Page 85 of Finding Denver
“You know what’s annoying?” I say. “You’re hard not to like.”
“So are you. I have a weird urge to thank you.”
I watch Belle tending to the Beast’s wounds and say, “Same.”
But we don’t say it. We don’t say thank you or bring the night to a close. We sit quietly, and the words that don’t need to be said float around us.
Thank you for not leaving me.
Thank you for letting me talk about them.
I don’t think I hate you anymore. Maybe I never did.
“Should we watchCasablanca?” he asks.
In a hotel with endless movie choices, we watch a movie older than the both of us. Colt mouths along with the words, and I make fun of him, and I laugh when he tells me about the first time he watched it and his mom cried at the end, and he couldn’t understand it.
“I get it now,” he says. “It’s so fucking sad. If this movie was made today, they’d end up together.”
“They don’t end up together?” I squeak, sitting up to face him.
He mouths wordlessly at me. “Yes?”
I swat his arm. “Colt, you just ruined the whole movie!” He quickly covers my eyes, plunging me into darkness. I huff. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to erase your memory.”
“Good. While you’re there, erase me meeting you.”
He laughs loudly. “You don’t mean that even a little bit.”
I grin. “Nope.”
He removes his hand, dark eyes sparkling in the dim light of the hotel room.
And something happens. More than nothing, but less than something. A flicker that I can’t name, and I’d be too scared to even try. The television light casts shadows across the side of Colt’s face, and somewhere in my chest,something buried beneath grief and reality stirs. It shifts aside the dirt of loss, the stones of life, the harsh truths that told me happiness is fragments. I allow it to flood me, to fill me, to draw me into a moment I shouldn’t share with him.
Because he isn’t my husband.
He isn’t even a man I should be with.
He’s an enemy.
Hewas.
A man not on the opposite side of a battlefield, but in the center, trying to stop the war in the first place.
He moves his hand to the side of my neck, his thumb resting gently on my pulse as it thunders under my skin. He searches my eyes and my skin flushes, warmth rapidly cascading across my body with every second we touch. Colt’s gaze drops to my lips and my heart lurches.
“You should go,” I breathe.
Colt nods but doesn’t move. “I should.”
Someone needs to stop this. This isn’t who we are or who we can ever be. This isn’t even what I want.
Is it?
I pull away and stand, taking a step back. The skin he’d been touching cools rapidly. “Thank you for tonight.”
