The Man I Could Never Have

Chapter Ten: Almost

"Elena." My name again. He said it like he was testing whether he still had the right to. "Tell me to stop. If you want me to stop, tell me now, because I don't think I'll be able to later."

"I don't want you to stop."

I don't know which one of us moved first. It didn't matter. His hand found my jaw, careful, like he thought I might change my mind, and for one suspended second his face dipped toward mine, close enough that I could feel his breath, close enough that six years of almost was about to become something neither of us could take back.

Then he stopped.

Not slowly. All at once, like he'd hit some invisible wall — his hand still on my jaw, but his whole body gone rigid, his eyes squeezed shut like he was fighting something I couldn't see.

"I can't." His voice cracked on the second word. "God, Elena, I can't."

He stepped back, and the space where his hand had been felt suddenly, brutally cold.

"Marcus—"

"I did this before." He dragged a hand through his hair, pacing back toward the window, putting the length of the kitchen between us like distance might undo the last thirty seconds. "I let myself want something completely, I gave someone everything, and I watched it blow up in my hands three weeks before I was supposed to marry her. I am not doing that to you. I am not doing that to your father. I am not doing it to myself."

"This isn't Diane."

"I know that." His voice was rough, almost angry, but not at me — at himself, at the whole impossible shape of the situation. "I know you're not her. That's not the point. The point is I don't trust what I do to people when I let myself want them. I don't trust what I'd do to you."

"Maybe let me decide that."

"You're twenty-three." He said it like an accusation against himself, not against me. "You're my best friend's daughter. You live in my house because your parents trusted me — trusted me — to take care of you, not to—" He cut himself off, jaw tight, unable to finish the sentence.

"Not to what, Marcus?"

He looked at me then, and for one raw second I saw exactly how much it was costing him to hold the line he'd just drawn.

"Not to fall in love with you," he said quietly. "Which I think I already have. And I don't know how to forgive myself for that."

The kitchen went silent.

I didn't know what to do with a confession like that — offered and then immediately fenced off, want and refusal in the same breath.

"So what happens now?" I asked.

"Now," he said, voice steadier than I knew he felt, "you go to bed. And I stay down here a while longer. And in the morning we pretend this was a moment of bad judgment on both our parts, because that's the only version of tonight either of us can afford."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to close the space between us again and prove him wrong about all of it.

Instead, I did the thing I'd always done. I let him have the last word.

"Goodnight, Marcus."

He didn't answer until I was almost at the stairs.

"Elena." I turned. He was still standing at the window, not looking at me, like he couldn't afford to. "For what it's worth. I meant it. Every word."

I went to bed that night with his almost-confession sitting heavier in my chest than any kiss could have.

I think I already have.

Six years of silence, and he'd finally said it — not to my face, exactly, more to the room, like he was confessing to himself as much as to me.

It should have felt like enough.

It didn't. Not even close.