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I turned away, leaning my head back on his shoulder. “There have been lovers, yes. But I never found anyone I trusted.”

“Why did you split up with her, then? With your girlfriend. If you were so close.”

It was weird to talk about Amber with him yet wasn’t all at once. But the answer to his question was hard to talk about with anyone. Was hard for me to even think about.

So I just shrugged. “People move apart sometimes, I guess.” I sat forward and looked back at him. “What about you? Ever been in love?”

He surprised me when he didn’t hesitate. “Twice. The last one – you remind me of her sometimes.”

Amber. He had loved Amber.

A ball formed in the back of my throat, and I felt truly conflicted. I was jealous, of course. But also, it was just another thing that connected he and I. Another thing that brought us together.

And I reminded him of her. “How?”

“I’m not sure. It’s hard to put a finger on because you’re really quite different. Like, she didn’t care for, well, for a lot of the things that happened in the bedroom. And elsewhere. She didn’t always like my approach. She was kinky, but not… submissive. Eventually that came between us.”

“How?” I asked again.

“It doesn’t matter.”

I needed these answers. For me. For us. “Is she the person you didn’t let leave?”

“Are you saying that trust is a factor for love?”

I glared, letting him know that I hadn’t missed that he’d dodged me entirely.

But then I answered him, because this topic was important to me, too. “It’s the factor. What else is it? Fondness? What about when he gets mad and beats you senseless? Or fucks your friend? Trust. All that matters.”

I pulled away from him, standing to stretch my legs or to try to relieve the sudden constriction in my chest or to escape the one thing it felt like I was endlessly trying to escape.

But it followed me, as it always did, wanting to come out, wanting to be exposed.

For once, I gave into it. “And that’s why she and I split ways. Because I lost her trust.”

“How did you lose her trust?”

“It’s complicated.” I already regretted saying what I had, yet I also feared I’d opened up a floodgate and was now being drenched in words that needed to be said, words that were going to leak out one way or another.

“Try me.” Reeve was like the riverbed, coaxing the deluge to flow in a natural direction. “You obviously want to talk about it.”

So, because I was drowning and tipsy, because I did want to talk about her, because I’d wanted to tell someone this story for a long time, because I’d been wanting to tell Reeve everything that I’d been hiding, I took a deep breath and said, “Okay.”

I sat down on the rock next to Reeve, uncertain where to begin. “Like I said, she and I had shared men before, but we hadn’t for some time at this point.” We’d been back from Mexico for almost two years and had resumed our long-term live-in relationships with men, just separately now. “She had a boyfriend. Bridge was his name.”

Reeve sneered. “Bridge?”

“Yeah.” For half a second I worried Amber had told him this story – it was a name he’d certainly not forget.

Except the Amber I knew never looked back. Never talked of the past. And Reeve was likely just making fun of the awful name. “Terrible, wasn’t it? Anyway, he was an okay enough guy. Much older than her. Fifty or so. Wealthy. She was really into him, but I don’t know. Let’s just say, she’d done better. But she said she loved him. Really loved him. And he was good to her, so I was happy for her.”

Bridge had been a drinker, but Amber was a complete coke addict by then. Together they made sense somehow.

“I, on the other hand, had just left asshole number too-high-to-count, because when I’d told him I was pregnant, he thought he could give me an abortion by kicking the shit out of me.” Richard had been his name. He was married, running for a seat on the senate, which he’d lost. Karma sometimes works out.

“You were pregnant?”

I nodded. Admitting an unplanned pregnancy always seemed to open the door to judgment, more than admitting a drug addiction or an interest in sexual perversity. Not that I’d told anyone about my baby.