One Last Time (Loveless Brothers 5)

“Stay there a second,” he says when he releases me, and gets out of the bed.

He looks around. Stretches. Runs a hand through his hair, which fixes nothing, and finally grabs his pants and reaches into the pocket.

When he gets back on my bed, there’s something in his fist. Seth wraps an arm around my shoulders and I lean into him, his other hand still hiding something.

My stomach tightens, and I swallow. I try to push away the sudden dread creeping through me.

“This is just a gift,” he finally says. “I swear that’s all. It’s not a question or a contract or some kind of obligation. It’s just something I wanted you to have, and that’s all it is.”

I look over at him, because I have no idea what to make of that speech. His blue eyes meet mine.

“Okay,” I say.

He holds his fist in front of me, exhales, and opens it.

“Here,” he says.

It’s the engagement ring.

Sitting in his palm, it’s smaller and simpler than I remember. Everything that happened after imbued it with so much meaning and significance that it looms large in my memory, but it’s just a gold ring with a diamond.

I hold out my hand, and he pours it in.

It’s the first time I’ve ever touched it. The day he proposed I only even saw it for a few seconds, still in the box, and that’s all. Amazing how something that takes up so little space seemed to fill the room.

“You kept it?” I finally ask.

“Well, sort of,” he says.

I take it in my fingers, look closer at it. One of the prongs is missing, and there’s grime in the setting.

“Did you feed it to a tiger?” I ask.

“Technically, I threw it into the woods behind my mom’s house after you broke up with me,” he admits.

I don’t ask why. I know why. Seth takes a deep breath.

“And then yesterday, I called in the cavalry with metal detectors and we ran a search-and-rescue operation for it,” he goes on. “It’s probably some sort of miracle that it didn’t get taken off by some critter.”

I sit up straighter, the ring still in my hand, Seth’s arm still slung over my shoulders.

“Why?” I finally ask. “Why not leave it?”

“Because I threw it in there to hurt you,” he says, slowly, looking down at it. “I know that doesn’t make any sense at all, but it’s what I wanted to happen. For a long time I thought that if I hurt you back like you hurt me, I’d finally get over it, but I never did. I tried every single time we fought, but seeing you cry never made me feel one lick better.”

He shifts against me, strokes my arm with his thumb.

“So it’s time to let go,” he says.

Carefully, I turn my left hand and slide it onto my ring finger.

It fits perfectly. I flatten my hand and look at it, the small diamond winking in the low light.

“I’m not proposing,” he says, a smile in his voice.

“Good, I’m not accepting,” I tease back. “Just curious.”

“It’s not bad,” he says.

I think it’s a quarter the size of the ring Nolan gave me, maybe less. That was a huge, honking thing that he liked to see on me but loved to see other men look at. I fell for it, though, the idea that the size of a diamond had anything to do with my value as a person or someone’s love for me.

“I got married because I thought doing that would fix me,” I finally say, still looking down at the ring.

“You don’t have to explain yourself, Bird,” he says.

“I want to.”

“Then I’m listening.”

I take a deep breath, close my fist, try to quickly arrange everything that I’ve worked through in therapy or talked about with Lainey or even meditated on in yoga class.

“I felt awful when I broke up with you,” I say. “I’d just failed out of school again, my mom was dead, I didn’t know where my life was going, all my old friends were about to graduate college and my new friends were getting high and then going to their jobs at Subway, but somehow it felt like breaking up with you was the thing that made me feel so truly awful. So when I met someone else, I thought… maybe that was the answer. Maybe I just needed to be with someone and I’d feel better.”

I take the ring off my finger, fiddle with it.

“And it felt like everyone I knew was pushing me in that you need a man direction, and I knew so many people who got married right after graduation, so when I met Nolan and he proposed a couple of months later, I said yes even though deep down I think I always knew it was a bad idea to get married.”