It was a few minutes before eight, so I focused my nervous energy on jogging around the lamps lining the sidewalk when what I really wanted to do was rip each one out and heave it as far as I could throw it. Now that would have been a tension reliever, but I didn’t need Emma to add any more evidence to the proof I was a “wild card.”
Like some bloody chick flick, it started to rain. I was going to tell a woman—the woman—everything of a mushy quality that went against every male instinct to divulge in the middle of a rainstorm under the cover of night. Under the light of a line of lanterns glowing yellow.
Insert wrist-slitting sappy music here.
I’d dressed for the occasion, three piece suit and all. I figured I’d worn one the better part of my life, why shouldn’t I on the day I told Emma Scarlett the way I felt? Too bad it was now drenched and clinging to my body like spandex. Expensive, silk spandex.
Running a hand through my hair, trying to get it to stay out of my face, I heard the library door open. I knew it was her before I turned around. That was what happened when you tied your soul to another’s—you were aware of them on a subconscious level that could never be turned off.
She didn’t see me. Drenched, desperate, drowning under the light of a lamp, she didn’t even look my way. It was clear to me now her feelings did not mirror mine. Her soul hadn’t done any reciprocal tying. She didn’t sense me before she could see me. She didn’t even see me.
I was still going to say what I’d come here to say, even though I knew I’d be hanging my head when all was said and done. I was at the summit and I wasn’t going to let all that climbing be for nothing.
“Emma,” I shouted at her back as she jogged through the rain.
She stopped mid stride, turning like she was moving through mud.
“Don’t be upset,” I said, taking slow steps towards her. “I’m just here to tell you something and that’s it. I’ll leave you alone after that if you still want me to.”
The rain was painting dark streaks down her dress, running streams down her face, but she didn’t duck beneath the nearest tree—she walked towards me.
“I’ve been worried about you,” she said. “Someone told me you ran away before the ambulance came. And you missed class.” With the two of us closing the space between us, we were standing in front of each other with one last step keeping us apart. “Are you all right?” she asked, looking up into my eyes first, before taking in the rest of my face.
“No,” I answered, “I’m not. But it’s not because of what Ty did to me—it’s because of what you did to me.”
She nodded once, like she knew just what I was talking about. “I’m sorry. For everything. I’ve done nothing but make a mess of your life.”
I took a half step forward, placing my arms on her arms. “It’s not really your fault at all. It’s mine.”
“No, nice try, but that doesn’t make any sense at all. You’ve done nothing but be wonderful to me. I’ll take all the blame for whatever you want to lay on me.” She shrugged off her backpack, letting it slide to the sidewalk, but her shoulders still hung with the weight of something.
I could let this deter me, she could deter me anyway she wanted, but I couldn’t risk losing the limited time I had with her. I’d come here with one thing to confess. “Why do you keep running away from me?” I asked, not employing this wonderful communication skill known as tact. “Why do you keep pushing me away when I get close?”
I wanted to know, because I knew she knew. I wanted to be able to circle one of the endless answers I’d come up with as to why she turned and ran at the very moments I’d been expecting her to run into my arms.
“Why don’t you run away from me?” she asked, forcing her eyes to mine. “Why don’t you push me away? Can you even answer that?”
I stared at that freckled, rain-dotted, sweet with a twinge of ever present anguish face, and I was staring at my answer.
“Of course I can,” I said. “I like you, Emma. I like you a lot.”
She exhaled sharply. “You don’t like me. You like the idea of me,” she said, like she’d been preparing this speech in her head for awhile. “You like the idea of saving the poor girl with a checkered past. The idea of having a girl who belongs to another guy. The idea of having a girl who keeps telling you no,” she continued, weaving out of the brace of my hands. “But then, when you’re done with me, what am I left with? Besides a broken heart and a future just like my past to look forward to?”
I couldn’t reply right away. I hadn’t expected this from her, wouldn’t have guessed in a year’s worth of guessing that these fears plagued her. I wanted to put together a thoughtful rebuttal to the insanity recently verbalized.
“Emma,” I said, finally. “I don’t want to conquer you. I don’t want you because of Ty. Or because you keep saying no.” I reached for her face to tilt it up to mine, but she twisted away from it. “I like you because of you and you alone.”
She closed her eyes and tried to step away from me. I wouldn’t let her. Not now that we were getting to the heart of what was keeping us apart.
“How do you know?” she snapped, still trying to pull away from me. “How can you be so darn sure you like me for wonderful me?” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm.
“Because I know.”
“You don’t know,” she replied.
“Don’t tell me what I don’t know,” I said, pressing forward because there was no further left to go backwards with Emma.
“I know because, before I met you, I didn’t have this gaping fissure cutting through my damn heart,” I said, thumping my fist over my chest, my voice elevating. “And now that you were kind enough to put one there, I know there’s no way of going back. No going back to pre-heart gaping fissure. And the hell of it is that no one can fix that fissure except for you. The one who made it.” Hair was glued around my face again and there was currently not a single scrap of me that wasn’t drenched, but the chill couldn’t cut through the heat coursing through me. “So that’s it. That’s how I know I like you, Emma Scarlett.”
Her face gave nothing away, but then the corner of her lip began to quiver. “You like me?” she said to herself, like it was the most unbelievable thing.
“No,”—her eyes snapped to mine like they were about to lose the game of staying unemotional—“that’s not exactly the right word.” I inhaled, willing the words I needed to say to come out right. “I kind of fell in love with you weeks ago and have been too scared of losing you to tell you.”
Not the most moving profession of love one man had issued to a woman, but it was mine.
“You love me?” she said to herself again, like it was even more unfathomable than me liking her. “Why?”
“Because I do.” It was that simple to me. Love is a simple thing by nature, people just like to screw it up and make it heavier than it is meant to be. That’s why it’s earned such a bad name.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she whispered, giving me a look like I was as unattainable to her as the angels in heaven.
“Is love supposed to?” I replied, taking a chance as I pulled her to me, not sure if she’d let me. She didn’t just let me, she came of her own accord. “Because if you need some proof to believe it, I’ve got an ocean of it,” I said, angling my mouth towards her ear. “I could tell you how I didn’t know I was lost until I found you. Or I could tell you how I have this ache in my gut when I’m not with you because I can’t keep you safe. I could tell you there isn’t a single thing about myself I like so much I wouldn’t be willing to change it for you. Or I could just tell you loving you is the most certain thing I’ve ever known.” Her hands clasped around my back, tugging me closer to her. “So, Emma, now it’s your turn. Why have you been pushing me away?”
Her head left its resting place below my chin. Staring at me with a deeper vulnerability than I realized she had, she said, “For the exact same reason.”
And there it was. I hadn’t even needed to hear the words. They were etched in every line of her face, in the way the curtain lifted from her eyes and I saw, for the first time, need and affection and possession in them when she looked at me. I saw the reciprocation I’d been certain wasn’t there. I couldn’t have been more wrong. She’d been hiding it, for whatever reason I didn’t know, and right now, it didn’t matter. One thing on my mind.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” I said, settling my hands over her face. “And I’m not planning on stopping for awhile.”
She smiled, the real one—the good one—but there was something else peaking it a little higher at one side. Something I wanted to see more of.
“It’s about time,” she said, crossing that last half-step separating us.
And then we were one. Bodies melding into one another, lips colliding together like they had minds all their own. Her kiss was sweet, but not particularly gentle. So, basically, it was perfect. I wasn’t sure what I’d been wasting my time kissing in the past, but being lip-locked with Emma Scarlett kind of made my kissing girls from all around the world seem frivolous, amateur at best, when kissing could be this good.
It wasn’t like a first kiss because we knew each other too intimately for that. And it wasn’t like a last kiss because we’d only just begun. It was the kiss you spend your whole life waiting for. The kiss you wish would swallow you whole so you’d always be living it. This was the kiss of a lifetime, shared with a woman I’d spent a few lifetimes waiting for.
Only when her breathing became erratic from loss of oxygen did I pull myself back. It was a feat of willpower Tibetan monks would have given the thumbs up to.
“Wow,” she said, working to regulate her breathing. “Now that I know you’re a kissing god, let me apologize for the disappointment. I’m a bit out of practice,” she said, her cheeks burning beneath the rain trailing down them. “Kissing Ty was like making out with a snake—all tongue and no lips,” she said, doing an exaggerated shudder while I worked at keeping the flash of rage caged. “I tried to avoid it at all costs.”
“I have an easy solution for getting you back in practice, you know,” I said, sliding the sheets of wet hair behind her shoulders. I understood why those romantic comedy directors dug the kissing in the rain scene. It was tough to beat.
She tried giving me a stern look that ended up being too playful for me not to give her an example. So I showed her.
“Practice,” I whispered in the space between our mouths, rivers of rain polishing our lips.
And I showed her again.
“Tireless days and nights of practice,” I said a minute later, and this time my own breath was hitching in a way I’d never felt before. Another very Mortal, non-Immortal paramount—shortness of breath.