She dragged in a breath and then was silent for so long I thought I’d said the wrong thing.
I breathed out an apology, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t?”
“I don’t know if I want to yell at you or cheer.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you,” I replied cautiously.
“Do you know how long I’ve waited for you to say that?” she asked.
“About as long as I’ve wanted to say it,” I replied.
“Which is how long?”
“You know how long,” I sighed. I was tired and an ocean away from her. This wasn’t the time to have this conversation. I’d stupidly started it when I couldn’t finish it the way I wanted—with her in my arms and my lips on hers. “I shouldn’t have started this tonight.”
“Don’t you dare do that. Don’t you dare take it away,” she said, her voice full of everything I was feeling, an aching desire ready to burst through our skin from years of holding it back.
“I’m not taking?”
“I cried after I had sex for the first time. Do you know why?”
Her words made every part of me protest. The thought of Violet’s beautiful, lithe body, naked and smooth, tucked into someone else’s arms, was enough to make me lose my mind.
“Vi.” It was a guttural growl mixed with a warning.
“I didn’t have sex with him because I loved him. I didn’t do it because I’d gotten so carried away with passion that I’d lost my senses. No, I did it with a calculated purpose. I did it so I would know what to do. So I wouldn’t be a teenage girl with a crush, but a woman who knew what a man wanted.”
I felt like the fabric of my soul was tearing at her words. At the pain behind them. Because of me. I’d never once led her on. Never once let her think there would ever be anything between us, and yet, just like me, she’d felt it in the very core of her being. We were an us. It was that simple.
“Did you really think?” I started, but she kept going. She talked over me as if I hadn’t spoken, as if she had to say the words or else they’d burn a hole inside her.
“It wouldn’t have been so horrible if it had been something I’d done subconsciously and realized later. But no, from the moment he touched me, you were on my mind. I lost my virginity thinking of you. Thinking of what it would mean if, in some miraculous way, you decided you wanted me.”
“Damn it, Violet,” I growled.
“So, you can’t say things like that, about wanting me, and then take it back. It would be cruel. Not some comic book version of cruel, but actual human cruelty. “
“I’m not taking it back,” I almost yelled, barely holding back. “There isn’t one piece of me that wants to take it back.” I heard a shaky exhale on the other side as if she’d doubted it. “I just don’t want to be saying it to you when I’m in another country, days away from you. I don’t want to say it when we can’t look each other in the eye and talk about the things that have stood between us since we first met and are still there.”
“Jersey told me to go for it,” she said with a shaky laugh.
“What?” That one comment stunned me. Jersey had been my biggest adversary from the day we’d all met.
“She quoted comics and everything, so you know she was serious.”
I scrubbed my face with my hand, the bristles on it scratchy enough to poke at my calluses and the permanently raised skin of my scar.
“It isn’t just Jersey,” I told her the truth, staring at the red mark.
“I know. It’s our age difference, and your job, and our worlds being completely different. I’m not sixteen anymore. Do I have to keep reminding you of that?”
“No, I think my body has figured it out all on its own.”
“Your brain needs to realize it too.”
Silence settled down again.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
