Page 49 of Honeyed

She begins removing the diamond rings I placed on her finger last night, and I rush her, anger biting at my heart. Grabbing her hand, I hold it in mine, not allowing her to take them off.

“Jesus fucking Christ, don’t you get it? I’ve spent my whole life bouncing around, fighting for what I thought would help me survive, would someday make me happy. But none of it fulfilled me. Not a thing made me content. Nothing except for being with your family in the town I’ve loved since the day I moved there. And then I thought, ‘well, if I can’t have Alana, if I can’t love her the way I want to, then I can at least be with her every day.’ So I got a job with you, to be where you are at every second, because you’d have to be blind not to see that we should have been together from the beginning. Arthur is the one who made me pull my head of out my ass, but he didn’t make last night happen. He didn’t make me want this marriage for real, from nearly the second I kissed you after saying I do. For a long time, I didn’t know who I was or what my dream was supposed to be. But it’s always been the same … my dream is you, with me, in Hope Crest, forever. For a long time, I thought I could get by on us being just the way we were. I was so fucking wrong, baby. So wrong.”

My eyes feel like they’re bulging with how desperate I am to plead with her. To make her see how incredible my need is to be with her.

“We could have had this so long ago.” She chokes on a sob. “Why do you think we didn’t speak for four months, Warren? You say you wanted me from the start, but you never tried.”

“We’re really getting it all out there, huh?” I challenge her because if we do this, some things can’t be unsaid.

“If the ship is sinking, I guess we’re both going down with it.” A tear slides down her cheek.

How badly I want to tell her that she’s wrong. That I’m not going down without her or a fight and that we’ll never sink as long as I can keep us treading water. But she deserves these answers, so I’ll give them to her.

“Your father could see what was happening. I’m sure everyone could. Or maybe they’d just seen one too many rom-coms. You and I were headed for this thing that was bigger than us. So he sat me down and gave it to me straight; if I decided to pursue you, if I fell in love with you and you with me, I better make sure it was the forever kind. As a sixteen-year-old kid, I was scared shitless. Not only is your father this intimidating presence, but he’d been my role model for as long as I could remember.

“Thomas Ashton brought me into his family when I didn’t have one. He taught me how to tie a tie and helped me fill out the job application for Hope Pizza when I wanted to work as a waiter. I looked up to him and how he showed up as a husband and a dad. I was also terrified of making sure whatever happened between us was the forever kind because hell if I knew anything about love. My father murdered my mother, the woman he was supposed to love most. I had no idea how to connect with my adoptive parents. And I was a teenager, I couldn’t see that far into the future. Your father told me he didn’t want me hurting you or breaking your heart, but more than that, he worried about me. Looking back, he really did mean that. Your father could see how broken I was, how lost I could have been had I not figured my shit out and carved my own path. Latching on to you simply because it felt good, because I loved being with you, would have hurt us both.”

“You don’t know that. You couldn’t have possibly known that.” Those aquamarine eyes glisten with tears I can see her struggling to keep from falling.

But Alana isn’t surprised. We might not have had the discussion, and I’m sure her father never mentioned his warning to her, but his daughter is a sharp cookie. She probably figured out quicker than anyone why I was keeping my distance. It’s why she grumbled any time I agreed with him over the years and why she stopped talking to me for four months after I stood up to him. She wanted me to stand up to him for us.

“I guess I couldn’t have. But I made a promise to myself right then that I would honor what your father was trying to do for me, for both of us. We were too young, too close. If it had happened back then, we probably would have been in such a toxic cycle, we’d never have been happy.”

“Again, you don’t know that at all. And you didn’t honor his words. Or are we still pretending we didn’t take each other’s virginities the night before we left for college?”

My stomach drops to my feet because Alana just said the one thing we’ve both silently sworn never to talk about.

That night had been coming for a lifetime, an inevitable force of magnetism that neither of us was strong enough to fight anymore. For years, we circled each other like fated mates, like animals whose scents were specifically, scientifically, made for each other. Like penguins who were destined to be together for life.

After my talk with Thomas and subsequent injury that left me scrambling for a shot at some kind of future I never envisioned, I tried my best to constantly stay in the friend zone with Alana. Until the last night of the summer. When she came to me with those gorgeous sun freckles sprinkled on the bridge of her nose, a white cotton dress swinging flirtily at her thighs, and a wish she wanted me to grant.

To take her virginity before she went to college.

Little did she know, I’d been holding out, if I were being honest, for her. Not that I ever allowed myself to cross that line. But something about that night, with its humid haze, the full moon, and the two of us lying out on a blanket in my favorite hidden spot by the canal, I couldn’t tell her no.

We were inevitable.

We took each other’s virginities in the way everyone probably dreams of losing it; in a romantic spot with a caring partner you’ve loved for a very long time. She came to me and said she didn’t want to lose it to someone random at college or when she was drunk and wanted her first time to be with someone who mattered.

Being the selfish idiot I was, I wanted her too much to deny her. I burned with jealousy, thinking about some stranger taking her virginity because I wanted to be the one she gave it to. So we’d taken that leap together, and even though I was a bumbling teenager, it’s still the single best sexual moment of my life.

The morning after, I woke up on that blanket alone to a purple rising sun, Alana nowhere in sight. So I’m not taking all the blame for how things panned out, because she started the vow of silence.

“I didn’t hear you making objections. There was never any push from you, no diatribes about how we should be together, no matter the obstacles. You stayed just as silent as I did, Alana. You were the one to leave first on that day we both went to college, left no note or anything.”

“Because I was scared!” she cries, throwing her arms wide. “I was terrified that you wouldn’t pick me, not over the entire future you had laid out before you. That summer, I felt like I was walking on eggshells, Warren. I was about to leave my entire family, the town I love, and you. God, thinking about leaving you was hell. You didn’t want us to go to college together, so I chose to go far, far away.”

“You loved college,” I reply weakly because what the fuck else am I supposed to say.

“Eventually. After I let you go. For a time, I let you go. And then we came back, and the silence had gone on too long. I couldn’t bring it up, not when I thought you moved on. You forget that we didn’t talk about anything relevant during those college years.” Tears leak down her cheeks, and I brush them away with my thumb.

She’s right, of course. I did my best to give her space, to plant her firmly in the friend zone. I tried to find another girl while I attended college, anyone who even came close to the feelings I had for Alana, but it was a hopeless cause.

“If we had gone to college together—and believe me, I wanted to follow you so fucking badly—I wouldn’t have been able to stay away from you. I made your father a promise and living far away from here with nothing standing in my way, I would have broken it.”

I will her to understand my mindset back then because I was only trying to protect us both.

“You decided not to love me first because my father warned you off. Then you didn’t step up when you had the chance because you didn’t want to hold either of us back. Then it was this or that. You know what these are, Warren? Excuses. A whole tractor trailer full of them. We’re fucking married and you’re still holding me at arm’s length.”

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