Chapter 5 - The Floodgates Open
The world stopped spinning on its axis.
The quiet suburban street, the distant hum of the highway, the rustle of the oak leaves—everything faded into absolute, deafening silence.
"You waited for me?" I asked, rising slowly from the steps, turning to face her with my hands shaking at my sides.
Emma stood up too, dropping the heavy knitted blanket onto the painted floorboards.
"Yes, you idiot!" she cried out, her voice a mix of laughter, tears, and five years of suffocated heartbreak. "I was twenty-three years old and desperately, hopelessly in love with my brother's best friend! I spent two years dropping hints so obvious that Daniel noticed, and you acted like I was just a younger sister who needed help changing her oil!"
"I thought I was protecting you!" I roared back, stepping closer, my voice shaking with raw, unleashed emotion.
"Protecting me from what?"
"From me!" I slammed my hand against the porch railing, the wood shuddering under the blow. "Look at me, Emma! I’m a carpenter with sawdust in my hair and grease under my fingernails! Five years ago, I was twenty-three, drowning in eighty thousand dollars of my mother’s medical debt, with a failing truck and an empty bank account!"
Emma flinched, but she didn't step back.
"You had an elite degree in interior design," I continued, tears finally burning the back of my own eyes. "You had offers from firms in Chicago, New York, and Seattle! What was I supposed to do, Emma? Tell you to stay in Batavia and watch me pour concrete while you gave up your dreams to make me feel like a man?"
"I didn't care about the firms, Ryan!" Emma shouted, grabbing the front of my flannel shirt with both hands, pulling me toward her with surprising strength. "I cared about you! I would have lived in your beat-up truck! I would have eaten two-dollar mac and cheese for five years if it meant I got to come home to you at the end of the day!"
Her words hit me like a physical punch to the chest.
I stared down at her upturned face, at the tears glistening on her cheeks, at the lips I had dreamed of kissing through a thousand lonely midwestern nights.
"You really loved me?" I whispered, my voice breaking completely.
"I never stopped, Ryan," Emma sobbed against my chest, her fingers clutching my shirt like she was drowning. "I spent five years in Chicago trying to replace you with men who had pedigree, titles, and clean fingernails, and every single time they touched my hand, I felt like an imposter. Because none of them were the boy who used to leave wildflowers on my dashboard when I failed my chemistry exams."
A heavy, jagged sob ripped from my throat.
I reached out, wrapped my large, calloused hands around her face, and pulled her toward me.
May you like
When our lips collided, it wasn't a gentle, polite greeting.
It was an explosion of five years of denial, five years of unspoken longing, and five years of running away from the only truth that had ever mattered in either of our lives.
