Fast & Wet (The Fast 2)

His head lifts, and a lock of hair falls over his eyebrow, over the scar I’ll never see in the same way again. “I’m so sorry. I’ll never forgive myself for what you went through. I tried to make it work, and then, fuck, you were in such bad shape and…” his head drops back down. “You were better off without me. I’d only keep hurting you. Ruin your life. Take away your family, your friends, school, your decision to be a mother, trap you.”

I hate hearing these things come out of his mouth, he sounds like my father, for god’s sake. “Do you think I’m stupid, Cole?”

I know how he will answer this question, but just like the last, he needs to hear it. His head jerks up, “What? No, of course not.”

“Then you listen to me. Those are my choices, and I will make them for myself from here on out. Do you understand me? Jesus, Cole. I could have gone to University College or Imperial College in London. I got accepted to both, you knew that.” In a last-ditch effort, I applied to several schools here in the UK. This didn’t have to happen.

“I didn’t know that,” he shakes his head.

“I told you that, in the letters that I wrote to you. You’d already left, and you’d stopped returning most of my calls, but I still wrote to you, and I told you that, the day I got the acceptance letters.”

“I, I never got any letters from you, Em.”

“What are you talking about, I wrote you every single day?”

In my teenage head, I tried convincing myself that maybe he was just too busy to return calls. Then I thought maybe getting mail from home would remind him of me, like an old-time love letter in the post that would rekindle his feelings for me. I wrote to him every single day for months.

Cole wraps his hands around my waist and buries his head in my lap. “I never got letters from you.”

It was so long ago. I definitely mailed them, but maybe I messed the postage up or got the address wrong. Though, you’d think they would have come back marked return-to-sender, or something. I guess it doesn’t matter, nothing will bring those years back and what matters is now.

“Promise me you won’t do this again, Cole. I need to hear you say it. My choices are my own, and you need to trust me to make them. I’m not better off without you. I am better with you. Promise me you’ll respect my decisions, no matter what your inner voice tells you. I can’t go through this again.”

His head lifts, and his gaze penetrates me, melts away all the fears inside because no matter what Cole has ever said, his eyes always speak his truth. “I promise you. I’m sorry for so much but as sick as it makes me, I’m never going to be sorry that you’re in my life again. I’ll never let anything take you from me again.”

Before I can argue with his fallacies of unworthiness again, his lips meet mine. All of the emotions whirling between us are conveyed with

the passion he’s kissing me with. What starts sweet turns needy and desperate, demanding my devotion and my forgiveness and my promises back to him.

I give in because there is no alternative for Cole and I. Because I don’t want to live in a world without my other half. Going through life missing my soul, walking around like a ghost, going through the motions like a shell of a person—it’s not really living.

No amount of time or distance ever broke the invisible chain binding us together, and there’s no force in the world this strong, that I’ve ever found.

There’s a reason I never got over Cole Ballentine. We were never over to begin with. Something inside of me knew it, even if my brain did not, and would not let me sever our chain.

Now I know, beyond all doubt, there are things in life that cannot be solved through science and reason. Some things have to be solved with your heart, your gut, your soul—and mine simply don’t function in a world without him.

“I love you, Em. I never said it back that night because I knew…”

“I know,” I kiss him back and swallow his words, swallow the pain inside him. I start telling him I love him too, I always have, but he cuts me off again.

“Please don’t, let me earn it. No one has ever loved me before, and I want to be able to believe you. I just, I can’t right now. Please just let me earn it.”

I don’t know how to convey to him that my love for him is absolute or how to describe to him how freely my heart gives it to him, even when it was without my will.

Real love is an unstoppable force that exists despite all odds, all obstacles. Even when you beg it to stop, beg it to dissipate into the night, love persists in its own dimension, pulling and dragging you back into its gravitational pull until order is restored to the natural world.

Love shouldn’t have to be earned from someone like your parents, and I don’t know that Cole will ever get it from his. Even if he did, it wouldn’t be honest or true.

I know I can never replace that for him, but I can show him how much he means to me. I can shine a light into his dark corners and be his candle in the twilight.

“You know what a composite is?” I ask, and he raises one eyebrow at me.

“Sure, like in our lab. Making something out of a bunch of nothing.”

I smile at him. He’s right, but leave it to Cole to boil down the bread-and-butter of my engineering degrees into something so tangible and honest.

“Talk science to me, baby, you know how much it turns me on,” he whispers into my ear as his lips runs down my neck.