I'm angry at him for leaving me.
I don't want to love again. I want Dutchie back. I want his soft kisses and tender snuggles. I want his hesitant hand reaching for my breast as he kisses me, as if we're sixteen and it's our first time instead of adults who've had alotof sex together. I want his goofy humor. I want his irrational hatred of celery. His odd fondness for spiders. I want his ability to drive for hours on end without a break. His eyes glittering in the dark of our bus in a rest area somewhere in Kansas, listening to a couple in the RV next to us fucking loudly for hours on end. I want his weird ass taste in music—the most obscure indie folk you can imagine, and the more obscure the better.
He's gone, though.
He's gone.
Our rings are in that jewelry box he made for me—the one in a safe in Felix Crowe's garage back in Three Rivers, Michigan.
And I vowed that I'd love again.
I just never thought it would ever happen. Or if it did, I figured it'd be years from now, when my grief is a scar rather than a crusty, multi-colored scab on a barely healing wound.
How do you love again after loss? Faye never did. I know, I know what she'd say. What shedidsay—she had a whole life with Tommy.
I had not even eight short years.
Felix.
I see him in my mind, too. My heart pitter-patters in my chest at the thought of him, and even that hurts like a punch to the gut. How can I have butterflies for a man when Dutchie hasn't even been dead a year? What's wrong with me?
I sucked his cock.
He made me come—sohard,somany times.
I want it again. I want that again. I wanthimagain.
I want to race back to Three Rivers right now and climb into his bed with him and fuck him until he sees his ancestors.
That's not love—that's lust; I lust for Felix.
He's fucking hot as hell—what red-blooded, straight female wouldn't lust after him? I mean, shit, Faye lusts after him and she's an eighty-year-old widow.
But…thereismore, isn't there?
Deep down, I know there is.
We didn't fuck, we messed around. Why? Because I knew, instinctively, that if and when I sleep with Felix, it'll be over. I'll not be able to get away. I won't want to.
Because there's something there. Something real and big and deep and absolutely terrifying. I've only caught hints of it—in those few precious moments of emotional intimacy with him afterward, when I told him things I’ve never told anyone, not even Dutchie. The safety I felt—the ease in his presence when I let my walls down a little bit, the knowledge that he'd protect me, take care of me.
I saw it most of all in the way he let me go.
In some ways, I'm a wild animal. You can never totally domesticate me. I'll always, always have blacktop highway in my blood and the hum of tires in my veins. It's all I've ever known. If he'd tried to keep me there, I'd have left for good, bus be damned. Or, probably, I’d have raised almighty hell until I could leave with Pumpkin.
But he didn't. He understood and he released me. He has collateral, sure, but I know he didn't want me to leave.
Even though he's just as scared and fucked up as I am.
I also know he feels the connection between us. The seed of love.
I don't know what to do about it. About him.
I don't know how to let him in. I don't know how to let myself love him.
The door creaks open behind me and a little hand touches my shoulder. "Ember?"
I dash away tears and offer Alaina a little smile. "Hey there, honey. What's up?"
