Page 93 of Cara & Gian: The Guzzi Duet

It was all the hows that made her pause.

It was the how did this happen that stopped her from saying it back.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” Gian asked.

“Why don’t you ask me to say it back?”

“I don’t need you to.”

Cara glanced away from the honesty in his gaze. “But you want me to.”

“That’s not what you asked. You asked why. I don’t need to hear you say something that I already know, Cara. And do you know how I know?”

“I’m listening.”

“I know you love me because I can count on one hand the times you’ve asked me for something, or needed something from me, or wanted just me until tonight. I can count on one hand, but I’d only need one finger to do it. Just tonight—that’s the only time you’ve ever taken something from me that you wanted. You called, you wanted me with you, and that says more than anything else you ever say possibly could.”

“And why is that?”

She didn’t mean to be so goddamn defensive, but it was hard. Her walls were her go-to defense for anything that seemed like it might reach too far inside her emotions or cut her too deeply, when it was all said and done.

Gian was definitely one of those things for Cara.

On both accounts.

“Because you don’t need me,” Gian said, his tone lowering an octave with the frankness his words took on. “Not in the grand scheme of your life, you really don’t. It might fuck you up for a while to send me on my way, but you would come out fine in the end. That’s what women like you do, right? You get hurt, brush yourself off, and get on with it—with life. Everybody fails you in one way or another, that’s what you’ve been taught.”

“Gian—”

“It’s true. Even if they don’t mean to, or it’s a by-product of someone else’s actions, they hurt you. Your parents, your siblings, or friends. And so you prep for the next person you let in to hurt you, too, and when they do, you get to fall, dust it off, and keep going with a few more bruises on your soul.”

She almost hated how he saw those things.

She wanted to hate that she had never needed to tell him those things.

“But what’s more amazing,” Gian continued, “is that you let me in. And that, in some crazy way, you still lower your walls enough to let someone climb over for a time. So here we are, you waiting for me to fuck up, even if I do love you, and even if you do love me, because it always happens, regardless. And you’ll be fine when it does—if it does—because that’s who you are, Cara Rossi. And we don’t get to be anything but exactly who we are.”

Cara’s exhale felt painful as it rushed out, but with that pain came a sense of relief. “Saves me the trouble of explaining all of that to you.”

Gian shrugged. “I never asked for an explanation.”

“No, you didn’t,” she agreed quietly. “Don’t you think it’s a little sad that you love someone who is just waiting for the other shoe to drop?”

“I think it’s sad that the woman I love feels like she has to wait on that at all.”

Well, then …

“What about all the shit I don’t like?” Cara asked. “The business you do, the things that life has taken from me, and how it hurts me? What if that bitterness I feel and the distrust that’s settled deep inside of me never goes away? Doesn’t that—in a way—reflect on us? Doesn’t that make us doomed?”

“There are a million things that could doom us, Cara,” Gian said, stepping forward to stroke her cheek and push a stray curl behind her ear. She smiled at his touch, feeling that familiar shiver race down her spine at his contact. “You know what else could doom us? That instead of taking that risk with me—jumping off the cliff that scares you—you want to debate how and why I love you inside of a liquor store at ten at night. Because that’s what you’ll keep doing, about everything, on all the little details about us, instead of just being.”

Cara frowned. “You don’t know that.”

“I know you worry about details all the time. Right now, you’re worried about the details of us, of something like love. That should be the easiest, most honest thing you can feel. And your very nature is to question it, Cara, and to question me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But you do. And you know what, that’s okay, too. As long as you be with me, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about those details and the nonsense. I don’t hear the noise of everyone else telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing with you. I don’t give a single fuck about any of that, because I love you. Nothing else matters. The rest will figure itself out on its own. I believe that entirely.”