“Don’t.”
One quiet word and it twists in my heart like a knife. I shake my head, suddenly tired. “You know what? You’re worse at this than I am. You’re more afraid of this than I am. At least I can say it. I love you. What’s worse is that you know it because no one else knows me better than you do. I want to live in that house with you and Fred and Dix. I want Diane to be my neighbor, that’s how far gone I am. I want to stay.”
I take a breath, my chest heaving with the effort not to shake him when he still doesn’t respond. “You’re the one holding us back, Miller. I know how hard it was for you to lose your mother. It was hard for me too. But there’s something special between us. There always has been. And you could have it if you’d stop pushing it away, but you have to make that decision. You’re the one who has to tell me where we go from here.”
The murmuring returns with a roar as I turn to grab my clothes. No doubt I just made everything worse by humiliating him at work, but I can’t worry about that now.
All I can do is hope he heard me.
And maybe go get drunk again. That’s always good for a laugh.
Chapter Ten
Roberta Don’t Give Me No Flack
Miller
New deck. New haircut. New box-o-wine I got from the corner store on the way home. Oh, and the speakers I installed a few days ago that are sharing my love for a certain classic R&B singer with the entire neighborhood as we speak.
Jesse come home, there’s a hole in the bed, where we slept.
Now it’s growing cold.
I’m not a pub guy. I’m a box-of-wine-by-myself guy. It’s getting so pathetic my ridiculous dog decided to join Fred at Heather and Diane’s house until I get my act together.
“It’s only been a few hours,” I mumble into my red plastic cup, because there’s no way I’d risk drinking around sharp objects. I’m a lightweight, remember? “You’d think they’d be more understanding.”
They actually were, until I gave them more details about what happened at work today. Once they realized what Brendan had done, everything that he’d said in front of the entire staff of Indulgence—who’ve been dying for any bit of interesting gossip about my life for years—he became the hero of the story. Me? I was the big, ‘fraidy chicken. Cat. Whatever.
Even Diane.
She’s never liked Brendan. She’d thought the same thing Regrettable Robbie had—that he was using what I felt for him, along with the memory of my mother, against me. Tugging on my heartstrings. Coming around whenever he wanted some affection and a home-cooked meal.
He’d be happy to know that she’s done a one-eighty, and I’m the one on the receiving end of her stink eye now. And why? Because I didn’t want to have an incredibly personal conversation at work?
Was it not as professional as getting a blowjob five minutes earlier?
“The door was closed,” I reason, filling another glass before lying on my back to look at the stars.
I keep going over what Brendan said. He has a point. I’ve been pushing people away. I’ve kept all of my focus on this old place, because I know if something goes wrong with it, I can fix it. A house can’t get sick and waste away. A house can’t fly off into the sunset and leave you.
So yeah, I’ve had some issues. But even if I didn’t, how in the hell would I know how he felt? I’m not Austen. I’m not a witchy Sherlock woman. I can’t read minds.
I’m also the one with zero experience at this. I knew I was in love with him, but was I supposed to intuit that he loved me back by his finger technique or the amount of times we came together in a single night?
Why are you making it less than it is?
“Because I didn’t know it could be more.” Anything I thought I saw, or might have felt coming from him, I put in the wishful thinking column of my heart. He’d been in that column for years. It was habit.
And I'm leaving the light on the stairs.
No, I'm not scared,
I wait for you.
Hey Jesse, it's lonely, come home
“Are you planning to torture us with this easy listening for the morbidly depressed all night?” Diane asks sharply from their upstairs window. “Don’t you think Fred’s been through enough trauma?”
“There’s nothing easy about Roberta,” I shout back, already knowing I’m going to be really embarrassed about saying that tomorrow.
“Could you two keep it down? It’s a weeknight,” says the neighbor who lives behind me. The one I’ve only spoken to once at a community meeting when he moved in a year ago.