“Joe, I think I might be clueless when it comes to love. Afraid I wouldn’t know real love if it bit me in the ass.”
He chuckled in spite of himself. “Been there,” he said. “Pretty recently, in fact.”
“I thought I was probably mistaken. At the time it seemed to me you were showing me something good. Sincere. Loving. But it could have just been…You know. Sex.”
“No complaints about the sex, then,” he said.
“It was so much more than that. For me, it was so much more than that.”
It was a huge relief to hear her say that, he actually let out a slow breath. He reached out a hand and wiped a tear from her cheek. “And you didn’t think it could’ve been more than that for me, too?”
“I just didn’t know.”
“But you came back here?”
“Well, Paul called me.”
“Paul?” he asked, astonished.
“Yeah. I think I’ve been played.”
“How’s that?”
“He called to tell me not to worry about you—that although you admitted you had it real bad for me, you were working at getting over me and I’d probably be free of you in no time. He said you wouldn’t bother a woman who didn’t want to be bothered.”
“He did that? Why’d he do that?”
“To make me think about what I might be giving up, maybe.” She wiped the other cheek. “So. You’re over me?”
“Not quite,” he said. “I’m still working on it.” He looked down for a second, thinking. “What did you come back for?” he asked her. “To clear the air? Get it over with? More sex? After which you’ll take off before I’m awake?”
“Then Vanni called me. She told me she’d been thinking about things, and decided I must be out of my mind. She told me a lot of the same things you’d already told me—about coming together to help your friends, about being there for Paul while he buried Matt. She knew that if she ever needed your help for any reason, you’d be there for her. And I thought, what the hell’s the matter with me? I’ve always wanted to be with someone who thinks like that, acts like that.” She looked up at him with those wide, damp eyes. “She told me you’d be here—bringing Paul the plans. Should I have stayed away? Would that have been for the best?”
“I don’t know, Nikki,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m not going to kid you—the way you ran out on me… That was awful. Then I wrote you that it broke me apart and you still wouldn’t respond. What am I going to think, huh? You’re not the only one who doesn’t feel like getting hurt again.”
“You wouldn’t know it by the way I acted with you, but I’m inexperienced. I’ve never done that before. It turns out I’m lousy at one-night stands. All paranoid and spooked.”
“Yeah? Me, too,” he said. “I never thought of it as a one-night stand. Not even that one night. I was destroyed to find you gone. More destroyed to hear it made you cry. I couldn’t believe anything happened to make you cry. I’m still having trouble with that.”
“Look, here’s what happened to me. He said he loved me. We lived together for years. I kept saying to him, I need a commitment, I want a family. And he kept saying, I might need a little more time on that. And then he finally told me—he had a vasectomy behind my back a couple of years ago because he was afraid I’d get ahead of him, stop taking my pills and sneak a baby out of him. That’s when I knew—there was no love, no trust. He was a liar and he was just using me. It was a horrible thing to face up to.”
“Jesus,” Joe breathed, almost speechless.
“I thought he loved me and was trying to come to terms with the whole forever thing,” she said. “He’d been through a rocky divorce about ten years back. It made sense to me that he’d be nervous. I didn’t know he was lying.”
“Nikki, I’m sorry. That was bad, what he did. He should’ve been honest.”
“Yeah. And then there was you. In five minutes I knew you were more honest and straightforward than he was, but I doubted the signals. I wanted to fall for you—but I don’t know you.”
He reached a hand toward her shining black hair. So soft. “By morning, there wasn’t an inch of me you didn’t know.”
“You have a big mole on your butt,” she said. “You should probably get that looked at. And a scar on your shoulder. And I think you had your appendix out.”