It should have been, and if she had kissed him, it would have been undeniable. But she hadn’t kissed him. She’d wanted to. Her whole body had been heavy with her desire to do it, and she hadn’t done it.
Because what she and Will had was more important to her than physical lust.
Suddenly a spark of fury ignited in her gut.
“You know what,” she said, realizing that while conversationally, she might be on the same highway, she was making a left turn. “It just makes me want to punch him in the face. Because I do know what it’s like. I know what it’s like to feel like I want someone else. I said no. I said no because we were married. Wearemarried.”
“Well. Presumably he said no until the moment that he decided he would rather risk your anger to get the sex that he wanted.”
Again, it was like a slap. Why was he so…him?
“Are you defending him now?”
“You’re acting like I’m trying to manipulate the situation, and I’m not. I’m just making you look at it instead of pulling a blanket over your head. Something happened between us, and more than that, we were friends. You acting like you don’t like me and you don’t get why is some high-level bullshit, Sam. You know what happened between us. Pretending that you don’t takes denial to a whole new place. And you know what, I was content to let you sit in the denial of your marriage. But the thing about denial is it all blows apart eventually. Look at you and Will.”
“We’re not blown apart,” she said, pressing her hand to her chest. “We’re separated.”
A sharp groove carved itself between his eyebrows. “Why is it so important to you? Why is being with him so important to you?”
“Because I love him. He’s the father of my children. He is…the love of my life.”
“Right. Still.”
“That’s the thing about being with somebody for a long time. Things happen. They aren’t always perfect. They change. You change. But in the end, you make the decision that it’s worth being together.”
“What if he wants an open marriage at the end? Then you won’t want to be with him. Then there’s a limit on the change.”
“Just stop. Okay?” She closed her eyes. “I like you. I do. You’re right. I did pull away from you. Because our…friendship strayed into dangerous territory, and I needed to remind myself exactly whose friend you were. And why I even know you. Really know you. Because of Will. The fact that I was attracted to you made it impossible for us to be close to each other. So yes, I dismissed it. More than that, I pretended it never happened because there was no room for it. I figured it was one-sided anyway.”
“Did you really?”
She closed her eyes. “I’m going to be completely honest with you. I haven’t thought about it. For years. There was a while, right after it happened, during the vacation, my surgery, all of that, I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t okay. Themostokay that I felt was when you…” She closed her eyes. “When you held me. Part of me was grateful for that. For the way that I felt safe. But it was grief, Logan. I absolutely told myself that I was the one that turned it into something…”
“Sexual,” he pressed.
“A near kiss isn’tsexual.”
“Ours was.”
His voice sent a shiver through her body.
She swallowed, her throat dry. “Yeah. Okay. Ours was. But the thing is… The thing is…in that moment, I had a choice to make, and I chose my life. Myreallife. Not my life when I was in a crisis point. Not my life when I was feeling outside of my body. You can’t make decisions like that when you’re…when you’re barely hanging on. You just can’t.”
Her words resonated between them. Because wasn’t that where she was now? Outside of her life. In a completely different situation than she would normally find herself in. With him.
But he wasn’t offering her comfort this time. He was pushing her.
“Maybe not. But as your friend,” he said, his voice curving oddly around the word, “it would be remiss of me to not ask you to take this as an opportunity to see who the hell you are. To be honest. About what your life was. Because how in the world are you actually going to create a marriage where either of you is satisfied if you don’t actually dig into the bullshit? You’re just going to go back to right where you were. Even if he says, ‘Fine, I’m done screwing around.’ He’ll only go do it again. Unless you figure out what the actualreasonis that he thinks he needs something else.”
She hated that everything he said sounded right. “Are you a psychologist?”
“I’ve been to a fuckton of therapy.”
That stopped her. “Really?”
“Really.Because when you have a small child and experience a devastating loss, you have to think of people other than yourself and sort your shit out, sometimes by talking to a stranger, even if you would rather die.”
“I just didn’t think that you…”
