“It must suck to live life with that perfect bullshit detector. What a curse.”
He might as well have slapped her and caressed her at the same time. This was what she missed the most. A man who could slip into shorthand with her, who understood her at a fundamentally different level than the rest of the world. The rarity of that kind of connection made her watch him, breathing through a decade of scar tissue, and realize that the past didn’t matter.
Truly.
How much longer was she going to deprive herself of being this well understood? Her anger was a shield against the injustice of what Gerald had done to her, but it was also a shell she used to justify hiding from the world. Three years of law school, seven years of hundred-hour weeks left her with virtually nothing to give to any sector of her life.
Least of all her heart.
She liked it that way.
Until now.
“It’s a gift.”
He snorted. “It’s a gift when it helps you. I don’t think it’s helping you right now.”
Damn it.
He did it again.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Know me so well? Even after all these years you just...do.”
“It’s a gift.” He didn’t smirk as he threw her own words back at her.
“It really is.”
She started to breathe as slowly as possible as her heart crawled into her throat, her stomach curling inward, her thighs tightening. He could just look at her and make this happen. He could give her a raw, unafraid appraisal and rip out the deep roots of discontent that had grown there in his absence.
She grabbed a tortilla chip and shoveled it in her mouth, the crunching a welcome static, breaking up the silence in her mind.
Gerald did that.
He quieted her, the internal voice silenced, the eerie echo leaving room for true emotion to seep in.
For him to walk back in.
“That’s it? You had PTSD like every other soldier—including me—and you left because of that?”
“Basically.”
“Basically doesn’t cut it.”
“I came home and spent nearly two months in a psych ward, Suz. That email was a gesture of mercy. Took me two years to get out of my own head and start living again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t need your pity.”
“I’m not offering it. The fact that you don’t know the difference between pity and empathy is really sad.”
He gagged on his water.
“Your walking out on me was the single worst thing that ever happened to me, Gerald. Ever.”
Eyes watering, he tried to recover and speak, his throat in spasms. “I’m sure that’s not true, Suz. You saw some roadside bombings that—”
“Don’t you dare—you, of all people—try to tell me my own internal state, Gerald. You don’t get to invalidate me. You don’t get to rank my emotional devastation.” Her voice was deadly calm. “You never had permission to do so, and you certainly don’t have it now.”
Pain flashed in his eyes. “You’re right. Forgive me.”
Forgive me.
Could she? Could she ever? As the waiter delivered a platter of enchiladas and quesadillas and they busied themselves, grateful for the break, she wondered. Could she ever forgive him? Or herself? Because if the answer was no, she was wasting time.
Hers and his.
“I’ve imagined this moment so many times,” she confessed. Why not? What did she have to lose. Worst case, her anger. It might be nice to set down that burden for good and stop letting it weight her down. “And not once did I think that when I explained how hurt I was by your leaving, you’d compare it to a roadside bombing and say that having the love of my life break my heart by email and then disappear wasn’t as bad.”
He closed his eyes and winced.
“And yet, every part of me wants to throw myself at you and be kissed like last night. I want to pour out my heart and pick that fine mind of yours. I want to watch you sculpt, observe how you move through the world with your body, taking in parts of life I only see at surface depth. So here I am, hating you and left with the echo of loving you so deeply, and for so long, that I think I held on to the anger because it was all I had left of you.”
With that, she grabbed a triangle of quesadilla, dipped it in sour cream, and took a bite.
Gerald’s eyes tightened, narrowing so much she could barely see the pupils. He leaned forward, his cuff brushing the tips of the chips in the basket, and whispered, “The biggest mistake of my life was not knowing how to trust you.”
She felt the words as they traveled from her brain to her heart, triggering biochemical systems designed to unite emotion with stimulus, biology with communication.
“And sitting here, across this table, watching you tell me how much I hurt you, and yet you still want what we once had, blows my mind. You always did that, Suzanne. And you still do that. Only you.”
A part of her knew he was holding back. There was more. Much more.
But another self inside her, one she’d shushed a thousand times, wanted to walk into his arms and be held.
“How have you been?” she asked softly. “How did you heal?”
“How do you know I have?”
“You said you’re a different man.”
He reached across the table and slid his hand into hers. Didn’t ask.
Didn’t need to.
“That’s really the story? You came home ahead of me, got put in psych, emailed me to break up, and by the time I was stateside, no one knew where you were. What were you doing? What was your life like?”