Page 162 of Only After We Met
“I should have been there to help you.”
“You tried.”
“Not enough.”
“I never let you help me.”
“And I hated that part of you.”
“I know. It’s just that the emptiness…” He brought a hand to hisheart and looked up in the sky. “I feel it right here. Always. And I can’t handle it. And then, when I’m in the spiral, it’s like I don’t feel anything. Nothing good, nothing bad. Just nothing.”
I turned and sank my fingers into his hair, just for the pleasure of doing so, of feeling us connected again physically, knowing he was close to me, real. “You never thought that maybe there’s no need to fill in the emptiness?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe the emptiness just is. Like the holes in Swiss cheese. You don’t look at them and think you need to fill them. They don’t need to be filled in to make things better.”
“Maybe I’m like that, like a piece of Swiss cheese.”
“Sure. Or like the moon, Rhys.”
“Why the moon?”
“It’s full of craters, but they’re pretty, aren’t they? Way more so than if its surface was just smooth. You’re like the moon. All of us are—we’re all imperfect. But so what? We can live with that. We should live with that.”
“Come here.” He hugged me.
We stayed like that a few seconds, holding each other as if the world would fall apart if we ever let each other go, as if his body pressing into mine were the only thing that brought order to the universe, held the chaos at bay, maintained calm.
“Promise me you won’t do that again,” I whispered, trying not to cry. “And don’t lie to me like you did that day when you left the restaurant. Don’t you dare.”
“I swear I won’t, Ginger. I really swear it.”
I looked at him, smiling nervously, because his hands on mywaist were burning hot, and his breath, so close, was tempting me.
“I saw you have all my books…”
“I read them too,” he said with a chuckle.
“For real? You read them all?”
“Of course! Who do you take me for? I also… I tried to imagine why you chose them, why you decided it was important for each of those stories to be told.”
“Don’t make me cry, Rhys.”
He smiled slyly and looked down at me, turning inward slightly. My head was resting on his shoulder. “What happened with James?”
“You waited long enough…”
“It was killing me,” he admitted, and despite everything, I smiled. “I was dying to ask you. But if you don’t want to tell me…”
“No, that’s not it. It just hurt. Not because of us, but because of Leon. I kept thinking about him, and that made me feel guilty. I guess it didn’t work because we just weren’t in love. We did love each other. And that was nice at first. But later, the feeling wasn’t strong enough. It wasn’t how it had to be. It wasn’t everything it should be.”
“How should it be?”
As he asked that, his long, warm fingers played with mine on the dew-covered grass, and my heart beat faster.
“Rhys, you know the answer to that question.”