Page 27 of Words I Couldn't Say
That tear was my undoing. I couldn’t help myself. I had to know why a girl who had always been close with her family, who’d given me up because she hadn’t wanted to ruin our friendship but had anyway, had stayed away for all these years.
“Then why have you stayed away for so long?” I asked.
Her gaze slid to me. She sighed then stared straight out the window ahead of her. “Because.”
That should have been enough, but now that she was here, it wasn’t. I knew how close Ava was with her family, yet she hadn’t been back to Ohio in over four years.
“Why?” I pressed.
“Because of you.”
Her quiet answer caught me off guard. Me? What had I done? I wanted to ask for more, but when I looked over, Ava’s gaze was focused out the window, her body angled away from me completely. The message was loud and clear. This conversation was over. Our earlier comfortable silence was now tense, the air in the truck thick as each mile passed without a word spoken. It wasn’t until I was on our street that I couldn’t stand it anymore. During the entire drive, I’d been racking my brain to understand how I could’ve been the reason Ava had stayed away for so long. Once the car was in park, I turned to her. My gaze wandered over her, and I appreciated the way five years had blossomed the beautiful, young girl into this now gorgeous, breathtaking woman. A woman, I’d realized, I needed more than the air I breathed.
“Why, Ava?” I persisted. I needed to know. As much as I thought she needed my words, I needed hers, too. I needed to hear her say it out loud.
Her short intake of breath was the only response to my question. She didn’t look at me as she nibbled on her lower lip, a nervous habit she’d clearly not broken.
When her eyes rose to meet mine, sorrow I hadn’t expected to see was there. As ifI’dbeen the one to break her heart. It didn’t make any sense.
“You, Tucker. You’re the reason I stayed away. When I left, I thought I was doing the right thing. We’d settle back into our friendship. Laughter, phone calls, and when I came home, we’d be us again. And in five years, we could finally be together. But, instead, I never heard from you. You never returned my calls or answered my texts. You avoided me the first couple of times I came home, and that hurt. More than you can imagine. So I stopped calling. I stopped texting. And I never came home again.”
Her words were like a sucker-punch. Maybe I could’ve returned a phone call. Maybe I could’ve answered her texts. But, whenever she’d reached out, all I could remember was the sight of her crying as she’d told me that we couldn’t be together. That she’d loved me, but it hadn’t been enough. Being without her had been hard enough without pretending I could just be friends with her. At the time, I hadn’t thought I could handle hearing about her college life, the parties, the boyfriends. So, instead, I’d made it so I’d heard nothing at all.
If I could take it back, I absolutely would. I learned the hard way that having her in my life even as just a friend would’ve been better than not having her at all. But she had to understand why I’d stayed away, too. That it hadn’t been easy for me.
“I doubt it’s more than I can imagine. The gut-wrenching anguish I endured when you walked away from me after my parents had died? That’s pain I’d never wish upon anyone. Not my worst enemy. Not you. So, yeah, I can more than imagine the pain. I lived it. Which is why I couldn’t see you.”
She swallowed hard as shimmery tears threatened to spill onto her cheeks. “And now?” she wondered, her hand hesitating on the door handle, where she was readying her escape if she needed one.
“Now?” I repeated, running a hand through my hair, unsure of how to answer her without scaring her the hell away. Without scaring myself with the truth. Nothing had changed over the course of five years.
I wanted her.
I craved her.
I had fallen in love with Ava Banks when I was a kid, and it was a love that had consumed me for years, burning, twisting, and soaring until I had been enveloped in such a way that I’d never break free. I’d never want to.
Hell, at that very moment, I wanted to forget all conversation and haul her in my arms, and at long last kiss the lips I’d been dreaming about for the past five years. The only lips I’d ever wanted to kiss. The first time she’d placed her lips on mine, I had been captivated. She’d captured me, marking me as hers, and for the rest of my life, my lips were for hers only. That was why it was so hard to resist her. It was also why it hurt being so near to her when there was still this huge canyon between us.
“Tucker?”
My name on her lips instantly brought me back to the present. She was waiting for the response to a question I’d just found the answer to.
“Now? Now, I know why,” I said. “You destroyed me when you left. Each day was supposed to be easier, because each day was one further removed from my parents, from my grief. But it never got easier, because every day that passed, every day I was supposed to heal, was another day without you. There were days I’d wished I’d been on that boat, Ava.” I cleared my throat from the thickness of my emotion.
Ava was watching me intently, tears streaming from her eyes. It was a shitty thing to do, but I wasn’t trying to make her feel guilty. I was trying to be honest.
“Out of nowhere, it hit me at the airport why I stayed away. Why I couldn’t be near you.” My throat burned from the pain of the truth. “Because seeing you? Being here now and being this close to you without being able to touch you, to feel you? Knowing you’re no longer mine? That hurts worse than anything I’ve ever felt before.”
