Free That Touch of Magic by Lucy March Page B

stop thinking of you as … well. Mine. He said you’d be different. He said those feelings would go away, and I’d be able to finally let it go and move on.” He let out a bitter laugh. “He was wrong.”
    “I can’t do this,” I said, my breath coming in short as my heart rate kicked up. “I have to…” I turned around, saw my shoes and clutch and dress on the dusty ground, and was grateful for Eleanor Cotton’s plastic-wrapped paranoia. “… the wedding,” I mumbled.
    I numbly went to pick up my things, and Leo talked behind me.
    “I love you, Stacy,” he said, “and I think you love me, too.”
    I grabbed the shoes, almost dropping them again, my hand was shaking so much. “Oh, really?” I said, trying to keep my voice strong even as I was unable to look at him. “You’re a cocky little man of God, aren’t you?”
    “I was twenty-one. My father had just died, and I was away at school…”
    I shook my head. “I told you not to go back for finals.”
    “… and I screwed up. I hurt you and I wasn’t man enough to face that, so I left. Maybe I don’t deserve a second chance, but wearing a hair shirt for the rest of my life isn’t going to fix anything, either.”
    “Nothing’s going to fix this,” I said. “It’s broken.”
    He stared at me. “You really believe that?”
    I lowered my head, unable to meet his eyes. “Yeah.”
    He went silent for a while, and then he said, “For ten years I’ve tried to convince myself it was my imagination, this thing between you and me, but it isn’t, is it?”
    I gathered my stuff in my arms and climbed up the cement stoop to my door. All I had to do was open it and go inside and hide until he went away. But I couldn’t pull the door open. I couldn’t shut him out. I just stood there, frozen, listening as he moved closer.
    “Tell me it’s my imagination, Stacy. Tell me there’s nothing special between us, and I’ll go away. I’ll get a better therapist, check myself into some kind of … I don’t know … rehab for delusional people.”
    I rested my forehead against the door frame, willing myself to go inside. I couldn’t move.
    “Stacy,” he said, his voice low. “Is it my imagination?”
    Before I realized what I was saying, I’d already said it.
    “No. It’s not your imagination.”
    Even without looking at him, I could feel the tension releasing from him, as though I’d just done him a favor. I hadn’t. Lying to him would have been the kindness, but long ago, we’d promised each other we would never lie to each other.
    And at least one of us was a man of her word.
    I managed to turn myself around and look at him, and my love for him was still so powerful it almost knocked me over. I wanted to throw my arms around him, kiss him until neither of us could see straight. Bring him to my bed and keep him there forever.
    But that was weakness, and if loving Leo had made me anything, it wasn’t weak.
    “It’s not your imagination,” I said, my voice gaining strength. “If knowing that matters to you, if it makes a difference, then great. Have it. I still love you, and I always will.”
    His eyes reddened, and my heart cracked at the sight of his pain. I could always handle my own pain, but his just wrecked me. That night when he’d told me about the girl he’d screwed in his dorm room on the last night of finals, just eight weeks after his father’s death, half of my misery was in seeing how much he’d been hurting. And then he’d walked away, and I’d wanted to go after him, but I didn’t because I thought it would be easier on both of us to give it some time, to tell him I forgave him when he came back.
    Except he never came back.
    I looked at him now, and he was beautiful and I wanted him for my own again so bad, I felt like I was cracking down the middle. But I couldn’t have him. I didn’t work that way anymore. The part of me that knew how to be with someone was broken, and there was no point in pretending