Free Pulled Within by Marni Mann

enough to know I wouldn’t be with you anymore…”
    “Maybe that didn’t have to happen. Maybe I could have been there with you.” They were so irrational, the thoughts of my younger self.
    “You were in school, Rae.”
    “I would have chosen you over school, if you’d asked.”
    I couldn’t believe I’d just told him that.
    “You would have dropped out your sophomore year to be with me? Left your friends and family? I would never have let you do that. And even if I’d been that selfish, I didn’t have the means to support you back then.”
    “So instead, you decided to never speak to me again?”
    His gaze moved to my lips, then lifted once more. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I’d heard how much I hurt you. I didn’t want to be your pain, and I didn’t want you to hear mine.” His face clouded over. “I realized long ago how shitty that was.”
    I tried to move away from him. He wouldn’t let me, but he kept his hands off me just the same. “Shitty? It’s way more than that. It’s unfair , Hart. You didn’t even give me a chance. I deserved that from you, at the very least.”
    “I would have told you to wait for me — I was ready to tell you, even as they were driving me out of town. That wouldn’t have been fair, because I knew you would have.”
    He was right; I would have waited. He’d meant that much to me— more than Saint or any of the guys I had dated in between. All my relationships after Hart were about healing, finding others with the same wounds I’d suffered and trying to close them—with my hands, my heart, my body. With my words and my loyalty. But Hart was the only one I’d been with who hadn’t needed to be fixed.
    He was also the only one who’d been there before my scar. All the others came afterward.
    I wasn’t too blind to recognize that, in trying to heal them, I was also trying to heal myself.
    “What are you doing back in Bar Harbor, then?” It came out as a whisper, and even that stung my already-burning throat.
    His hand slid over mine and stopped just on the other side of my palm. “I’m building a spa.”
    “No, what are you doing here ?” He could be as evasive as he wanted. I couldn’t anymore.
    Tiny flakes started falling from the sky. I felt them on my face. I glanced up, greeting the white specks of cold. They stuck to my eyelashes and melted on my lips.
    “This was the first chance I’ve had to come home,” he said. My neck slowly tilted downward until my vision fixed on him. “I’ve missed it.”
    I could tell he was waiting for something. Did he expect me to fade into his arms? To wrap my mouth around the sweetness of his? I wasn’t the soft thing he’d left behind all those years ago. I was made of scars now, of storms and squalls that tossed me about and made my life unpredictable.
    I was hardened.
    “I get it,” I said. And I did; I understood his answers, and the position he’d been in, even though there had been years in between for him to pick up a phone and offer an explanation. As fucked up as it was, a part of me was grateful for it. I didn’t know what I would have done if he had come to my house to say good-bye, or if he had called me from prep school. Because he hadn’t, my life had gone in a different direction, much darker than I’d expected.
    And after all these years, he’d found me again, at what was possibly my lowest moment. What that meant or what was supposed to happen, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what either of us wanted. All I knew was twenty-nine days .
    And he hadn’t even apologized for leaving me behind.
    I couldn’t give in to him now.
    “Don’t ask for any more minutes,” I said.
    A playful look came over his face. I had to stop myself from smiling. “I won’t…for today. But this won’t be the last you see of me. You know that.” He didn’t make any attempt to back up or drop his hands from the window.
    “Do I? This from the guy who leaves in the middle of the