“Sara,” I manage to lament on the verge of more tears.
“Jeffery,” she replies, closing her eyes to break the spell she cast.
I watch her mere inches away from me, and just like a memory of some long forgotten dream, I know what will happen next. It’s as if no time has passed, it’s as if we didn’t break each other our whole life, and it’s as if nothing else matters but her and me.
I was going to wait, I was going to be respectful, I was going to let her invite me into her space to finally talk, like adults, like parents, but I can’t wait any longer. I walk in uninvited and invade her space as I take all the air in the room with me. Can she see the pain leak out of my eyes and the resolve in my stare? She stumbles backward and gasps in shock at my forwardness. She knows I won’t be held at bay any longer—I’ve waited for almost fifteen years to un-pause our story, and now that my heart is in full control it turned my brain off, because I don’t care what’s right or wrong. I’m here to take back what fate promised me all along.
I feel her before I even touch her. My hands and body come at her all at once. I pull her flush against me, and turn us both to the left—as if part of some well rehearsed dance—and usher us into the open powder room. Once we’re in the dark, windowless room, I shut the door with a bang, quickly locking it. My heart explodes in its cage, my limbs tremble as I hold her near, and everything turns to red. I can’t think as I try to breathe and not pass out with her clutched against my heart.
Is this really happening?
She attempts unsuccessfully to say something, but it’s no use, both of our brains negate to function. My body hasn’t come to terms with reality, and her touch and scent are overwhelming … but she still feels like home.
“Don’t tell me to stop, don’t push me away, you don’t have to say anything, and please, for the love of our children, just listen to me,” I beg nervously with my eyes and words while the automatic lights slowly come on, illuminating her petrified stare.
She vehemently shakes her head and looks away from me. I feel like the wolf luring in a lamb, but I’m the one who’s been lost in her spell.
“I love you. Look at me. I love you so much, Sara. I’m sorry for everything I made you live through. I’m sorry I can’t stop loving you. You don’t need to talk, baby, just look at me and listen to what I have to say, please,” I continue while I loosen the hold I have around her tiny waist and lower her to rest on the marble vanity, positioning myself as close as possible between her legs.
I’m suddenly aware she’s wearing nothing but a man’s white T-shirt around her overheated, trembling body, and as I look down, I feel the flush of her skin rise and spread under my touch. I slide my hands up her bare legs, sending feelings to places I know I have no right to try and communicate with anymore. I haven’t seen her or touched her like this in over two years, and being this close to her, breathing the same air as her inside this little powder room, only makes me want us back a million times more.
I look down at my hands placed on her thighs; I’m trembling, too. I tear my gaze back to her eyes as she breathlessly watches me in shock, waiting for me to make the next move.
I want to kiss you, taste you. I’m starved for you.
“I don’t deserve anything from you, but I beg of you to forgive me for everything you had to endure by knowing me. I want you to believe me when I tell you that you are, were, and always will be a part of everything that I am. I’m nothing without you, Sara. You are my life, my family, and a part of my heart. Please tell me you understand what you are to me?”
She still hasn’t said a single word and I can tell my words are making her angry by the way she holds her tongue and won’t talk to me. But her emotions toward me are loud enough that sound isn’t necessary. We stare each other down, willing our eyes to say that which our words fail to express. Without warning, she slaps my face with one hard blow that makes my head jerk to the side. I let go of her thigh to touch the spot she just hit and I smile.
Finally, we’re getting somewhere.
“Do it again, but harder. Come on, you need to beat the shit out of me. Do whatever you want to me and tell me everything you need to say to me, and let’s get this over with. I deserve and will accept every form of punishment from you, but I won’t accept you leaving me. I owe it to our children to fight for you,” I explain, no longer smiling.
She closes her soulful, haunted eyes and swallows whatever air is still left in the room before she finally allows her own tears to emerge. She’s hysterical. I can taste her frustration with every sob at how our lives seem to always get twisted and bent until somebody snaps and breaks.
I lower myself closer, cupping her face to rest my forehead to hers. Her proximity makes my head spin. “I don’t know why I can’t let you be. I don’t know why I can’t breathe without you. I just know that you’ve been etched in my future from the moment I kissed you in your room. Sara, I need you to give our family a fair chance. Please don’t leave us; we need you. You can’t marry him. We made a promise.”
She pushes me away from her and opens her eyes, looking at me as if for the first time. We’re having a stare off again and I know that this, right here, is a conversation fifteen years in the making.
She finally finds her elusive voice that I’ve been dying to hear and begins to speak.
“I fell in love with you that night in the club and in my room seventeen years ago. I dreamt about nothing and no one but you ever since I can remember. Every night I slept in your T-shirt to have a small piece of you touch me. I lied to myself and everybody I ever loved for you. You were my first kiss, my first dance, my first everything, and I would’ve agreed to do anything you asked of me. I gave you everything that was mine to give, and you took it all. You left me with nothing! You don’t know what it was like being me—just waiting, watching you have everything without me. I know you didn’t want to hurt me, but you did and I let you. You didn’t love me enough back then to not be with Jacqueline when you couldn’t sleep with me, and you sure as hell don’t love me now. You made your bed, Jeffery Rossi, and it’s time for you to go lie in it, without me. If you think you love me, like you keep saying, then leave me alone.
“I will always love you as my biggest lesson of all, and as the father of my children, but I don’t want your love anymore. I’m not the Sara you kept indefinitely waiting with all those beautifully empty promises for years. I’m not that girl you once knew. I finally understand what being loved feels like, and you didn’t love me. He loves me. I love William Spencer Knight, and I love our baby that’s growing inside me. You can’t take that from me.”
As her words leave her mouth and escape into the universe, it’s as if I’ve been shot in the heart. I let go of her and begin to stumble back, colliding with the wall behind me. I shake my head vigorously and almost inaudibly yell
no, no, no, no,
over and over.
She gets herself off the counter I placed her on and takes a few steps toward me. I want her to hit me, wake me up from this nightmare. But instead, she engulfs my waist in a hug and begs me to do her one last favor. “Please come back to our kids. Please don’t abandon them now. They don’t know me. I can’t meet them now when they lost their mother, and I can’t have them lose you, too. I’ve watched you and them from afar every day. I would sit at the corner café by your house and watch you be a perfect father, just like in my dreams, and it was the only thing that kept me alive.” We both have tears rolling down our faces, holding on to one another as our sad reality comes into focus. Juliet and Jacob, our beautiful children, need to be our main concern. Nothing else matters—not the promises, not the broken dreams, just our babies.
I wail, not recognizing my own desperate sounds as her words continue to cripple me. Both our legs seem to give out at the same time as we slide to the floor. I’ve always hated seeing men cry, and hearing myself cry out seems even more painful and unnatural. I’m aching inside as my world slowly continues to shatter, crumbling piece by piece. Every last hope I’ve held onto for years of us finally being a real family slowly dissipates.
She’s been sitting between my legs on the floor, resting her head on my chest like she’s done thousands of times, only I’ve made no attempt to touch her back. She’s not mine anymore, never was, never will be. We’ve been motionless for what seems like hours, and I have yet to stop crying. How can two people wreak this much havoc in one another’s lives? Will it ever not hurt being around her? Will I ever stop loving her?
I look down, only to be confronted with eyes that almost feel like they’re my own. The same eyes I thought I’d look into for eternity. They’re my kids’ eyes, they’re my youth, these eyes were supposed to be my future, but they aren’t my destiny. My whole life has been a mistake. “I will never stop loving you, no matter who you love or choose, my love for you will always be there. I don’t care if you don’t believe me, but I never thought I needed to choose you. You were always etched in my heart as a constant future.”
My former lover, my so-called “affair,” looks shattered. We break each other; that’s what we’ve done from day one. I broke her by first being a delusion and then morphing into a promised illusion.
“I was always the beggar, the hungry shadow waiting for a promise to materialize, clinging on to any morsel of hope you granted me. I never asked you to choose me, but why didn’t you? Wasn’t I worth your choice?” Her honest words make my tears fall even more. “Jeffery, please, stop crying,” she says as she puts her head back on my chest, listening to the heart that now beats for no one. “When did you fall in love with your wife?” she asks, reminding me that there is more carnage to come.
I’m quiet, not sure how to answer her question. She starts to get up when I finally tighten my hold. She looks up at me, and I at her, and I see how much she still cares for me. I feel her body react to me as if I still own it, and only God knows how much I wish I still did.
There is no use trying to hold on to her, she’s not mine. If something should be yours, no one can take it away from you. Before I let her go, I look into her troubled eyes. The same familiar eyes that all I’ve ever done is promise fairy tales I had no tools for building. She should be loved the way I promised I’d always love her. She should be cherished and spoiled with undivided attention. I robbed her of that with my self-righteousness covering up my selfishness. I never thought I was hurting her thanks to the strong façade she fabricated, but she’s right—I took everything and gave nothing back.
Is this love? Does love need to hurt this much? Or is this a forced kind of love that slaughters all involved?
She’s finally in my arms where I’ve wished her to be millions of times, but I’m still lost and alone.
Guilt.
I feel guilty for everything I’ve put her through. Was I punishing her for lying to me that first night we met when she was only fifteen? I never asked her for her age and she never offered it. It wasn’t her fault I fell for a fifteen-year-old. I’ve never stopped thinking about that night. Have I been punishing myself, too, by holding on to her as a self-indulgent fantasy and forcing us to live in pause because years later some crazy old gypsy read my palm and told me she would be my future? I still moved on with Jacky, but I didn’t release her.
I don’t know how long we’ve been huddled on the floor, and I’m not sure where to go from here. Sara and William are having a baby—that’s a reality I need to accept. She will never be my wife. She can’t take Jacqueline’s place and raise our kids; that’s not her life. She loves him and she wants and will have children with him. She chose him, and I can’t pretend that she hadn’t chosen me, because I wasn’t a choice. She chose me for years, and I took it for granted, accepted her love as if it was a constant unyielding entitlement. She never once asked me to leave Jacky. She never once told me how much it hurt or that she wanted a family. Was it convenient? Was it easy until it became painful? All the years between us, how could it be a mistake? Juliet and Jacob, our kids … perhaps they’re the only reason our lives collided and intertwined. Did I hold on to her, waiting for her to love me the way I always thought she did? She never once stood up for us. She, too, kept us a secret like some dirty affair. Was that easier than telling the truth and moving on?
The thought that they made a baby together and that they’re getting married devastates me. This is what she felt at eighteen when I married Jacqueline. Only she was a baby when I did this to her.
It was over for us before it even started.
I wrap my arms around her as I pull her tighter into me. If I could go back in time, I would let her go. I would allow her the happiness that I promised but could never give. I would not hold on to what some fortuneteller at a bar read on my palm as if it was the word of God. “I’m sorry, Sara. I’m sorry for everything.” I kiss the top of her head as I allow her familiar scent to calm me one last time. She will always be a part of me, and I owe her so much. “I want you happy. I swear, for the rest of your life, I want to make sure you never cry again.” I’ve caused this poor, innocent girl enough heartache to warrant her murdering me out of self-defense.
“When did you fall in love with Jacqueline?” she questions for the second time.
I don’t want to tell her. I can’t tell her, it will kill her. “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t do it on purpose, Sara. It wasn’t what I wanted.” The thought of hurting her even more now starts to cripple me. I don’t want to say another word.
She turns in my lap to face me with those brilliant, knowing eyes piercing through my ugly soul. “I know, but you fell in love with her before we even met, didn’t you? You married her because you loved her. It was different than what you felt for me, right?” Her question is laced in pain.
I nod my head. “I always loved you, too,” I offer as the guilt of my actions weighs me down. “We were friends. I didn’t think we had a future. The things Jacky and I lived through made it impossible for me to not love her. I did try to pretend and not care—I tried to only think of you and us. I tried to not get attached to her, because I knew she would be taken away from me. I’m sorry. I was scared that I’d lose her and you, and I just held on to both of you.” My wretched tears haven’t ceased rolling from my eyes ever since I walked in.