Page 163 of Only After We Met
“I want you to tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“You do though. You told me once.” His thumb rubbed the back of my hand. “It’s feeling a tingle in your stomach when you see them. Not being able to stop looking at them. Missing them even though they’re right there. Wanting to touch them at all hours,talking about any- and everything, feeling like you lose all sense of time when you’re together. Noticing the details. Wanting to know everything about them, even the stupid stuff. You know what, Rhys? I think it’s actually like being permanently on the moon. With a smile on your face. Without fear.”
I didn’t want him to see me trembling.
“How can you remember so perfectly everything I wrote?”
“I’ve reread it lots of times.”
“Still…”
“And back then, I was on the moon.”
“Rhys…”
“No. I fucked it up, Ginger. For years I’ve been stumbling over the same obstacle, and I’m the one who put it there. I was wrong. And now…”
“Everything’s changed,” I managed to say.
“Not the important things. Not us.”
“Two years have passed, Rhys.”
“And yet I feel like it’s just been a few months since I said goodbye to you at the end of the summer we spent together, because in all the time since, I’ve felt nothing. It’s as if I didn’t exist. Ginger…” He reached up to stroke my cheek, and I flinched. I could tell he was nervous, uncertain. His fingers traced the outline of my lips. “Don’t you feel anything anymore? Don’t you feel me?”
What could I tell him? Yes? That he was one of the reasons my relationship with James had fallen apart? That no other man could come out on top when I remembered everything he had made me feel, how well we knew each other, for better and for worse, and how unconditionally I loved him, tenderly, but also like an addict?It was true what I had said about that long-ago night, that he shined so brightly I could see nothing else…
He must not have understood my silence.
But in my heart, I wished that he had.
His lips touched mine. That’s all—just a touch. It was almost nothing, but I felt it the way I’d never felt anything else. Reticent, unsure…from Rhys, it felt almost dainty, because I remembered him as savage, intense, hungry. Anything but tender.
“Let’s try, Ginger,” he whispered against my lips before kissing them again, slowly, softly. “I’ll give you everything you want. You and Leon. I should have from the first day I met you. I thought about it too. I swear I did. At the airport in Paris, when you were about to turn around and get in line. You were just a kid. And I wanted to kiss you so bad. And I should have. And, dammit, I never should have told you not to wait for me after what happened on the Ferris wheel. I should have told you I’d come back in a few months after signing that contract to go to Australia…”
“Rhys, don’t do this.”
“And then came the worst part. That summer.”
“We can’t change what happened.”
“I was crazy about you. I was so in love, I got angry at myself and at you, at both of us, the closer we got to your departure. I didn’t dare put myself out there. It was like I had vertigo. I should have gone with you, because if I’m honest, there was nothing I really cared about keeping me here. Just a bunch of smoke and mirrors…”
“Rhys, stop torturing yourself like this.” I wrapped my arm around his waist.
“All I want is to be with you and to compose. Wherever. InLondon. And I’ll buy a house in Australia, a little old one we can renovate, and we can take our vacations there. We can have a cat…”
It sounded perfect. Magical. But distant.
“Rhys, look at me. Breathe. Take a deep breath.”
He did. He breathed in several times, not taking his eyes off me, telling me so much in the silence broken by the beating of two hearts.
“I don’t want to lose another second.”
“I know.” We were so close.