“All I could think about was you. Fuck, Audra. I was considering asking a woman to spend her life with me, and the only woman I could think about was the one who’d let me go.”
Audra stumbled and I reached out, steadying her by gripping her forearm.
“And so I went to see you.”
She halted, her head turning as her eyes widened. “You what? When?”
I stopped in front of her. “I only wanted to see you in person—just to see you. I didn’t want you to know I was there. I just . . .” I looked off into the distance, pursing my lips. “I don’t know, I just needed to see you. To lay eyes on you after all those years.” I sighed, meeting her stricken gaze again. “You came out of your building, and you were with a young, blond guy. You were laughing, and I watched as he walked you to your car and you got in and drove away.”
“That was . . . that was Jay. He works for me.”
“I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know if he was a coworker or boyfriend, and it didn’t really matter anyway. The timing . . .” He shook his head. “Anyway, what I did know in that moment, was that I wouldn’t ask Winnie to marry me, that I would never ask Winnie to marry me, and I broke up with her that night.”
She stared at me, wide-eyed, but she wasn’t walking away so I rushed on. “I knew in that moment I would never love Winnie even half as much as I’d loved you. And she deserved more than that.”
“Dane,” she said, her voice a broken whisper.
“I went back to my grandmother’s and told her I’d changed my mind. She just looked at me for a minute and then said, ‘That’s all it took. One look at her is all it took.’ Somehow she’d known I’d gone to see you.” I sighed. “I don’t know, but she knew, and she was right. One glimpse of you, even from across the street, the sun already fading from the sky, and I knew.”
“Dane,” she breathed, “neither one of us can expect to feel that same . . . intensity of first love. It isn’t fair, not to anyone else and not to us. It wasn’t right to compare what we once had with”—she waved her hand through the air—“whatever you had with . . . her.”
“No. I made myself believe that for a while too, but that wasn’t it, Audra. I didn’t love you that intensely because you were my first love. It wasn’t that. I know that now. You weren’t just my first love. You were my once-in-a-lifetime.”
She shook her head, gripping her sides as if in pain. “Why. . . why are you telling me this?”
“Because you need to know. You need to know that I’m not trying to hurt you, Audra. I’m not trying to cause you pain. I want to be able to talk to you about what happened between us, because for me, those feelings aren’t in the past.”
“It’s just this situation, Dane. It’s just”—she shook her head—“sleeping together every night, the high emotions of our predicament. It’s not, I mean, once we get back . . .”
I gritted my teeth in frustration. “You can’t fucking tell me what I feel. I just thought it was too complicated to . . . hell”—I let out a harsh breath—“I didn’t know what to do. But the situation has made it clear to me that we’re worth fighting for. Things between us can be worked out. If you’ll just talk to me, Audra. You need to, I know you do.”
She turned again and began walking. “God, Dane. You say you care about me, but you keep pushing me.”
I stepped to catch up. “Because I should have then and I didn’t.”
She laughed again, another garbled sound. “You should have pushed me? I didn’t need you to push me. I just needed you to . . . I needed you to be there.” She whirled toward me, stopping me su
ddenly as we almost collided. “You left me! All . . . all those days and I could h-hardly function but y-you just went about life—b-business as usual. And I saw it,” she spat. “I saw the l-look of relief on your f-face and I don’t think I can forgive you for it. You say you still have feelings for me, but you had feelings for me then too, and you were still r-relieved that he had . . . had . . . you were relieved. And every day that I looked at you, I s-saw that expression. I couldn’t look at you without remembering and I . . . I couldn’t stand it.” Her teeth were chattering and she was trembling all over, practically gasping through each word, and my heart rose to my throat and lodged there, stunned and wracked with pain to hear her talk about this after so long. But I’d pushed for it, hadn’t I? I’d pushed her, and as much as I wanted to walk away, to sift through the revelations of her confession, I didn’t have time for that. We were on a mountaintop, stranded, starving, and I had nothing to lose.
I clenched my eyes shut for a moment, taking a sharp breath, and allowing my mind to go back there, to the first storm—the one we hadn’t survived. I shook my head. “I didn’t know what to do, Audra. I was trying to stay sane, to function, because you couldn’t. I was trying to pick up the slack so you didn’t have to think about any of that—so you could just grieve the way you needed to. And then I left you to do that.” Regret slammed into me, so strongly I almost sagged against the weight of the emotion.
Yes, I left her.
I’d left her alone because it was the easier thing to do.
And then she left me.
“But I wasn’t relieved that Theo was dead. I was relieved that you weren’t. When I saw you holding him, honey, my heart broke. I kept thinking of those long hours you fought to bring his body into the world. And all I could keep repeating to myself to make it bearable was, thank God I didn’t lose my wife too. Only, I did lose you, didn’t I?” Looking into her tear-filled, devastated eyes now, I could recall so vividly what her face had looked like that horrible morning. She’d looked pale, forlorn, destroyed, but I’d held on to the only thing I could, the relief that I hadn’t lost them both. That my girl was still there . . . fighting. Fuck. How did I miss that? What she saw in my expression . . . she hadn’t understood. And then I’d distanced myself emotionally, leaving her to fight alone. No wonder she’d lost all trust in me.
Audra inhaled a big shaky breath, giving me another stunned look of stark pain. She opened her mouth as if to say something and then closed it, shaking her head as if rejecting whatever she’d been considering. Then she turned again, heading the few feet to our clearing, walking slowly this time. I let out a deep sound of frustration, gripping my hair in my hands and staring at the sky for a moment. Finally, I followed along behind her, walking in her footsteps.
She was sitting on a rock near the fire—the fire that had died and was now nothing but smoldering ash.
“Ah, fuck!” I yelled, kicking at the snow and then picking up a handful and throwing it at the fire. The spray bounced off the cold wood and flew at Audra and she flinched back, drawing in a surprised breath.
My heart dropped. “Oh, God, Audra, I’m sorry, I . . .”
Fuck, fuck, fuck!