Five Years Later, He Still Wants Me

Chapter 5: A Mistake

I spent three days avoiding him and every single second replaying his hand around mine.

That was the problem with weakness. It didn’t leave when you asked it to. It sat there, patient, waiting for you to slip.

I hated how much I’d enjoyed it. The warmth of his fingers. The way he’d looked at me like five years hadn’t touched a single thing between us.

Boundaries. That was the word I kept repeating to myself. You need boundaries before this gets out of control.

So I built them. Short emails instead of meetings when I could manage it. Group settings instead of anything private. Distance, deliberate and obvious, the only defense I had left.

He noticed. Of course, he noticed everything about me, that was the whole problem. But he didn’t push. Didn’t corner me, didn’t demand an explanation. He just waited, the way he’d promised he would, and somehow that patience unsettled me more than pressure ever could have.

The distance held for three days. Then circumstances stopped cooperating.

The planning meeting ran late, investors trickling out one by one until the room emptied to almost nothing, until it was just papers and half-full coffee cups and, somehow, the two of us standing on opposite sides of a table with nowhere convenient left to hide.

“We can’t keep pretending the past doesn’t exist,” I said, before I’d fully decided to say it. “Every time we’re in the same room, it’s right there. Between us.”

“I’m not pretending anything.” His voice was low, steady, dangerously calm. “You’re the one pretending you feel nothing.”

“I don’t”

“Say it.” He took a single step closer. “Tell me you feel nothing for me. Say it and I’ll believe you. I’ll stop.”

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out.

He waited, and the silence stretched long enough to become its own kind of answer.

He closed the distance between us slowly, giving me every chance in the world to step back, to stop him, to remember every reason I’d spent five years building a wall this thick.

I didn’t move.

He kissed me. For one weightless moment, I let myself have it.

Five years disappeared. The gala, the press conference, the hallway all of it collapsed into the single, devastating fact that I remembered exactly how this felt, and some reckless part of me had never stopped wanting to feel it again.

I kissed him back before I remembered anything else.

Then the rest came rushing in behind it the photograph, the silence, the reasons I’d walked away in the first place and I pulled back, breathing like I’d been underwater.

He looked just as undone as I felt.

“I’ve wanted to do that,” he said quietly, “since the second I saw you again.”

“We shouldn’t have done that.”

“Do you regret it?”

Say yes.

“Yes.”

I felt the lie the moment it left my mouth. I think he did too.

I left before he could say anything else, before my own face could betray the truth, I’d just handed him wrapped in a single dishonest word.

I made it to my car before I broke down.

Not loudly. Just my hands on the wheel, my forehead resting against them, my breath coming in short, humiliated pieces.

It was weakness. That’s all. Old memories, bad timing, nothing more.

I told myself that the whole drive home. I told myself that while I deleted his last three messages without reading them, while I silenced my phone, I climbed into bed determined to file the entire evening about things that never happened.

It can’t happen again.

I believed that part, at least. I needed to. Before I let myself fall asleep, my fingers found their way to my own lips, still remembering the shape of his mouth against mine, still remembering exactly how easily five years had folded into nothing.

“It was a mistake,” I whispered into the dark.

Somewhere underneath that lie, quiet and certain and impossible to silence, I already knew the truth.

The real mistake wouldn’t be the kiss.

It would be pretending I hadn’t wanted it.