My eyes flared open. “And here I thought you weren’t like them. You were the only one—”
“Thea,” he said, his voice harder than I’d heard him take with me. I fell silent.
“I knew you before the procedure for longer than I have after,” he said. “For all those weeks, we talked and listened to music and every conversation we built was torn down again by the amnesia. Over and over again. A part of me is scared shitless you’ll suddenly…”
“Go away again?”
He nodded. “I never want to cro
ss a line with you. Which is why I shouldn’t have kissed you at Blue Ridge. I should’ve waited until we were outside of those gates.”
“We are now,” I said, my hand wanting to slide across the table and take his. “We’re here now. Together.”
“But we’re not here for me,” he said. “We’re here for you. I don’t want you to think I’m trying to get something out of you.”
“I don’t think that,” I said. “But we are here for you. You’re a good man. You deserve some happiness too. Don’t you?”
He shrugged, lifting the weight of his loveless life on his strong shoulders. No self-pity, just a heartbreaking gesture of resignation.
The waitress arrived, her arms laden with burgers and two baskets of fries.
“Here we are.” She set them down. “Anything else?”
“We’re fine, thanks,” I said. I ignored the heavenly scent of greasy food curling under my nose and kept looking at Jimmy, who stared back. I’d never seen him so hard and intimidating. A stone wall built up year by year, to protect a child who had nothing and no one.
“You want to know if I think I deserve happiness?” he said to my expectant gaze. “No, I don’t. Life doesn’t work that way. The world doesn’t owe me anything, and I stopped asking a long time ago. End of story.”
A short silence fell. Neither of us spoke or moved to touch our food.
“I think that’s exactly how life works,” I said gently, conscious I was talking to a man for whom life had provided only the barest of essentials. “I think everyone deserves happiness. It’s out there, waiting to come to us, but we have to be open to receiving it. We have to know we deserve it, in order to give it a chance.”
“Simple as that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s that simple and yet, sometimes that hard to do.”
He jerked his chin at my food. “Eat,” he said, a faint smile on his lips. “It’ll get cold.”
My appetite was gone. It was more important to make him see I knew what I wanted. To shout that I trusted him with every fiber of my being, and he could trust me. But James Whelan took nothing for himself, even when he deserved everything. Quite possibly, the idea of being loved was so foreign to him, he wouldn’t know it if it slapped him in the face.
Or if it were sitting right across from him.
We ate in silence, the air between us tight with possibilities. A humming live wire connected us. Its tension strained tighter and tighter, waiting for something to break it.
I watched Jimmy take a bite of his burger. A dollop of mustard stuck to the corner of his mouth.
Without hesitation, I crawled up onto the table, clattered over silverware, and nearly knocked over a water glass. Jimmy stared, his eyes wide to see me on my hands and knees on the tabletop, my face inches from his. His shock mellowed into want, a heat emanating from his skin.
“You have some mustard on your face,” I whispered. “Let me.”
I bent my head toward his and licked his lips in a long, slow swipe. My mouth lingered on his, wanting his kiss so badly. Hungrier for it than any food.
“Got it.” I climbed backward into my seat, vaguely mindful of other patrons watching and whispering. I sipped my cold shake, casual as hell on the outside while inwardly, I was on fire for him.
I’m yours, Jimmy, I thought. Come and get me.
Chapter 28
Jim