Page 65 of Loving You Always

“He left you, abandoned you.”

“He left Mama Jess with me.”

“Are you defending him?”

“No, but I’m not defending myself either. Jo told me about the fight.” Kerris swallowed, not knowing details, but knowing how barbed Cam’s tongue could be. And knowing Walsh.

“What fight?” Walsh stood up and walked to the end of the bed, leaning one shoulder against the bedpost, eyes hedging.

“Between you and Cam.” She crawled to the end of the bed, carefully clutching the covers around herself. She looked up at him. “I know it’s not easy thinking about his time with me.” She reached for his hand.

“You mean about him having sex with you?” His face like granite, Walsh clenched his other hand into a tight fist.

“Yeah, I guess.” She squeezed a small breath into the narrowed passage of her lungs. “I know this is awkward.”

“It’s wrong that he had you, and that I…God, if you had only listened to me that night, we could have—”

“Avoided all this? This is my fault, right? That’s what you want to say.”

She was goading him into an explosion she might regret, but at least all their cards would be on the table once and for all. He jerked his hand away, turning to lean his back against the bedpost.

“I’m not saying that. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Are you telling me that when you think about Cam with me you don’t hate me just a little?” Kerris forced the words past the lump of shame clogging her throat. “Resent me just a little?”

“I could never hate you. Stop it. Don’t do this.”

Even with his back turned, she could see the anger calcifying his posture. He was like a famished tiger held back from raw meat by a strand of floss.

“We have only a few days together before I leave for Tokyo. I’m not wasting time talking about my feelings for Cam.”

“You haven’t thought about it? Haven’t envisioned—”

“I said stop it right now.”

Walsh turned to face her, lips clamped so tightly together the syllables were ground to paste. He strode like a caged panther to the window, facing away from her. He slammed his hand against the glass before turning back to her, the city lights behind him a beautiful spectacle.

“You should have waited, Kerris! Dammit, yes, I resented you. I had to give the toast at your fucking wedding and grin like a monkey the whole day, while my insides were torn up. I told you at the hospital we should have talked to Cam. And after what we shared in that gazebo that night, you did what? Went off and got engaged to my best friend twenty minutes later? Because youassumedI was marrying Sofie? What is that? Whodoesthat?”

“Walsh, I—”

“No. You will damn well listen now.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his flawlessly tailored pants. He dropped the room temperature with his icy stare. “You don’t poke a tiger unless you’re prepared to get bitten.”

She held back her words, knowing this was what she had provoked. He breathed deeply through his nostrils and out through his mouth before continuing more quietly.

“I was so angry with you.” The ice in his eyes slowly thawed until only pain remained. “And I loved you so much, I loved Cam, and I wanted to do what was right, but everything felt wrong. The only thing that felt right was being with you, but I knew it wasn’t right. Only because you’d made the wrong choice. It wasn’t just your life. It was mine. It was Cam’s. Did I resent the decision you made? I did. Do I miss Cam? I do sometimes. Do I ever, ever want to live without you again? I can’t. Not ever. That’s all that matters.”

“But Walsh—”

“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, or how your choices separated us. I don’t know how not to love you. And a choice between you and Cam is no choice at all.”

Kerris refused to cry. She wished with all her heart that Dr. Stein were here to run interference. They needed an objective third party, a mediator, because now that she had provoked him to the ugly truth, she had no idea what to do with it. No idea what the right thing was to say, so she just said the truth that mangled her security and tugged at the threads of her assurances.

“I’m so scared it’ll always haunt us.” It was something she’d never even admitted to herself, that the damage she had done to his friendship, what she had cost him, would erode what he felt for her. “I’m scared that one day you’ll wake up, see Cam gone and me still here, and it won’t be enough and that you’ll leave.”

“You don’t ever have to be scared of that.”

“Yes, I do.” She said the words with eyes closed, afraid that if she opened them, she’d lose her nerve. “Walsh, this love gives you so much power over me. Something I promised myself no one would ever have again. That I’d never be that vulnerable again. Everyone leaves.”

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