Page 88 of Chasing You

“What?” I ask, taking that drink and tipping it down the sink behind me before turning to see him again.

“I just never thought I’d hear that again.”

“What? My snort?”

He smiles. “Your laugh.”

That makes me pause. I can feel the flush creeping up my chest. “I’ve laughed around you.”

“Not like that,” he says.

He’s probably right. I haven’t let myself laugh like that with him. I’ve been trying for so long to hold back, to protect myself, but I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up, and I think Miles knows it too.

He smiles, taking another sip of the drink. “You know, through all these years, I’ve never really had any cocktails. None were any as good as yours. Especially not that apple martini you made the last time we did this.”

My heart stops. I hadn’t even realized that we are playing out something we used to do all the time.

It came so naturally to me that I forgot. Forgot that he's always been the person I've tested new cocktails on. That we used to do exactly this four years ago, just not here. It makes me feel sick in my stomach.

Here I go again with this back and forth. My mind and my body can’t agree on what they want, can’t even agree on what they feel. It’s like I’m in this never-ending loop of not knowing what the hell to do when I’m in this man’s presence. He’s trying to earn back my trust, and I’m finding it hard not to hand it all over to him.

“Can I tell you something?” he says, his voice quiet as he rolls his empty glass on the bar top. It’s so similar to the question I asked him only nights ago that I wonder if this is going to be another one of those moments. The ones where I nearly hand my heart back to him.

“Depends, is it going to make me feel better or worse than I do now?” I say, knowing I can be brutally honest with him.

“I honestly don’t know.”

My stomach didn’t know the definition of sick until that sentence was just spoken aloud.

“Miles?”

He finally looks up at me. “I came back.”

“What are you talking about?” My voice sounds muffled through my own ears, like I’m drowning underwater.

“I came back for you. I went back to Sorrento, back to the bar, but you were gone.”

I shake my head, refusing to believe what I’m hearing. Not understanding a single syllable that’s left his mouth. “What do you mean you went back?”

“I went back for you, Marina. I spent a month back at work, thinking of you every single minute, regretting what I did, and hating myself for it. I couldn’t get you out of my head. His eyes are pleading with me to understand, like I don't know that exact feeling.

“I knew I had just fucked up the singular best thing in my life, so I came back. But you were gone. I asked Rosalie where you were and she said you’d gone home, but that she didn’t know where that home was. You never told her, and you had never told me.”

My breathing turns quick as the image he’s describing plays out in my mind. I can see it so clearly. Him walking into the bar like he did that first night, and every night after. A look of hope on his face, waiting to see a glimpse of me.

“But I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t believe that I had lost the chance to tell you how sorry I was, and how wrong I was,” he shakes his head. “I stayed there for over a week, getting stuck at the bottom of a whiskey glass waiting for you to come back. I knew it didn’t make sense, and that you were long gone, but I wasn’t going to take the chance that you would show up when I wasn’t there. So I waited until I got called back to work, and I knew you weren’t coming back.”

A singular tear rolls ever so slowly down my cheek. Everything that I thought about him leaving… It was wrong. Or was it?

He still left in the first place. But knowing he came back, it changes things. I don’t know if it should, but it does.

“So I let go, or I pretended to. I tried to accept the fact that I was never going to see you again, and I had no one to blame butmyself. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t touch anyone else, I couldn’t think of anyone else, I couldn’t sleep without dreaming of you, Marina. You have consumed me from the moment I met you, not knowing where you were, or being thousands of miles away from you never changed that. You still consume me,” he says plainly, as if it’s so obvious.

Another tear drops from my eye. “Please don’t cry,” he whispers.

I just shake my head. “You were always so good at pretty words, weren’t you?”

“Let me prove to you that they aren’t empty,” he begs.

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