“Because I ghosted you.”
Her mouth flatlined and she looked away, out towards the beginnings of sunset.
“I can explain.” He’d planned on this conversation being held back home where everything was familiar again.
“I hope so.”
“May I kiss you?” He hadn’t planned on asking that. Do you have a death wish, you fucking idiot?
“Not if you’re about to tell me you don’t love me, and you don’t want to be together.”
That was fair. “I love you more than I ever thought possible.” Also fair. Loving her was a privilege and an honor. “But this, us, is a big deal.”
“Now I want to shiv you.”
The fairest of all. He reached out his hand and she took it, stepping closer. Tiny waves lapped at their feet, no hint of the tidal pull of feeling flowing between them. She nodded and he took her face in his hands and brought his lips to hers. She didn’t smell of goat’s soap or cattle anymore. The kiss was cool and tentative, not enough to defrost his heart but then he’d hurt her terribly and he didn’t deserve her warmth.
“So why?” She waved a hand at the jungle behind them. “Why leave me like that, without a word or a way to contact you?”
“We were detoxing.” They had an agreed schedule for time to be spent recovering alone after a fully immersive assignment like they’d just done. It was a completely reasonable but utterly redundant answer. The look on her face said car crash. He felt it in his gut like evisceration. “Because I don’t want us to be a mistake.”
She flung her hands up. “You’re infuriating. How can we be a mistake?”
He led her to his sun lounger and they sat side by side under his big umbrella. There were others on the beach earlier, but they had it to themselves now.
“Everything about going undercover is an act. You play a role for a specific purpose. You do and say things you wouldn’t normally do. You’re forced into situations and relationships you wouldn’t normally have, and you make decisions based on circumstances that aren’t—”
“I don’t need undercover con for beginners. You don’t think we’re real?”
He bumped her shoulder. This was hard. This was the stuff in relationships he’d always avoided, the meat and potatoes of loving someone and still being unsure of them. He’d had no practice at it, spent all his time in the sweetness and light of new connections where tomorrow didn’t matter and being good at goodbye was an asset.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow with Rory was the connective tissue that kept him moving through life. Everything else was sleep, sugar, work, redistribution of justice and mindless distraction.
“We might’ve been real a long time ago. You didn’t choose me until I was the only one you could turn to in a circumstance where you were being mind-fucked into isolation and doubt.”
She looked down at her hands folded in her lap with their shiny red nails. She knew there was truth in the timing.
“And I wasn’t strong enough to do the right thing, to wait until we were back in our places so that all of our choices weren’t warped. I’m trying to do that now.” He took her hand brought it to his lips, watching her expression soften. “I’ve loved you too long to be someone you conned yourself into needing. Someone you love who isn’t right for you. It wouldn’t be loving you if I let that happen.” He relinquished her hand and knew there was a chance he was losing her too. “Better that we stay friends than become lovers who burn so bright we flame out too fast. That’s not something I want to live with.”
She stood, walked to the edge of the circle of shade thrown by the umbrella and faced the sea. If the restaurant plated his heart and served it with whipped cream, he’d cut it into small pieces and eat it to stop the ache in his chest.
“There’s only one thing worse than not having you in my life, and that’s having you resent me,” he said.
A breeze lifted the hem of her beach wrap and kicked it back from her legs. He’d had those legs hitched around his waist. He’d had her tenderness in his hands and he’d fucked badly with it.
“You know the thing that hurts the most?” Her voice shook, and she kept her back to him. She wasn’t the least bit interested in his resp
onse. “Not that you couldn’t tell me all this before you jetted off to paradise.” She looked over her shoulder at him. “I forgive you for that. You weren’t in a fit state to be thinking entirely clearly. It’s that even now you don’t trust me to know my own mind.” She turned fully to face him, distress in every line of her body. “You don’t trust me to make my own decisions. You don’t think I haven’t thought about how we came together? Interrogating myself is my new jam. Did I force things between us, did I coerce you? Am I repeating a pattern? Did I set myself up to get to this place where we don’t know who we are to each other anymore?”
He couldn’t sit any longer. She put a hand up to stop him standing. Fuck. He’d really, truly screwed this.
“Did I lose my best friend because I took him for a lover? I couldn’t stay away and be patient any longer. Had to come and hear what you had to say. I had to remind you that I’m done with keeping you at arm’s distance. I chose you when I didn’t have to choose anybody. I chose you when it was inconvenient and unprofessional and possibly dangerous to both of us and all of that is on me.”
“Ah, Rory.” Having eaten his heart, his mouth could no longer form the right words.
“Nothing about Abundance conned us into being together. Yes, the timing was poor and our stress levels, what they did to us, sped things along, but we’re professionals and we’re smarter than that. The gaslighting is all on you and I can’t rescue you from yourself.”
Without his heart, missing his words, and slammed by her reasoning, he also lost the agency to move. He let her leave the beach, her head held high, and when he could finally summon the will to stand, he threw himself in the sea, where he considered that the reason he couldn’t float wasn’t lack of body fat, it was lack of courage.