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“You think I’m wrong? That I see you through some rose-colored glasses that erase your flaws? Nope, try again. Your flaws are only small pieces of you. You are more than just those tiny flaws; you are what you make of them, how you overcome them, how you choose to take those flaws and turn them into something positive. I see you, and you’re amazing.” Jason stared at me with an expression of extreme thought. “I know Annie saw it, too, only she chose to ignore what it meant. You need someone who sees your value as you are, not what your value is to them.”
“Someone like you?”
“I didn’t say me.”
“You know, I was always confused why you stayed friends with me after that night. With what I did to you, I don’t know anyone who would have continued speaking to me, let alone attend my wedding to someone else.”
I felt the rush of blood to my face. “You made a choice. I wasn’t going to punish you for choosing what was right for you at the time.”
“Even if it was the wrong choice?”
It was my turn to stare at him. “Well, none of us know what our choices will lead to when we make them. Anybody can look back at something and say they should have done it differently, that’s the benefit of hindsight. You couldn’t have known you and Annie wouldn’t work.”
“Except I did. She’d dumped me three times by then. It was never me dumping her. She was always the one who found reasons to end it. Every time she took me back, I thought, ‘How long will it last this time?’ I thought that somehow I was obligated to see if it would work with her.”
“Obligated?”
“It’s hard to explain. I convinced myself that she had some claim on me, like how priority housing worked in school. I thought she wouldn’t be coming back to me if she didn’t really love me.”
“Wow. That’s not good,” was all I could say.
He laughed. “Yeah.”
After a short silence, I felt compelled to speak. “I convinced myself that it wasn’t my place to tell Annie what happened that night, that it was somehow private and between the two of you to hash out.”
“That’s why you made up that story?”
“Yeah. Your sex life is your business to tell, not mine.”
“But it involved you. Wouldn’t that also make it your own business?”
“I’m not saying it was sound logic,” I laughed.
“All this time, I thought you regretted it or something.”
“I regretted the morning after. I regretted that so much, I almost blocked out the whole thing until you showed up here and hugged me.”
“You forgot what you said?”
“I didn’t forget it entirely, not really,” I confessed. Confusion filled his face. “I forgot the details, pushed them down deep. I made it into a fuzzy old movie in my head made up of generic stand-ins and downplayed feelings. I forgot how great it was, how much it all meant to me.”
“Which made it easier for you to stay friends with me.”
“Yeah. Apparently, it messed me up more than I thought. I should have just told Annie the truth when she asked.”
“Then I guess we’re both at fault. I never told her, either.”
“It wouldn’t have been a great idea to have me as a guest to your wedding if you had.”
More thunder crashed outside, and the force of the booms made the ceiling fans sway back and forth a little. I wondered briefly how long Nikki and Siti would go on, and if maybe there was a chance they’d be asleep by now. I was still amped up from ziplining and realigning my life goals, and sitting next to Jason was bringing back all the old emotions. My heart fluttered in my chest, I saw flashes of his naked body, felt the rush I felt so many years ago. If I stayed much longer, I was going to make a fool of myself.
“It’s getting late,” I said. “With any luck, Nikki will have exhausted herself by now.”
“You don’t have to go,” he said as I stood and moved toward the door. “I remember what it’s like to be sexiled and have nowhere else to go.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to get in the way of your semi-vacation, or the article you have to write.”
“Really, it’s no trouble—”
