I’d always been a shitty boyfriend.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” Emme said.
She stood, but I caught her arm. “The day you were kidnapped,” I said, “I was convinced I could help out because I knew so much about you. But I didn’t, not this Emme. Not who you are now. I had to learn about you all over again. It was like meeting you for the first time, like I’d flown back four years and sat across from you at that study table and re-experienced what it was like to”—say it, or you’ll lose her—“to fall in love with you again.”
Emme’s arm went limp.
I met her stand. “I am glad you’re okay. I’d nuke this city in order to get you back. But you have to understand that it hurts to be around you. Yes, I see you differently, for the person you’ve become, but in here.” I palmed my chest. “You’re still the same.”
Emme regarded me, color rising into her cheeks. “The whole time, when I was trapped in that basement, I thought of you.”
I let her go.
“In that chamber, it was your voice in my head, your face in my dreams, your will I was using to keep living.” Tears overflowed, raindrop tracks streaking down her face. “It took being thrown in a locked room by a madman to realize what a mistake it was to have not fought for you the instant you stepped out of my life.”
Something akin to anticipation built at the bottom of my spine. “What about Dave?”
She curled a hand into a fist and held it against her heart. “It also took being taken against my will to realize Dave wasn’t marrying the whole of me. He wanted what he knew. Not what I endured after. Just the party planner, the hostess, the perfect wife with a touch of spirit to keep things interesting. He didn’t want this darkness inside me. Or a traumatized woman with a fucked up past that includes a father being an accessory to a decades-old murder.”
“The law is less punishing on accessory after-the-fact,” I said automatically. “Your dad will face a few hits, but with a good plea deal he should come out okay.”
“See, this is what I mean!” Emme said. “How can you stand there and be all factual? You’re doing exactly what you did all those years ago—”
“You have no idea how I’m feeling,” I said.
“Because you never tell people.”
“I am trying to do the decent thing here, Emme, and respect who you are and what you’ve been through and your efforts to move on, however you choose to do it.”
Her face crumbled. “Why do you think I’m here, you moron? I’m here to tell you I still love you.”
I froze. “But…you just finished telling me what a jerk I am.”
She laughed through her tears. “I want you to be my jerk. Spence, you are the one good thing to come out of this. The boy I cared about and now the man I adore. My life is about missing moments now. I know we’re not perfect and there are so many things to work out, but I want that leap of faith. I want you.”
I opened my mouth but it took more effort than I expected to speak. “I can’t promise you flowers, Emme. I don’t know if I’ll ever change into the man you want—a good man, a stable one. I’m terrible at romance and forget birthdays and am more likely to fall asleep on the couch than wrapped around you in bed—”
Her laugh was bright, genuine. “I would never expect you to be someone you’re not. That was my mistake years ago. I accept you, Spence. For your sucky gifts and your lack of verbal I love you’s. You make up for it in the way you look at me when I’m naked or in sweats—with fire. For your ability to honor my intelligence and seek out my opinion. Or the way you comb your fingers through my hair without even realizing. For your dirty laundry everywhere and your excellent jubilee pie. Stop me at anytime…but are you still that guy?”
Probably, with a lot more suits. “Yes.”
Emme closed the space between us and cupped my neck with her one good hand as she tilted her head up to mine. “Maybe we’ll hate the new us. Maybe you’ll still yell when you find my hair clogging the shower drain and I’ll yell back when I’m hanging the workshirts you’ve left draped over our dinner chairs overnight. Or while forcing you to help me clean this place…” She tried for a chuckle as she looked around, but her trembling finger pads against my scruff gave her nerves away. She turned back to me. “Or maybe we’ll fall back into what we were, but better. Wiser. I want it all with you again, Spence. If you’ll have me.”
My arms reached past her heart-shaped face, the line of her shoulders, the cascade of her hair. They curled around the Emme she was, the girl of my dreams, the woman she is. She was lost but by some divine opportunity, was returned. I crushed her to me.
“I will,” I said, before leaning back and catching her lips. It was a kiss I’d shared with her every day, when she came home from her internship, when I woke up next to her in the morning. The joyous lip-smack when I cooked a particularly epic dinner. The tender sweep after we fought or she experienced failure. The comforting caress when we were on the couch watching a movie and I combed back her hair and tilted her chin. The passionate silk when we made love.
And I would do it all again. Because this time, our kiss held the promise of second chances. “I’ve loved you always.”
