I ran all the way to the edge of the Pacific, to the beach house where Emma’s sunny sweet smell assaulted me when I stepped in the door. She still lingered here, but once the scent was gone, no part of her would be here again.
The two hour run had done me good. Teleportation could have gotten me here in a blink, but when I ran, when I really let myself tear the ground apart, my mind emptied, and that was just what I needed. I ran until I couldn’t remember my name.
But no matter how furiously I surged ahead, I couldn’t forget hers.
I tore my battle ruined clothes off as I entered the guest bedroom and took a full length investigation of my body in the closet mirror. I was almost good as new, except for a couple of gashes over my brows that felt like they’d split open to the bone. They might take another hour to heal like they’d never been there.
But I knew, once I was fully healed, while my skin wouldn’t bear the scars of this day, the stuff that ran just below the skin would hold every scar like a mother holds a baby. I’d never fully heal from this day.
Accepting my fate by punching a fist-sized hole through the mirror, I cleared the bed of all things Emma, everything I’d picked for her, everything I’d wanted for her. I crawled into the covers, naked as the day I was born, broken as the day I died, aching to feel her arms around me. Aching to feel her anyway I could.
It was in that space between awake and asleep that I found her. She was waiting for me—she’d been waiting for me all along. She’d only needed me to look for her in the right place.
I didn’t let myself slip into sleep. I stayed in this space, caught in between worlds, belonging to neither. I stayed with her and she stayed with me. If we couldn’t be together in this world or that, we’d create our own to be together.
It was, perhaps, the most meaningful epiphany of my life.
I laid low for a few days, despite it nearly killing me. Every other second I wanted to go find Emma, so the seconds in between I convinced myself to stay put. It was driving me mad, feeling like I was being torn down the middle. So I communed with the waves to find the solace I was lacking, and when they grew tired of me, I tucked a blanket around myself and lounged beneath the stars beside a fire I couldn’t seem to give much life to. Even the embers missed her.
I lay beneath that vast night sky believing Emma might be doing the same thing, and this small thing was perhaps the only right I had to claim of a girl that wasn’t mine. I even tried to give perspective to my problems the way Emma could when she viewed the night sky, but no matter how long or hard I looked, it didn’t work for me. My problems didn’t seem any smaller, any less significant, and their weight didn’t lighten.
I knew what I had to do before I could say goodbye. Before I could “just leave her alone.” I had to tell her how I felt. Holding nothing back. Leaving nothing to interpretation. Tear open my chest and expose my soul to her. That was the only way I could move forward with no regrets.
If, after laying it all on the table, she still wanted me to disappear from her life . . . well, it would rip my beating heart from my chest, but I’d do it. I’d do anything for her, even if the last thing was saying goodbye. I didn’t know how I was going to look at the girl I loved and tell myself the only thing left to do was walk away, but I prayed I’d find the strength to do so when and if that moment arrived.
By Thursday night, I hoped my face—that had healed as if a pair of brass knuckles hadn’t beat it to hell—wouldn’t cause too much alarm. Three days after taking a beating of that caliber, the swelling and bruising should have just begun to peak, so I was a fool for hoping Emma wouldn’t notice this if I didn’t give her something bigger to think about. I was counting on my tell-all profession to do the trick.
A few minutes away from the campus, I punched a number in my cell, hoping I still had one ally on my side.
Four rings, and then a click. “What?”
“Jules, it’s me.”
“Hey, Me,” she said, turning down the grunge rock raging in the background. “I heard our favorite person in the world went all VanDamme on your pretty little face. I hope he didn’t do too much permanent damage.”
Running a yellow light, I said, “Don’t worry. My face is just as breathtaking as before.”
“Thank the gods.”
“Where is she, Jules?” I asked, drifting around the corner of the campus’s entrance. “I messed up. I need to see her.”
She sighed into the phone, no reply coming.
“Please, Jules,” I said. “If she still hates me when I’ve said what I’ve needed to say since the day after I met her, I’ll leave her alone. I promise.” This, despite being a promise I didn’t want to keep, was one I knew I could.
“All I can say is you two better name your first child, girl or boy, after me,” she said. “It’s against my kind’s policy to be a purveyor of all things of a mushy, lovey dovey variety and you’ve made me a regular Yenta.”
“You’re an angel among goth chicks, Jules.”
“She’s at a study group in the library. She’ll be done at eight.”
“I’m buying you your first place out of college,” I said, jerking the Mustang around the corner, heading to the library. Heading to Emma.
Julia laughed. “I’m holding you to that. And don’t think you can get away with a fifth wheeler rotting away in a trailer park. Don’t let the clothes fool you—I’m a girl who enjoys the finer things in life.”
“Whatever you want, Jules. I owe you big time,” I said, pulling into the first available parking spot. “Gotta go.”
“Go get her, sexy buns,” she said with a purr before hanging up.
I could see the library from where I was parked. I imagined I could see Emma through its brick walls, leaning over a book, tapping her forehead with a pencil in concentration. It was every day moments like these I wanted to live a lifetime of. Every day moments I was minutes away from possibly losing forever.
I bowed my head against the steering wheel, calming myself, saying prayers to whoever would listen, thinking positive thoughts. I’d never lacked for confidence, and I’d always felt grounded in who I was and proud to be that person. I was a man who knew what I was made of, but I was an instant away from finding out if that man was good enough for Emma Scarlett. If everything I’d made of myself was anything she wanted.
Slamming my hands against the dashboard to release some tension, I threw open the door and took the first step in closing the physical and, fate willing, the emotional distance, between Emma and me.
It was a few minutes before eight, so I focused my nervous energy on jogging around the lamps lining the sidewalk when what I really wanted to do was rip each one out and heave it as far as I could throw it. Now that would have been a tension reliever, but I didn’t need Emma to add any more evidence to the proof I was a “wild card.”
Like some bloody chick flick, it started to rain. I was going to tell a woman—the woman—everything of a mushy quality that went against every male instinct to divulge in the middle of a rainstorm under the cover of night. Under the light of a line of lanterns glowing yellow.
Insert wrist-slitting sappy music here.
I’d dressed for the occasion, three piece suit and all. I figured I’d worn one the better part of my life, why shouldn’t I on the day I told Emma Scarlett the way I felt? Too bad it was now drenched and clinging to my body like spandex. Expensive, silk spandex.
Running a hand through my hair, trying to get it to stay out of my face, I heard the library door open. I knew it was her before I turned around. That was what happened when you tied your soul to another’s—you were aware of them on a subconscious level that could never be turned off.
She didn’t see me. Drenched, desperate, drowning under the light of a lamp, she didn’t even look my way. It was clear to me now her feelings did not mirror mine. Her soul hadn’t done any reciprocal tying. She didn’t sense me before she could see me. She didn’t even see me.
I was still going to say what I’d come here to say, even though I knew I’d be hanging my head when all was said and done. I was at the summit and I wasn’t going to let all that climbing be for nothing.
“Emma,” I shouted at her back as she jogged through the rain.
She stopped mid stride, turning like she was moving through mud.
“Don’t be upset,” I said, taking slow steps towards her. “I’m just here to tell you something and that’s it. I’ll leave you alone after that if you still want me to.”
The rain was painting dark streaks down her dress, running streams down her face, but she didn’t duck beneath the nearest tree—she walked towards me.
“I’ve been worried about you,” she said. “Someone told me you ran away before the ambulance came. And you missed class.” With the two of us closing the space between us, we were standing in front of each other with one last step keeping us apart. “Are you all right?” she asked, looking up into my eyes first, before taking in the rest of my face.
“No,” I answered, “I’m not. But it’s not because of what Ty did to me—it’s because of what you did to me.”
She nodded once, like she knew just what I was talking about. “I’m sorry. For everything. I’ve done nothing but make a mess of your life.”
I took a half step forward, placing my arms on her arms. “It’s not really your fault at all. It’s mine.”
“No, nice try, but that doesn’t make any sense at all. You’ve done nothing but be wonderful to me. I’ll take all the blame for whatever you want to lay on me.” She shrugged off her backpack, letting it slide to the sidewalk, but her shoulders still hung with the weight of something.
I could let this deter me, she could deter me anyway she wanted, but I couldn’t risk losing the limited time I had with her. I’d come here with one thing to confess. “Why do you keep running away from me?” I asked, not employing this wonderful communication skill known as tact. “Why do you keep pushing me away when I get close?”
I wanted to know, because I knew she knew. I wanted to be able to circle one of the endless answers I’d come up with as to why she turned and ran at the very moments I’d been expecting her to run into my arms.
“Why don’t you run away from me?” she asked, forcing her eyes to mine. “Why don’t you push me away? Can you even answer that?”
I stared at that freckled, rain-dotted, sweet with a twinge of ever present anguish face, and I was staring at my answer.
“Of course I can,” I said. “I like you, Emma. I like you a lot.”
She exhaled sharply. “You don’t like me. You like the idea of me,” she said, like she’d been preparing this speech in her head for awhile. “You like the idea of saving the poor girl with a checkered past. The idea of having a girl who belongs to another guy. The idea of having a girl who keeps telling you no,” she continued, weaving out of the brace of my hands. “But then, when you’re done with me, what am I left with? Besides a broken heart and a future just like my past to look forward to?”
I couldn’t reply right away. I hadn’t expected this from her, wouldn’t have guessed in a year’s worth of guessing that these fears plagued her. I wanted to put together a thoughtful rebuttal to the insanity recently verbalized.
“Emma,” I said, finally. “I don’t want to conquer you. I don’t want you because of Ty. Or because you keep saying no.” I reached for her face to tilt it up to mine, but she twisted away from it. “I like you because of you and you alone.”
She closed her eyes and tried to step away from me. I wouldn’t let her. Not now that we were getting to the heart of what was keeping us apart.
“How do you know?” she snapped, still trying to pull away from me. “How can you be so darn sure you like me for wonderful me?” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm.
“Because I know.”
“You don’t know,” she replied.
“Don’t tell me what I don’t know,” I said, pressing forward because there was no further left to go backwards with Emma.
“I know because, before I met you, I didn’t have this gaping fissure cutting through my damn heart,” I said, thumping my fist over my chest, my voice elevating. “And now that you were kind enough to put one there, I know there’s no way of going back. No going back to pre-heart gaping fissure. And the hell of it is that no one can fix that fissure except for you. The one who made it.” Hair was glued around my face again and there was currently not a single scrap of me that wasn’t drenched, but the chill couldn’t cut through the heat coursing through me. “So that’s it. That’s how I know I like you, Emma Scarlett.”
Her face gave nothing away, but then the corner of her lip began to quiver. “You like me?” she said to herself, like it was the most unbelievable thing.
“No,”—her eyes snapped to mine like they were about to lose the game of staying unemotional—“that’s not exactly the right word.” I inhaled, willing the words I needed to say to come out right. “I kind of fell in love with you weeks ago and have been too scared of losing you to tell you.”
Not the most moving profession of love one man had issued to a woman, but it was mine.
“You love me?” she said to herself again, like it was even more unfathomable than me liking her. “Why?”
“Because I do.” It was that simple to me. Love is a simple thing by nature, people just like to screw it up and make it heavier than it is meant to be. That’s why it’s earned such a bad name.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she whispered, giving me a look like I was as unattainable to her as the angels in heaven.
“Is love supposed to?” I replied, taking a chance as I pulled her to me, not sure if she’d let me. She didn’t just let me, she came of her own accord. “Because if you need some proof to believe it, I’ve got an ocean of it,” I said, angling my mouth towards her ear. “I could tell you how I didn’t know I was lost until I found you. Or I could tell you how I have this ache in my gut when I’m not with you because I can’t keep you safe. I could tell you there isn’t a single thing about myself I like so much I wouldn’t be willing to change it for you. Or I could just tell you loving you is the most certain thing I’ve ever known.” Her hands clasped around my back, tugging me closer to her. “So, Emma, now it’s your turn. Why have you been pushing me away?”
Her head left its resting place below my chin. Staring at me with a deeper vulnerability than I realized she had, she said, “For the exact same reason.”
And there it was. I hadn’t even needed to hear the words. They were etched in every line of her face, in the way the curtain lifted from her eyes and I saw, for the first time, need and affection and possession in them when she looked at me. I saw the reciprocation I’d been certain wasn’t there. I couldn’t have been more wrong. She’d been hiding it, for whatever reason I didn’t know, and right now, it didn’t matter. One thing on my mind.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” I said, settling my hands over her face. “And I’m not planning on stopping for awhile.”
She smiled, the real one—the good one—but there was something else peaking it a little higher at one side. Something I wanted to see more of.
“It’s about time,” she said, crossing that last half-step separating us.
And then we were one. Bodies melding into one another, lips colliding together like they had minds all their own. Her kiss was sweet, but not particularly gentle. So, basically, it was perfect. I wasn’t sure what I’d been wasting my time kissing in the past, but being lip-locked with Emma Scarlett kind of made my kissing girls from all around the world seem frivolous, amateur at best, when kissing could be this good.
It wasn’t like a first kiss because we knew each other too intimately for that. And it wasn’t like a last kiss because we’d only just begun. It was the kiss you spend your whole life waiting for. The kiss you wish would swallow you whole so you’d always be living it. This was the kiss of a lifetime, shared with a woman I’d spent a few lifetimes waiting for.
Only when her breathing became erratic from loss of oxygen did I pull myself back. It was a feat of willpower Tibetan monks would have given the thumbs up to.
“Wow,” she said, working to regulate her breathing. “Now that I know you’re a kissing god, let me apologize for the disappointment. I’m a bit out of practice,” she said, her cheeks burning beneath the rain trailing down them. “Kissing Ty was like making out with a snake—all tongue and no lips,” she said, doing an exaggerated shudder while I worked at keeping the flash of rage caged. “I tried to avoid it at all costs.”
“I have an easy solution for getting you back in practice, you know,” I said, sliding the sheets of wet hair behind her shoulders. I understood why those romantic comedy directors dug the kissing in the rain scene. It was tough to beat.
She tried giving me a stern look that ended up being too playful for me not to give her an example. So I showed her.
“Practice,” I whispered in the space between our mouths, rivers of rain polishing our lips.
And I showed her again.
“Tireless days and nights of practice,” I said a minute later, and this time my own breath was hitching in a way I’d never felt before. Another very Mortal, non-Immortal paramount—shortness of breath.
“I like the way you think,” she said, sucking a drop of rain from my bottom lip. I lost the feeling in my lower half, it was that paralyzing of a sensation. I wanted to rinse and repeat that feeling a couple dozen times a day.
And this time, she showed me. It didn’t seem like she needed much practice to get her “back-in-practice,” but I suppose since everyone passing by was giving us a good ten second rubber-neck, we were accelerating her through an intensive course.
A couple passed us and, even though they were no threat and a few car lengths away, I couldn’t shut my survival instincts off even though the woman in front of me was kissing the living daylights out of me. Now that I had something priceless, all my own, to love and protect, I wasn’t about to put the indestructible killer running through me up on a shelf.
“Isn’t that the guy who got his ass beat by that chick’s boyfriend?” one said to the other, like it was common knowledge.
“Yep,” the other replied. “Looks like he’s going to take another beating too.”
That conversation got me thinking about something other than the way Emma’s mouth felt against mine.
“Call him and end it,” I said, running my hands down her neck. “I don’t want any piece of him between us for another minute. End it.” It was a plea, not a demand, but it was also a need, not a want.
Fear, raw and rugged, coated her eyes before she threw that curtain over them. “I’ve been avoiding him all week,” she said in a small voice. “I think he’s got the picture.”
“Make it official.” I slid the phone out of my dripping suit pocket, holding it out for her. “Tell him I’m your man. Tell him I’m yours and you’re mine and if he comes within a football field of you, I won’t hesitate to send him back to hell with the rest of his demon brethren.”
She bit her lip, looking down.
“Be free of him for good.” I held my finger at the ready, only needing the numbers. I’d call him for her if that’s what she needed. Hell, it would have been a pleasure.
“Okay,” she breathed, nodding her head. “I’ll tell him tonight. Now,” she clarified, picking up her backpack to leave.
“If you think I’m letting you out of my buff, lonely, desperate arms any time tonight, you’re gravely mistaken,” I teased, pulling her back to me. “You can break up with him right here. No hands required.” I adjusted the phone beside her ear, and smiled.
She took a heavy breath, attempting to draw in something she was short on. “After six years of cowering to him, I’m going to face him now. For the first time, I’m going to stand up to him so the last thing he’ll remember of me was that I wasn’t afraid of him anymore.”
“Okay, Em, you’re freaking me out a bit here,” I said, rubbing slow circles into her arms. “All this talk about cowering and being afraid and standing up is painting a picture of Ty keeping you locked in a dungeon or something.”
I laughed an uneasy one, waiting for her to join in. When she didn’t, I went blank faced. “He didn’t. Did he?”
“No,” she answered, hugging me to her and, while I would never be one to put up a fight when Emma wanted me close, I got the distinct feeling this was an attempt to keep me from seeing what was happening on her face. “Of course not. This is just something I have to do in person. On my own,” she added, guessing what I was going to say next.
I clutched her to me, tucking her head beneath my chin. The girl had guts, but she was crazy if she thought I was going to let that happen.
“You must think Ty knocked something loose if you believe I’m going to let you go to that sadist alone. Hell to the absolute no. Over my dead body.”
Or, at least my dead dead body. I was bouncing on the balls of my feet at the thought, the tension was that intense. I wanted to outlet it into Ty’s snake kissing face.
Her tiny hands molded around my neck. “I need you to trust me on this,” she said, sounding calm, but looking anything but. “I don’t need to trade one possessive boyfriend for another.”
There it was, the nuke that decimated my resolve. How could I argue around that point? As much as I didn’t want to see it, as much as I wanted to excuse my alpha dominance on the situation, she was right. I was acting possessive, throwing around ultimatums and orders like I was the director of the scene of her life. Like I’d said, I didn’t want to conquer her. I wanted to conquer life with her at my side.
“Fine,” I said before I could change my mind. “But you keep your finger on my speed dial, and if he comes within a two foot radius of you, you call me. If that’s good with you,” I muttered when her eyebrow peaked.
“Quite good with me,” she replied, shouldering her bag and kissing the corner of my mouth as she turned to leave.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” I said under my breath, kicking the sidewalk because none of this felt right. Her walking away from me towards Ty, a man I wouldn’t trust if the world’s fate depended on it, to tell him she was breaking it off. Ty didn’t strike me as the kind of guy that took being dumped very well.
She spun around, continuing to walk away. “I heard that,” she said, wagging a finger at me. “Meet me back at my dorm in a couple hours. We’ll celebrate me cheating on my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend whose heart I’m off to break.”
“I’ll bring the champagne,” I hollered, pretending I’d nail-gunned my feet in a dozen different places to the sidewalk so I wouldn’t chase after her. So I wouldn’t become that possessive boyfriend she didn’t want. So I wouldn’t be there to protect her if she needed it.
My stomach turned, and then turned again. My instincts, my gut, was firing on all cylinders, ordering me to go with her. Screaming at me that something wasn’t right. However, I was no longer a one man operation, able to submit to whatever I was feeling at the time I was a half of a whole and, as novice as I was at relationships, I knew the quickest way to find yourself out of one was to go in the opposite direction of the other half. No matter how strong the bond was, it could only hold so long when its halves were fighting in the opposite directions.
I watched her go, having no faith in the decision I’d made to stay behind.