Nothing Like the Movies
: Chapter 41

Wes

The minute my lips landed on hers, the teasing torture was left behind, and all that remained was want. I kissed her mouth the only way I knew how—obsessed, crazed, needy—and she returned the favor, delivering hot suction that drove me wild.

I squeezed her waist, not caring about anything but the way she kissed me back like she didn’t want to ever stop. I could feel every inch of her body against me, and when her fingers slipped under the back of my T-shirt, I growled like an animal.

She made me feral for her.

I dropped the ball and pulled her tighter against me, my body pressing into hers from memory, like a key into the only lock that would ever fit. I cursed into her mouth when I felt her legs wrap around me, my knees literally weak from the intensity of my want.

I put my hands underneath her and started walking, away from home plate and toward the dugout, and the way she tightened her long, bare legs around me set me on fire. It got quieter as we entered the dugout, and I didn’t stop walking until her back was against the wall in the darkness. Until I was pinning her body against it as we kissed like we were about to die and this was our last moment together.

I had missed her for what felt like my entire life.

And she was in my arms, kissing me.

Like she’d missed me for her entire life.

It gutted me, to be honest. Finally having her in my arms, meeting me kiss-for-kiss after we’d spent the past few hours together, felt terrifyingly perfect.

Like each and every wish I’d made upon a lifetime of stars was coming true, all at once.

This was my Liz, finally back in my arms.

“God, I love you,” I said against her mouth, every part of me lost in what was finally found. I leaned into her, breathing in her perfume as her fingers gripped my shoulders. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“Wes,” she breathed, her eyes still closed as she whispered into me. “Don’t.”

“What?” I lifted my mouth, breathing heavy, looking down into sleepy green eyes that fluttered open like butterfly wings.

She gave her head a shake. “Don’t say that.”

“Don’t say what?” I lowered my head and rubbed my nose against sweet freckles, flexing my fingers against the softness in my palms.

“That you love me,” she said, blinking at me with a wrinkle between her eyebrows.

“Why not?”

“Because you can’t,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s too soon.”

“Too soon?” I wanted to laugh at that, because how in the hell could it be too soon? “Did you seriously just say that?”

“It’s, like, our first date.” She dropped her hands from my shoulders and rubbed her lips together, replaceing her feet and stepping back from me. “You can’t love me already.”

I felt the distance between us grow, inches that felt like miles, as my hands became empty. I watched her retreat as I said, “Well, I do.”

“No, you don’t,” she said emphatically, passionately, almost as if we were arguing. She put a little smile on her face, like she was kidding, but it was forced.

“Please help me understand what’s happening here, Lib,” I said, a weight settling in my stomach as the thing I thought had returned to me backed farther away. “Because I’ve never stopped loving you.”

She shook her head back and forth, tucking her hair behind her ears and biting down on her lower lip. She looked haunted—hunted—as she insisted, “No. Let’s not talk about that. I don’t want to talk about the past.”

“I’m not…” What the hell is happening? I looked into her eyes and explained, “I’m not talking about the past, Liz; I’m talking about my feelings for you.”

“Wes.” She said it through gritted teeth, like she was trying to hold on to her patience or something. “I don’t want us to do that. Let’s just go forward, okay? Let’s just, like, pretend this is new. You’re a freshman who took me out on a date tonight. A really great date. Can’t we just be that for now?”

Pain—was it pain?—pinched in my chest as she said those words, because the whole time I thought we’d been coming back to each other, had she been trying to pretend I was someone else? To forget everything she’d ever known about me?

Is that what she has to do to be okay with me?

I swallowed and tried to come up with words, but the only one that came to me was, “No.”

Her eyebrows furrowed together. “No?”

“We aren’t that, Lib. You can’t pretend that I’m some guy you just met—”

“Why not, if it means we’re able to move on?” she interrupted, looking frustrated and almost desperate to convince me.

“Because you shouldn’t have to mentally split a person in two in order to love them,” I replied, a little too loudly with a voice that was cracked but fuck.

“Don’t you get it? You either love me or you don’t,” I said, not wanting to face the truth of that statement. “Because I’m not the kid next door, or the asshole who broke your heart, or the goddamn freshman who took you out on a date tonight.”

I took a deep breath and proceeded to tell her what she apparently never wanted to hear.

“I am just Wes fucking Bennett, Lib, the guy who can’t remember a single day in his life when he didn’t love you.”

She watched me with wide eyes, frozen in place, probably thinking I was absolutely unhinged. I felt like I should add something, like just kidding or that’s totally fine, but it wasn’t fine.

“Do you know how many 12:13s I’ve watched pass without you? Tonight it’ll be the seven hundred and twentieth,” I said, the words burning my throat. “The last thing in the world I want is to say something that makes that number infinite, but I also can’t let you erase our history. I don’t want to remember the bad parts, but I refuse to forget the good.”

I looked into the only eyes I’d ever loved and confessed, “Because our good moments were the crumbs that fed me for seven hundred and nineteen 12:13s when I was alone.”

“God. Wes.” She wiped her eyes and stepped closer. “When you told me the truth the other day, I was so mad at you for giving up on us, and for not talking to me before you made the decision to end us, that I couldn’t think beyond those facts. I knew you’d been trying to do the right thing, but I also knew that my heart would never recover from the loss, right?”

That made my stomach hurt, the way it always had, when I thought about how much I’d hurt her.

“So my anger made me kind of blind, I guess, to your sacrifice. I was so mad that you did it, that I didn’t take the time to think about what it must’ve been like, for you, to do it.”

I wanted to touch her so badly, but I was too afraid of where this was going.

“And in my wildest dreams,” she said, her voice thick, “I never would’ve imagined that while I was crying through so many 12:13s, you were too.”

You have no idea, Lib.

“But here’s my honest confession,” she said, her eyes bright as she looked up at me. “I’ve loved you, and I’ve missed you, and I’ve hated you and regretted you, but I’ve never forgiven or forgotten you. So I just—”

“Excuse me.” A bright flashlight shone directly into our faces as a deep voice said, “Do you two have permission to be here?”

My eyes adjusted to the garish brightness, and I could see a cop, staring at us from just outside the dugout.

A cop, with his cruiser lights flashing in the parking lot.

I looked at Liz as she stared into the light, her eyes enormous.

Oh, shit.