Page 103 of One Last Shot

“What do you want me to say, Sasha?” She looks away, glancing out the windows at the terrace.

“I want you to explain.”

She straightens her back, sitting up to her full height, and squares her shoulders. Then she slowly turns her head toward me. “Because no one—nothing—ever hurt me more than your leaving did.”

Oh shit.“I thought we talked about this when I was in LA. I thought we were okay?”

“You explained, yes. That doesn’t make it hurt less.”

I wish I could tell her how much it hurtme, to know how she felt about me and to have felt the same way, and to have had to walk away from her to save her. I want to tell her the truth, but mostly because I want her to see that I was trying to protect her. I didn’t want her to know that her father had essentially sold her off.

She deserves to know the truth.

But the truth would only hurt hermore, it wouldn’t make her feel better. And it would bring up so many more questions and issues, and there’d be no real resolution because both our fathers are dead now. No, telling her would make things worse, not better.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I really am. I did what I thought we both needed me to do at the time.”

“I would have done anything for you, you know?” Her husky voice has that sentence coming out low, like a promise or a threat.

“I know,” I assure her. “And that’s partly why I needed to leave. You needed to go to Switzerland, Petra. You needed to chase your dreams. And I needed to chase mine. We made our way back to each other as adults,” I remind her.

“Yeah, because we were secretly married, and we didn’t know it,” she gives a sad, sarcastic laugh and a knife of guilt twists in my stomach because, in a way, I did know. “We didn’t come back to each other by choice, necessarily.”

“However it happened,” I tell her, “I’m glad it did.”

She waits a beat too long before she says, “Yeah, me too.”

* * *

“Where is she?” Stella asks me for at least the fifth time in the last fifteen minutes. She’s swinging her feet under the table and fidgeting with a french fry that now resembles a lump of smashed potato between her fingers.

“She’s on her way,” I assure her. “Traffic is terrible at this time because everyone’s leaving work. And she has to come from Brooklyn, which is farther away than the Upper East Side.” Stella has no sense of the city yet, so I arrange our basket of fries, the ketchup, and the salt and pepper shakers to try to explain to her where Times Square is relative to other parts of the city.

Clearly bored by my explanation, Stella says, “I’ve hardly seen Petra since she’s been back.”

“It hasn’t even been two days yet, and you had school today. You saw her last night, and you’ll see her tonight. She’ll be here for the whole weekend.”

“Yeah, but you have that party tomorrow night so you’ll both be gone and I have to stay behind with Raina.”

“I thought you liked Raina?” I’m careful to ask, not to insist, because I want to make sure she’s telling me how she really feels, not saying what she thinks I want to hear.

“Ido.” She sighs, then looks at the ceiling in frustration. And we’re officially to the eye rolling years. I had expected we’d at least get to nine or ten before she started in with that. “I just like Petra better. Besides you, she’s my favorite person.”

“Want to know a secret?” I ask, leaning toward her conspiratorially. She nods. “Besides you, she’s my favorite person too.”

Stella’s smile is huge. Petra and I haven’t tried to hide our feelings for each other since she’s been back, and Stella has certainly noticed that there’s something going on between us that she didn’t see when Petra was here before.

Last night when I was sitting on the couch watching a cartoon with Stella before she went to bed, Petra ambled into the den and sat down on my other side. I wrapped my arm around her and pulled her into me. I run so hot that I don’t normally like having people and their body heat pressed up against me. But with one arm around Stella and the other around Petra, and both of them curled into my opposite sides, I realized maybe I didn’t mind when the people pressed up against me are my two favorite people.

“Is that why she’s sleeping in your room now?” Stella asks, and the feeling of my stomach dropping almost makes me choke on my drink. I probably should have thought about how I’d answer this question when it came up, since we aren’t trying to hide it this time around. It seems stupid to put her in the guest room and then for us to sneak around after Stella goes to sleep.

“Yes, because I want to spend as much time with her as possible.”

“Even while you’re sleeping?”

“Yes, I like having her close by even while we’re sleeping.”

Stella nods and I can practically see the wheels turning in her mind. “Can she sleep in my room one night?”

---