Page 165 of Lovestruck at Sundown
I grabbed William’s hand and pulled him toward me, silently asking him to sit on the bed and hold me. He did.
“No matter how much I begged, your mother told me a few days before her death that it would soon become impossible to stay. She wanted to return to New York with you and start a new life without me in it—here, actually.” He looked around the apartment and smiled, as if he could imagine her alive and well, living a different life. “The way she gave me her ultimatum felt so cryptic, and my obsession with retaining her didn’t allow me to see the signs.”
“That she was pregnant and would soon start to show,” I said, unable to fathom how different my life would’ve been if we had left and my mom had been able to give birth to that baby. She’d still be alive, and I would have an eight-year-old sibling. I wouldn’t have met Thomas or Caleb because I would’ve never gone to Paris, but William … I was always destined to cross paths with him, no matter what.
“I didn’t know she was pregnant!” He cried out, his voice raw with emotion as he crumbled back onto my sofa, collapsing against the cushions with a heavy thud. “I’m so sorry,” he sobbed, his voice choked with tears, as he buried his face in his hands. “I didn’t know. I didn’t find out until the autopsy.”
“When you came to see me in May,” I reminded him, angrily brushing away the tears from my face. “You said: no more secrets. And still, you deliberately withheld this very important piece of information from me.”
“These secrets were never meant for you to discover.”
“But the truth always finds its way out, doesn’t it?” My crying had stopped, and a feeling of numbness took over. It was becoming too much to process, sodissociating seemed like the convenient way out of this emotional mess.
“I never meant to hurt you, kiddo,” he muttered, his words barely audible amidst his sobs. “I know you don’t trust me anymore, but I’ll do whatever it takes—anything you need, even if it means staying away—so long as you can find it in you to stop looking at me like that one day.”
I considered his pleading words with equal parts loathing and compassion, witnessing the agony pouring out of his body after years of being kept locked up inside him.
Deep in my heart, I knewthiswas the complete truth I’d been seeking all this time. It devastated me that I had to stumble against every crumb along the way instead of having it offered up freely during the countless opportunities my dad had possessed whenever I brought up the subject.
“The problem is you never trustedmeto begin with,” I retorted. “You never trusted me to know how to make my own choices, to think for myself and figure out what was best for me on my own, or to make mistakes and learn from them, including learning the real story between you and Mom,” I asserted firmly. “But I navigated through it all regardless.”
“Please forgive me,” he pleaded, rising slowly from the sofa as if the weight of his body had become an unbearable burden. “For everything.”
“I don’t know how to recover from this,” I admitted. “I can only hope that I will someday, as I have with everything else that’s happened in the past.”
Nodding, he squeezed his eyes shut and rested a hand on his hips. “I love you, kiddo. Even if it seems like I’ve gone out of my way to convince you otherwise.” Resigned and depleted of anything else to say, he walked out of my bedroom, and I held on to William as I listened to my dad’s footsteps grow softer and more distant until the front door clicked shut behind him.
After my dadleft, I drank the Coke William had brought earlier, brushed my teeth, and showered. William joined me, claiming he was “terrified” I would faint again. I had zero complaints. So I let him shampoo my hair and lather my body in complete silence. Neither of us spoke a word, and I was thankful for it. I needed a moment of serenity, and William’s fingers massaging my scalp under the hot spray of water not only provided that but needed to be added as an additional definition in the dictionary.
I was still mentally overwhelmed by the events of the night, grappling not only with the confrontation between Agent Mark and my dad but also with the situation regarding William.
Additionally, I hadn’t forgotten Arabella’s texts and how much they had affected me. I didn’t know how to stop the doubts and insecurities screaming inside my head, demanding attention like a runaway shopping cart heading for a parked car.
As I downed the glass of water William had left on my nightstand, he returned from his room after brushing his teeth. He was wearing nothing but black cotton shorts. Tiny water droplets trickled from the tips of his damp hair onto his bare chest.
There was never a moment I wasn’t in complete awe of him.
The moments I spent with William were always the easiest, happiest, and most fulfilling. I loved and admired his capacity to disconnect and be fully present. It always made up for the longing after months apart. That knowledge kept me going whenever he left. He would be back someday, and I would haveallof him. His attention, his words, his body, his heart.
“I’m not asking you to stay, but I feel like you’re leaving at the worst possible moment,” I said, giving my back to him as I set the empty glass back on my nightstand.
William crawled on the bed behind me and wrapped his arms around my chest, pulling me back against him into a spooning position. “I don’t want to leave either. I want to be here for you.” He tangled his leg with mine and tucked my hair behind my ear, pressing a soft kiss on my cheek.
“You always are, even when you’re away.” I grabbed his hand and kissed it, clutching it close to my chest like a security blanket. “Do you think we’re destined to repeat our parents’ patterns?”
“No,” he replied quickly. “Of course not.”
“I can’t stop thinking about the inevitability of it,” I confessed, our spooning position making it easier to talk without being distracted or hypnotized by William’s gaze. “If we could somehow go back in time and watch how our parents’ love stories began, I bet we’d be swooning. The courtship, the butterflies in the stomach, the moment they realized the love was reciprocated.
“And after the honeymoon phase came full circle, something must’ve initiated the deterioration of the relationships, like a Trojan horse in the form of a first big argument that made them realize they weren’t as compatible as they thought they were. Then, promises weren’t kept, leading to disappointment, loneliness, and an inevitable desire to fulfill their emotional needs with someone willing todo that for them.
“But they kept going because, at some point, they started having kids, so even if more problems arose, they stayed for them. Fought to make it work forthem.” I stopped to breathe, and William waited, as if sensing I wasn’t done yet. “The idealization ended. Feelings changed. Lovers were brought into the equation. And the marriages broke apart.”
“And you think that’s the path we’re destined to follow because that’s how it went for our parents?”
“That’s probably how it goes for most couples when I come to think of it,” I said, my voice turning sad and bitter. “No wonder fifty percent of marriages end up in divorce.”
“Let’s never get married then,” William whispered in my ear, making my skin react.
