now. But one thing I know is that I’m getting ready to leave. I’m getting ready to leave and, Dani, I just can’t put you in the position of being in limbo for months, years, who knows, just so that I can feel what you feel like.” He drops his head against mine and sighs. “I’ve never wanted someone as fiercely as I want you, Dani-girl.”
The tone of his voice is so heartbreaking that my chest clenches.
“I wish it were a different world. One where I wasn’t leaving and our future wasn’t unknown. If it were, you would have been mine already.” He gives me a sad, small kiss against my forehead—not pulling back for a few beats. He looks me in the eyes again before pulling himself up and walking out the door.
Well, if that doesn’t suck, I don’t know what does.
I might be grasping at straws here . . . but what he didn’t say was that we didn’t have a future at all. Just that he wasn’t sure what it was.
It’s not much hope—but it’s something. And that was more than I had an hour ago.