Mary Sullivan - Always Emily

This was so unfair. “You abandoned me first. Why?” Salem didn’t answer. She knew he understood the question, the one he’d never answered years ago. “Why?” she pressed. “You could have waited for me. You wanted me.”

“Not when we first met. You were so young. Like a kid sister. We had a bond, yeah. You were my little buddy. I couldn’t believe a twelve-year-old actually got me, understood my love of nature and my heritage, of history.”

He tapped his fist against his chin, a measured action, maybe judging how much to tell her? “I felt less alone because you were there. Why else would an eighteen-year-old hang out with a twelve-year-old? Why else would I pour my dreams out to you? I’d never known a kid who was so good at listening. I—I wished you were part of my family.” He angled away, as though embarrassed to admit to the very thing she had felt when she first met him—an unprecedented affinity with another person. Her heart soared. He had felt the same way as her!

“Then you were fourteen, almost fifteen, and beginning to look like a woman, and things changed. I fell in love with you.”

Her heart rate kicked up, did a song-and-dance routine in her chest.

“I found you attractive.” He grasped her upper arms, expression intense. “Don’t you get how young you still were? I respected both you and your dad too much to touch you. And myself, when it comes down to it. For God’s sake, it wouldn’t even have been legal. I tried waiting, but I kept on thinking about you, dreaming about you. I had to change how I dealt with you, to cut off the friendship, because it was becoming something it shouldn’t have been until you got older.”

All that time when she’d been dreaming about him, and he had started to turn away from her, he’d been doing the same with her. She’d had no idea. He’d hidden it well.

When he said, “I hated that attraction. It drove me nuts,” he shattered her blossoming happiness. “I had to distract myself with other women. Waiting was hard for a guy that age. What was I supposed to do? Wait four or five years?”

“Yes.” It came out a sibilant plea. “Why didn’t you?”

“You were a girl. I was a young man. I needed companionship.”

“You needed sex,” Emily said, still bitter sixteen years later.

“What was so wrong with that?” The sphinx was gone and Salem’s anger slipped through. “I was a guy. That’s what men do. They have sex with willing women. Annie was willing.”

“You didn’t have to get her pregnant.” And break my fourteen-year-old heart.

“That was an accident. Failed birth control.”

“You didn’t have to marry her.”

“Seriously, Emily? Leave Annie to raise the baby alone? Maybe let some other man step in? Don’t you know me at all?”

Yes, she did. Through and through. Proud, ethical Salem would do the right thing. She expected no less. It had been only her vulnerable young heart that had been unreasonable. It had hurt to lose him.

To lose something you never had, Emily?

But we did have something, a connection. Everyone thought so, not just me. Salem just told you he felt it, too.

“Why were you distant after you got married? We still saw each other all the time, but you treated me differently.”

“Of course I did.” The statement exploded out of him. “I was married and committed to making it work. I would have been a fool not to. I had children and was trying to create a strong family. My children had to believe I cared for their mother. Annie tried hard, too.”

It all made perfect sense. Her own naïveté had wounded her, not Salem.

“Stay,” Salem said again. “With me and the girls. Annie’s been dead for four years. We could make it work now.”

The age gap that had mattered when they were teenagers no longer did at thirty-six and thirty.

One big, big thing besides her career did separate them, though. Jean-Marc. She couldn’t dump him, long distance, just because Salem asked her to. Out of the blue, she might add. Where on earth had this come from?

“Don’t go back, Emily.”

“I have to.”

“Then this is goodbye.”

Her heart chilled. “What do you mean?”

“No more hanging together. No more contact. It’s too hard on me. I need to walk away. I need a clean break.”

The ice in his voice stripped her skin raw and opened a yawning pit where his presence had always been, dependable and there. She might see him only three or four times a year, but he was always present in her mind, like a beacon lighting a path through her dark times.

The thought of losing Salem, her rock, sent her into a panic. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do, Emily,” he said, the sphinx back and unyielding. “The next time you come home, stay away from me. Leave me alone.”

Bewildered, she said, “But—but you’re my best friend.”

“For the love of God, Emily, friend? Is that how you see me?” Before she realized he’d moved, he gripped her wrists, his shoulders blocking the spill of moonlight from overhead. He swore and pulled her against him. His lips hovered above hers.

He’d never— She’d always wanted— At last.

But he didn’t kiss her. He moved his mouth to her temple but didn’t touch her, simply breathed on her skin, raising goose bumps across her flesh.

Time stilled while his soapy aftershave wove ribbons of scent around her.

Lick me. Lick my temple, my cheek, my lips. Make love to me.

His breath swept her cheek, lingered on her ear and then trailed down her neck. He made no contact, but shivers followed in his wake. Her mind knew she couldn’t give in, but her body, oh, her body wanted nothing to do with common sense. Her heart wanted to own his.

Fingers of cool air caressed her shoulders, but Salem’s palms on her back were hot, drawing her closer to his hard chest and flat belly.

She’d always loved his height, his muscle. She touched him now, her hands flat against his chest and roaming his lean frame, measuring his dimensions for those nights when she would need memories, something, to hold close in the Sudan. Salem. Words, thought, fled. Only Salem. Only this and now.

Too soon, he set her away from him, his hands hard on her shoulders. “I’m not your friend, Emily. The next time that jackass hurts you, the next time he screws around on you, don’t come crying to me. If you leave tomorrow, this will be our last time together.”

She struggled to catch her breath. She wasn’t this kind of woman. She didn’t keep two men at one time. When Salem had been married, and since her relationship with Jean-Marc started, she’d been careful to not give Salem any sign he might construe as encouragement. She had put aside her youthful infatuation, had buried it deeper than the most elusive artifact, opting instead for only friendship and a shoulder to cry on. By the time Annie died, Emily had already become deeply involved with Jean-Marc.

Shaken that she’d almost lost reason, she stepped away.

Salem wreaked havoc with her good intentions. And he hadn’t even kissed her. Lordy, Lordy, what if he had?

She swiped beads of sweat from her upper lip and pulled herself together. Her hand shook. Salem, what you do to me should be against the law.

“I have to go back,” she whispered. “There are things—”

“Fine. It’s over.”

She saw red. She didn’t know that could be real, but holy relics, it was. “Over?” she asked, her voice dangerously quiet. “How can something be over when it never began?”

“Get on that plane tomorrow morning and consider us done. The next time you visit your family, stay the hell away from me.”

He strode to his beat-up old Jeep, slammed the door and spewed gravel, leaving ruts in the side of the road.