Page 47 of Love Walked In

“What do you mean, if I let them?” I knew it was spring now, with green buds on the trees and blossoms everywhere, but all of a sudden I’d shot back in time, to the dark sidewalk outside Ross & Co.

in early January. I rubbed my arms, feeling cold and alone and wary, even with Leo a foot away from me.

I shook my head hard. “That’s not true. I made my own luck, I wrote my own story. Don’t you dare pity me.”

He scrubbed his hand through his hair. “I have never once in the last three months pitied you. That’s not what this is about. Stop avoiding what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Fine,” I snapped. “What are you trying to tell me?”

His voice came out pleading. “If you never face the past, it’s just going to keep coming after you. And I’m trying to tell you that I can be beside you when you face it.” He took a deep breath. “Judith kept asking me what I wanted, and I know the answer, Mari. I’ve known it for weeks.”

“What do you want?” I felt like I was about to answer a knock on the door in the middle of the night when I would be better off hiding under the covers.

He took my clenched hands, ran his thumbs over the backs. God, I loved his long fingers, how expressive and capable they were, as they held a pen or touched my face or trailed down my body in the middle of the night. “You. More than anything, I want you.”

“You can’t have me,” I said, my old reflex still intact. “I told you, I don’t do this.”

But I want to .

I smothered the naive thought before I could say it. It didn’t matter what I wanted when it came to love. No one had ever put me first, and even Leo, steadfast Leo, could tell a lie to get what he wanted.

“I know what you told me, but I’m desperate.” He studied my face like I was a book he could reread over and over. “You are my spring. You are soft green grass, all the flowers blooming and the sunshine on my face. If you leave me for good, it may as well be winter forever.”

“You don’t mean that,” I interrupted, unwilling, unable to hear him.

“I do,” he said, like the words were a vow. “You’ve changed everything for me. When I’m with you, it’s like I’ve been suffocating my entire life and now I can breathe .”

“But you hid the truth.” God, I hated the shake in my voice.

“I hid it to keep you.” He looked down. “I wanted to keep you so badly.”

A ray of realization broke through the dark hurt drowning me.

Greg had treated me like a mangy stray left on his doorstep.

Dina had convinced me that she’d cheated with someone else because I was too difficult to love.

Neither of them had ever knelt in front of me out of contrition.

Neither of them had ever said anything resembling an apology. They’d just… abandoned me.

Leo wasn’t abandoning me. He was staying and begging me not to leave him.

“I didn’t make it easy for you to be honest,” I said quietly, remembering the moment in the park when I’d blocked any confession he might have made.

He nodded at my concession, his face serious. “But I should have told you anyway. Do you think… do you think you can see a way forward? Toward maybe, someday, forgiving me?”

I hesitated at the shake in his last few words, remembering cinnamon toast, and silly comedians with catapults, and sweet, soft begging words in the middle of the night. “I have to go home,” I finally said.

He looked at me like he knew I was hiding behind a wall made of rules and regulations. “If there weren’t such a thing as visas, as borders, would you stay? Would you try?”

His voice shook on the last question, and it was all too much. The last three months, the last three weeks, the last hour—they were a riptide and I was struggling not to go under. “I don’t know,” I said tightly, an unwanted tear trickling down my face.

Leo’s hands flexed. “I can’t bear it. If you’re crying, I need to hold you. Please let me?”

Without a word I stepped into him, and he wrapped his arms around me. I sank into the hug, his bay rum smell, the way he rubbed my back. It was safety like I’d never had, comfort like I’d never known.

But I needed to be brave. I tensed, and he let me go. I dashed one more tear away and pasted on one more smile. “We should go join the rest of them. Graham’s going to get suspicious and come find us.”

Leo’s mouth opened, on the verge of one last argument. A perverse part of me wished he would get mad at me, just one more time. But he only clamped his mouth shut and nodded. “Sure, let’s go for one,” he said, an edge of bitterness in the words. “To wish you bon voyage.”

We walked around the shop, turning out the lights. As Leo turned his keys in the door behind us, the click of the lock was a period, the end of my London story.

I told myself I’d just have to start a new one when I got back to California. But somehow, the words weren’t as consoling as they’d been before.