Breathless (136 page)

“Maybe you’re right,” I finally said. “I do like this girl a lot, more so than I’m willing to admit.”

“Then tell her that, Damian!”

“But—”

“But what?” she demanded with an incredulous look on her face. “What is it that could possibly be preventing you from telling her something you know she wants to hear, something you actually feel, something that will make you not this miserable mess that is sitting in front of me now? What is it?”

“I—” I was unable to respond. “How?”

“What do you mean
how
?”

“Like, what do I do? Commitment is not in my vocabulary, so I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.” I felt agitated and conflicted.

Emma laughed. “What do you want to do, Damian? Do you want her back? Do you want her to be a part of your life? Would you care if she found someone else?”

“No, I don’t want her with someone else!” I said quickly, before I knew I’d even felt this way.

“Then you need to go and ask for her forgiveness and commit to her.”

“Commit?” I glanced at her doubtfully. “But—”

“No buts, Damian! Yes, commit! Commitment may not be a word you’re familiar with, but if you want a girl like Alexis to stay in your life and not end up with another guy, you need to add a few new words to your vocabulary, starting with commitment.”

Can Emma be right? Do I really like Alexis? And even if I do, am I willing to commit to her?
These thoughts raced through my mind long after my coffee with Emma.

Instead of taking the BART back home, I decided to walk the three miles back to my apartment in the Mission. My mind was racing with thoughts of Alexis, and I needed time to think about things.

Halfway home, my eyes spotted something in one of the shop windows. It was a ceramic boutique that sold handmade pottery pieces. In the far back corner of the shop was an elderly woman throwing a bowl on a potter’s wheel. At that moment, I knew I missed Alexis. I knew I wanted to hear Alexis’s voice. I knew I wanted to see her again. I took my phone out of my pocket and immediately dialed her number.

The phone rang once. Twice. Three times. And on the fourth time, I thought it would certainly go to voicemail.

But it didn’t. She picked up.

“Hey,” came her tentative voice.

The second I heard her sweet voice, I knew I’d made the right decision to call her. I knew at that very second that she was what was missing in my life, that she was the reason for the void I’d felt in the last month I’d lived without her, that she was the reason why things didn’t feel right with any of the girls I’d slept with since the day I’d met her.

“Hey, Alex. It’s me.”

There was a pause on the other end, and for a second, I thought the call had been disconnected. Then I heard the faint sound of her breathing and realized she was still there.

What is she thinking? Can she really be this upset with me that she’s not going to talk to me?

“Are you still upset over what happened?” I asked. “It’s not a big deal.” The moment I heard those last words come out of my mouth, I immediately regretted it.

As if to confirm my mistake, the line went silent, and this time, I knew she had hung up on me.

I dialed her number again.

No answer.

Shit. Why had I said that? I felt annoyed with myself.

Emma
was
right—I really liked this girl. She was different and I wanted more from her than I’d wanted from anyone else. I knew I had to do something drastic, something out of character, to get her to talk to me again. I wondered what she was doing. I wondered who she was doing, and the second I imagined her with another man, I was consumed with rage.

By the time I’d walked through the front door of my apartment building, thoughts of Alexis with another man were driving me crazy. Images of her fucking another man flashed before my mind and I knew I had to stop that from happening. Like an itch I couldn’t stop scratching, getting her back was all that I could do and think about. I raced up the stairs, and instead of heading to my apartment on the sixth floor, I stopped on the second floor.
It’s Sunday. She might be home! I just need to talk to her!

I knocked on the door and heard rustling inside.

When she opened the door, I could tell she was surprised to see me. She also looked like she had recently been crying.

“Damian, why are you here?” I could hear the pain in her voice.

“I just want to talk, Alex.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said softly as she started to close the door on me.

I pressed my hand against the doorframe. “I miss you, Alex.”

I saw her pause at my words. “Please don’t say that if you don’t mean it,” she murmured.

“But I
do
mean it.” I was surprised by the emotion in my voice. “Look, Alex. I’m sorry. I fucked up. I…” I paused as I searched her face, hoping she could give me a sign and let me know if I was going the right direction.

But her face was blank as she looked at me. So I continued. “I thought I wanted someone or something like me—someone who was only in it for sex, someone who was cocky, someone who cared for no one but herself. And at a moment of weakness, I freaked out and gave in to the fear of being with someone who is nothing like me—someone who wants more from me than I’m used to, someone who makes me want to be a better person every time I’m around her. Someone like
you
.”

I saw her face soften but she remained silent. Her silence propelled me to continue talking, to fill the emptiness between us.

“I was scared of how much I had started to care for you in the short time we had known each other. I was scared of how much I was changing because of you. I was scared of how I had started to want different things. I had started to think about a future with someone in it—with
you
in it—and that scared the hell out of me.”

“Damian,” she finally said. “I don’t want to be with someone who questions whether I should be the person they want to be with. I’ve already had a boyfriend—who I was with for four years, who loved me for four years—cheat on me and break my heart. I don’t need another. I don’t want to be with someone who is scared of being with me. I don’t want to be in a relationship where every day I’ll wonder if they’ll get cold feet and run out on me.”

She was right.

I sighed. “Look,” I began. “There’s a reason I’m not great at this intimacy and commitment thing.” Even saying the words seemed painful and poisonous. But then I looked into her eyes. I saw the emotion and innocence in them. I knew right then that she wasn’t my mother, and we weren’t my parents.

“What is it?”

“I—” I didn’t want to talk about it. It was too painful, and I had buried those emotions for far too long. I didn’t want to open up old wounds. But by the look in her eyes, I knew I had to tell her. I knew that if I wanted to keep her in my life, if I wanted her to stay, I needed to open up to her.

But as I was about to tell her, I resisted and remained silent.

“Can you tell me one thing?” she asked as she looked down at her feet.

“What is it?”

“Will we make it?” All of a sudden, I saw tears streaming down her face.

“What?”

“If we try this again, are we going to make it?” she asked, her voice shaky but louder this time.

“I don’t know how to answer that,” I said honestly.

She looked away from me and I knew that had been the wrong answer.

I sighed. “Look, I like you, Alex.” I took her hands in mine and pulled them toward my chest. Her hands were limp against my hold, but she didn’t pull away. “I can’t predict the future. But I do want to be with you, and I do want us to make it. And for the first time in my life, I want to see where things can go with us. That has to count for something, right?”

“So you want to be in a real relationship with me?” I could hear the hope in her voice.

I looked away from her, realizing I hadn’t really thought about this in detail. “I’m… I’m not sure I know what a real relationship is.”

She looked at me with pained eyes. “Then what is it that you want, Damian?”

“I—I don’t know. I’ve never had to deal with this before.”

“Well that’s not good enough.” There was a mixture of anguish and anger in her voice. “You
broke
my heart, Damian. You
broke
what we had when I walked in on you naked with that girl. I can’t be with someone that doesn’t know what he wants, not when I’ve given you a chance before!”

When I heard her words and saw the look on her face, my heart sank. I knew she was serious. I knew that I might have lost her for good.

“Alex.” A sharp pain twisted inside my chest, and I tried to steady my emotions as I desperately waded through my thoughts. “I really want to give this another try. What do you want from me? What can I do?”

She looked at me in disbelief. “If you don’t know the answer to that, then—”

“Alex, please. Please give me something.” There was a pleading tone in my voice that seemed so unnatural and out of character.

“Damian, I want someone who’s not scared to be in a relationship, who’s not afraid to express their emotions. If you want another chance with me, I want you to do something spontaneous, something silly, to show me you care. A grand gesture, an expression of love, if you will.”

I looked at her, surprised by the directness of her request. “But you know that’s not me.”

“You asked me what I wanted. That’s what I want.”

“What if I give you a key to my apartment? That’s a gesture, right?”

She looked at me in disbelief. “You’re kidding right?”

“No. I wasn’t.” I looked at her uncertainly and then sighed. “Alex, I’m just not sure I have all that to give.”

“Then I don’t know what else to say.” She looked hurt and disappointed. “You know what I want now. Do with it what you want, but I need to get going.”

Before I could say another word, she closed her front door and left me staring at the door, at a loss for words.

As I walked slowly to my apartment, I knew that there was something different here, that my feelings for this girl were different, that there was something here I actually wanted, that there was something here I could actually lose—something I didn’t want to lose.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Alexis

A WEEK HAD PASSED SINCE DAMIAN had surprised me with a phone call and then stopped by my apartment. My heart had pounded violently against my chest when he had shown up. What I’d wanted more than anything was to fall into his protective arms and kiss him, to pretend like things were back to normal and that the past month had never happened. I’d desperately missed his kisses. I’d desperately missed his touch. I’d desperately missed him.

But the fresh wound that still resided in my heart reminded me that I couldn’t pretend that things hadn’t changed between us. I couldn’t pretend that he hadn’t betrayed my trust and destroyed my heart. I wasn’t sure I could forgive him. And I wasn’t sure he was a man that could ever change for someone else.

And yet, when I thought back to our blissful months together before he’d shattered my heart to pieces—the enduring memories of times gone by—I wanted to relive them again and again. I wanted to stop time and live in those memories forever, like in a never-ending loop of only happy moments.

But that would be too easy, and ever since I was thirteen, I’d learned the hard way that life was never easy. So when Damian had come to my door, I knew I had to be strong. I needed to protect my heart against him. I needed to see that he had indeed changed. I couldn’t let him back into my wounded heart until he proved that to me. And until then, I was going to live my life without the promise of him in it.

“Alexis?” Grace broke through my thoughts from her potter’s wheel.

I cleared my throat and looked up at her. “Yes.” I realized that I’d been sitting at the instructor’s potter’s wheel and had been staring off into space while my eight students were busy with their individual projects.

“So I’ve made the opening on my bowl. What do I do next?” Grace eyed the clay that was spinning on her potter’s wheel.

“Be right there,” I replied.

After a minute, I walked over to Grace’s station and studied her piece. “Great job with the centering, Grace. You’re really getting the hang of it.”

“Thanks. It’s only taken me four classes to learn it,” she said sarcastically.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. Centering is one of the hardest parts to master. You’re doing an amazing job. Now, let me walk you through the steps to opening up your clay to make your bowl. First, let’s get the wheel spinning at a moderate to fast speed.” I watched Grace’s clay and waited for the wheel to start.

But it didn’t move.

“Grace?” I looked over at her and noticed that her gaze was not on the clay on the wheel, nor was it on me. Something toward the front of the room had caught her eye. Then I noticed several of my other students also staring at the same direction.

Before I could follow their gazes to see what had caught their attention, my heart stopped when I heard his voice. “Hi, Alexis.” I’d recognize that rich, deep, inviting voice anywhere.

It was him. It was Damian. I looked toward the front of the room and saw him standing at the doorway of the pottery studio.

I wanted to laugh and cry when I saw him standing there.

I chose to laugh. There he was, shirtless with wet clay painted all over his chest. I couldn’t be sure, but the clay appeared to be in the shape of a heart.

From the corner of my eyes, I saw all eight of my students exchange glances at one another. Some snickered, some spoke in hush voices, and some gaped at Damian’s half-naked body.

He looked at me—and only me—and smiled. I saw the same warm, stunning blue eyes I had missed for the last month, the same eyes I had tried to forget, the same eyes that had haunted my dreams at night.

“You said you wanted something silly and spontaneous,” he finally said.

Before I could respond, he waved his arms around with exaggerated movements and began to sing “You Are My Sunshine” by Willie Nelson—off-key.

I started giggling when it became clear that he didn’t know most of the lyrics and was making up the song as he went. What made me laugh even harder was how confident he bellowed out the song as he moved around the room with his arms swinging around him.