You Make Me by Erin McCarthy Page A

brushed my folded arms at the elbows, his hips bumped mine. He tilted his head, and his eyes were the stormy blue I remembered so well, just as intense and compelling as they had ever been. He had a tattoo on his bicep now, flames with something in the middle that I couldn’t see because he was right on top of me. “That’s my girl,” he murmured. “Just the way I remember. You look beautiful, by the way.” The back of his knuckles drew down the length of my cheek. “I like you without makeup.”
    Oh, God. I felt the tears sooner than I had ever imagined they would appear. They filled my eyes, blurring my vision of his gorgeous face. The ache of missing him was overwhelming. It made me shudder, giving up. I couldn’t fight it. He had been my everything for a time, and my body, my heart craved him just for a brief fleeting second.
    “I missed you,” he said, pulling me into his arms.
    Saying that I missed him in return was the understatement of the century, a weak inadequacy of how it had been the last four years. “I missed you” could never describe the pain I had been through, the desperate need to wake up and see his smile again, hear his laughter, have him tease me and chase me down over the rocks.
    So I kept my arms folded, between us, but I let my forehead rest on his chest, let myself breathe him in. “Why did you leave?” I whispered.
    “I didn’t want to. Believe me, I didn’t want to.” His breath was warm on my temple, his arms strong and solid around me. “But social services was planning to look into statutory rape allegations against me. They heard I was having an inappropriate relationship with you.”
    I froze. “What? Are you serious?”
    “Yeah. So I left and they let it go. I didn’t want to put you through the questioning, the physical exam, all of that. I figured you deserved better and it seems I was right.” He pulled back and unfolded my arms, lacing his fingers through mine. He held up my left hand, studied the engagement ring from Ethan. “I’m happy for you. I really am. But I’m sorry for me. And a little angry, even if you don’t want to hear that.”
    My throat was tight and I felt his sadness as profoundly as my own. We could have been together. We should have been together. “I wanted you ,” I told him. “And fuck anyone who thought they had the right to interfere.”
    He lowered my hands, still entwined with his. “Want and need are two different things.”
    Heath stepped away and I felt the loss of his presence immediately. I didn’t want him to release me quite that quickly. “You found Mr. Perfect,” he said, and his tone wasn’t nice.
    It was a conversation we never needed to be having. “I’m not going to talk about him.”
    “Sometimes in my bunk I would imagine that you had waited for me. That we had something special enough to last through a separation.” He gave me a smirk. “Hey, at least it was good for jacking off, if nothing else.”
    My mouth dropped. “Charming. Really charming. Don’t put this on me. You’re the one who left. You could have taken three minutes to tell me what was up. You could have contacted me at some point in four years. You know, like a text or an IM or something. Anything. And you were with a girl the other night, so it looks like you moved right along with your life yourself.”
    “She doesn’t mean anything to me. I barely know her.”
    “And that’s supposed to make it okay?”
    “Yes.” He shrugged. “I didn’t betray you by falling in love with someone else.”
    Oh, no he didn’t. He had a lot of fucking nerve. “I didn’t betray you. You chose not to exist in my life! What was I supposed to do? Stay celibate for the rest of my life? Become a nun who prayed at the shrine to Heath?” I bent over and grabbed my gloves off the floor. “I’m leaving. I don’t need this shit.”
    My hair was slipping out of my bun and irritated with the tug of its weight falling, I reached out and yanked the tie out