CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Holden
Have you ever had a moment when words cling to the edge of your tongue begging to be spoken, but your mind knows, your heart knows, that once those words are given voice, you will never be able to repair the damage they cause?
I was in one of those moments with Michaela, my eyes caught by hers, my pulse jagged and sharp beneath my skin as silence surrounded us both.
How do you tell a person that you finally know who they are? How do you say sorry for having judged them harshly? How do you forgive yourself for wanting to scream from rooftops that you’ve finally found the one, while knowing you would leave that perfect person standing alone in the dark?
Speaking the words trapped by my indecision would eventually leave Michaela drowning in heartache. Not saying them at all was as good as lying without remorse, as good as denying what was true about a woman I had only just discovered.
It’s too late for me to love you.
It’s too late to admit I was wrong.
It’s too late to tell you how wonderful you are despite everything this town has done.
Saying what was on my mind would only drag her into the same hell I was living. The same hopeless situation where something beautiful could have been born if I weren’t facing going away from her forever. Despite how cruel my words would be, she stood staring at me with hopeful eyes, putting her foot down for the first time, leaving herself open to be crushed by a truth that would only destroy us both.
I’m not a stupid man. My entire life has been spent observing other people. And except for this woman standing before me now, I’d never been wrong about what I knew existed beneath the lies that every person wore.
Everybody but her, a woman I’d watched for so long, a part of her calling to me since the moment I met her, a part I’d willfully ignored.
Her full lips parted just barely, her eyes searching my face. Her expression frozen in a moment I wanted to paint. This moment. Right now. When the veil had slipped to reveal a soul as abused as me who was just now learning how to gather her life to herself and take charge.
Forgive me...
“Too late for me to know you for who you really are, Michaela.” My admission was spoken on a rush of regretful breath, but I voiced it regardless, dropping my own veil for her to see that the man who had been running from her for the past four days was really just a coward who couldn’t face that his heart had been right for over ten long years to want her. “It’s too late for me to know what it’s like being with a woman I could have loved all along.”
Greens eyes blinking, lips parting even more, Michaela’s entire demeanor changed as soon as the words were released from the confines of my innermost thoughts. She transitioned from a woman asserting herself for the first time, to a woman weighed down by a confession she must have suspected, but never let herself believe could be real.
Disbelief saturated her soft voice. “You’ve known me since we were children, and you’re just now telling me this?”
Shrugging, I admitted, “We barely spoke. We hardly knew each other beyond our connection to Delilah. It’s like I said. I’m too late.”
Clearing her throat of some emotion I wanted, no needed, her to deny, Michaela stepped forward, her fingers moving as if she wanted to reach out, to touch, to cross that invisible barrier I’d placed between us the minute I recognized I wanted to feel her inside myself.
People are so quick to throw the word ‘love’ around as if it were something distinct and separate from themselves. As if it were simple, basic, or exact. They confuse it with lust. They confuse it with romance. They confuse it with the simple interest they have to learn about another human being. But in that confusion, they lessen what it really means.
If you truly love someone, you feel them in every cell of your body. Whether they’re right next to you, or a million miles away, that person is still the air you breathe, is still the first thought on your mind, is still so indelibly embedded in your heart that to lose them is to lose a piece of yourself. Love doesn’t distinguish between a mother, a son, a sister, a brother, a father, or the woman a man eventually calls his wife. It’s not interchangeable. It’s not a word that has alternate definitions. It exists or it does not. And once it exists, truly exists, it never goes away.
Romance, lust, friendship, attraction, interest - those words carry alternate meanings, they can be applied and stripped away once the honeymoon is over, but love never falters, not in divorce, not in anger, not even in death.
It NEVER goes away.
And that’s what makes it so dangerous.
I didn’t need love with Michaela, she didn’t need it with me, no matter how badly we wanted it, only because it would never disappear once I was sent to prison. It would linger on both of our hearts as a nascent phantom, forever calling to us, but never receiving an answer.
So why couldn’t I stop myself from feeling the first spark of it now?
Shaking her head, Michaela trapped the bottom corner of her lip between her teeth, the movement dragging my gaze down to a set of lips that may as well have been dipped in poison. Releasing it so that the corners of her mouth could curl up into an unsure grin, she stepped forward. “I don’t think it’s too late.”
Despite my heart pounding, my breath pouring out of me with the absolute need I had to touch her, I forced myself to step back and replace the distance she’d closed. “I’m going to prison. I know you don’t want to believe it, Michaela, but-“
“You’re not going,” she insisted, stepping forward, closing the distance, forcing me to step back again.
“You can say that as many times as you want, but it doesn’t make it true.”
Another step forward. Another step back. This dance of ours ending once my body hit a wall, preventing me from maintaining the distance that was necessary to keep from committing my worst sin of all: the intermingling of two hearts that were doomed never to remain together.
Staring at me with expectant eyes that sparkled like priceless emeralds, Michaela stood still for several seconds that felt like minutes, hours, days and weeks, her mouth finally falling open on a question that was more dangerous than she understood.
“What would happen if I kissed you right now, Holden Bishop?”
Dragging in a breath, I released it slowly, my weary eyes never leaving hers. “We would both end up heartbroken.”
“Immediately?” she whispered.
“Eventually.”
A smile tilted her lips. “I can live with eventually.”
I couldn’t step away. Couldn’t look away. Couldn’t catch my breath enough to open my mouth and tell her how eventually meant forever. Couldn’t explain that in a world full of chaos and heartache and tragedy, we didn’t need to add to the pile by taking a chance that would ultimately end in failure.
The distance between us was lost. Her body softly pressed against mine. Our breath intermingling as she craned her neck to look at me, pushing up to her tiptoes to wrap her hands over my shoulders, this view, perspective, this moment captured and frozen in my mind.
My fingers twitched as I fought not to touch her in response. My heart pounded as if to expel that small spark of an emotion I didn’t want to consider. My mind raced back to recall all the images of this woman I’d sketched through the years, empty and faceless...until now.
Now I saw her for who she really was.
Now I understood how wrong I’d been about her.
Now I couldn’t deny that I’d watched her for years without understanding why.
And when she reached up to pull my head to hers, when her mouth pressed to mine, tentative and tender...
Now I felt her for the first time.
Once you feel a person who touches your soul, it’s too late to deny that you can’t live on for eternity without them.
My body reacted before my brain could catch up, my hands going to her hips, my fingers gripping down so that I could pull her against me tighter, so that I could lift her a little higher and deepen her tentative kiss until it was as destructive and violent as fire.
She tasted like heaven and hell all wrapped up in one, her scent like fresh flowers blooming over a field that had once been barren. The heat of her skin scorched my own, the sounds escaping her throat...
Damn. I’d lost the fight against her before I realized we’d even started battling.
My thoughts were cut off so completely that all the warnings stopped screaming, my hands lifting her legs to wrap around my hips so that I could turn and press her against the wall she’d trapped me against earlier. And the second our bodies connected in places that should have been left alone, the only warning that softly whispered was that if I didn’t have her now, I would burst apart at the seams, I would shatter to the ground or implode.
This. This was the moment I’d been running from since the day I brought her into my house, and I realized quickly that the running had been futile because eventually would always come.
We kissed like two people who had never known true passion, like two separate souls waking up for the first time to discover there was a perfect fit staring them in the face, and once that kiss had left us both breathless until we were forced to pull apart, I pressed my forehead to hers while gulping down oxygen, my eyes locked to hers, our gazes wide and startled.
“I want to take you to my bedroom,” I finally said once my lungs were no longer gasping.
“You should,” she answered just as breathless as me.
“I really shouldn’t.”
“But you’re going to.”
I hated how simple her argument was. If she’d said anything else, maybe I would have stood a chance, but instead my fingers tightened over the cheeks of her butt, a growl rumbling from my chest because despite what my mind was telling me to do, my body wasn’t hearing it.
“Yeah,” I answered, “I think you’re right.”
“Stop thinking,” she whispered.
So, I did.