“She hurt you, I know. I’m sorry, but—”

“Quiet.” He tapped a finger on the top of her head. “She didn’t love me, or if she did, that love had specific requirements. So you couldn’t call it a gift.”

He was silent for a moment, selecting his words carefully. “It isn’t easy looking in the mirror and accepting that you were missing some element, some thing that kept a person you wanted from loving you.”

She tried to keep steady. “No, it’s not.”

“And even when you come to terms with it, when you realize it just wasn’t right, that there was something missing from the other person, too, something missing from the whole, it still breaks your stride. It makes you a lot more hesitant about taking that kind of chance again.”

“I understand that.”

“And you end up going nowhere,” he stated, echoing her earlier statement. “Jordan said something to me the other day that had me thinking, and thinking back. I asked myself if I’d ever really imagined life with Lily. You know, pictured how we’d be together a few years down the road. I could see the immediate future, the moving-to-New-York thing. How we’d get jobs in our chosen fields, find a place to live, and then I realized that was pretty much it. That was all I’d been able to see. Not how we would live or what we’d do beyond that vague picture, not how we’d look together in a decade. It wasn’t hard to picture my life without her in it, maybe harder to pick up my life at the point she dumped me. Lots of bruises on the pride and ego. Lots of anger and hurt. And the by-product of feeling like I probably wasn’t cut out for the whole love-and-marriage thing.”

Her heart was twisting, for both of them. “You don’t have to explain.”

“I’m not finished. I was bumping along pretty well. Had my life in order—not so you’d think so, but it suited me. Then Moe knocked you flat on the sidewalk, and things began to change. No secret I was attracted to you from the get-go, and hoped we’d end up naked on this sofa sooner or later. But, initially, that’s as far as I could see things, regarding you and me.”

This time he tipped her face up. He wanted her to look at him now. Wanted to see her face. “I’ve known you less than a month. On a lot of basic points we come at it from opposite angles. But I can see my life with you, the way you can look through a window and see your own little world spread out. I can see how it could be a year from now, or twenty years from now, with you and me and what we make.”

He skimmed his fingers along her cheek, just to feel the shape of it. “What I can’t see is how I’d pick up my life from this point and make it without you.”