Page 125 of Not in Love
“I’m sorry, I’m not following.”
“At Kline. In the conference room.” Her throat bobbed. “You said that we were tragic.”
Ah. They were rehashing and dissecting his failed love declaration. “I didn’t mean to—”
“And I want you to know, we don’t have to be. Because tragedies have sad endings, and we don’t have to have one. We don’t even have to be over.”
Eli’s pace on the ice remained steady while the words penetrated his frontal lobe. “We don’t have to be over,” he repeated slowly, reluctant to let his hope color her words with meanings that weren’t there. “The last time we talked, Rue, I thought that maybe we’d never even started.”
“And I’m sorry I made you believe that. I think . . .” She shook her head. Carried on skating with that unimpeachable posture and hard-earned grace. “You know, I think the sex is a big part of the problems between us.”
“The sex?”
“Yeah.”
He snorted out a laugh. “Rue, if there is one single thing that was never a problem between us, it was the sex.”
“That’s not what—it was good. And I’d love to have more of it.” She bit into her lip. “But it overshadows other things I want to do with you. Talking. Listening. Just being around you. It’s so new to me, to crave someone’s presence. Wishing I could run something by you. Having meals with you—that you cook for me, preferably.”
Blood roared hopefully in his ears. “So you’re recruiting cheap kitchen labor,” he murmured to mute it. She was giving him very little. He’d told her that he loved her, and she was admitting to enjoying his company.
Maybe Eli had no dignity, but he’d take it.
“I can actually cook satisfyingly well—”
With a push of his skates, Eli blocked her path and came face-to-face with her. Rue nearly crashed into him, her hands gripping his biceps for balance.
This close, he could count the spikes of her eyelashes. Watch her trembling lips as they pressed together.
“What do you want, Rue?” he asked.
“I’m trying to articulate it, but I’m not very good at it.”
“No way. Really?”
Her pale cheeks flushed.
“Say what you want to say, and do it now,” he ordered. “You have two minutes.”
She wasted thirty seconds just glancing around the rink, searching for who the fuck knew what, and Eli’s stomach began to grow heavy with dread that he’d once again read too much into too little. But she eventually took a deep breath, and when she spoke, her tone was solid and assured. “I thought I could never be happy. But with you, Eli . . . I have never felt the way I do with you. Never. And I think that’s why it took me so long to put words to it.”
His heart beat in his throat. “What words?”
“Safe,” she said.
He forced himself to remain silent.
“And accepted.”
More silence. Harder, this time.
“And enough.”
That, he couldn’t take. “Rue. You have never been anything but enough.”
She glanced away. The back of her hand rose to wipe at her cheek.
“And something else. Something I didn’t have the language for. It was growing between us, and I didn’t know how to name it. Even when I could finally imagine life as something shared. Even when I trusted you. Even when my mind was always full of you. There had never been anyone like you, and for a long time I didn’t have the word.”