He dropped his hands from my shoulders. “I don’t have the strength to explain everything to you, to fight every hour of my waking life just to be with you, just to take on the world that’s going to kick the shit out of me because I’m with you. You are a battle I don’t want to fight, Roxanne. I want to have my strength at hand.” His dark eyes searched my face, and he held out his powerful right hand. “As a man, I can’t do the things I need to do with you as my woman. You know I’m right.”

“Didn’t you ever hear of Romeo and Juliet!”

“If they’d lived, the world would have beaten them down, to pulp. To dust. They’d have lost each other anyway. That’s the real tragedy, not that they died. And that’s what the world would do to us. Maybe one day in the future it won’t cost a black man and a white woman everything they have, every ounce of strength and sinew and courage just to love each other, but that day sure as hell ain’t now.”

“That’s what you learned in Montgomery? You’re leaving me because I’m white and you’re colored,” I lashed out, knowing how he hated that term, using it like the vicious little tool I knew it to be.

“I can’t believe you said that, Roxanne. Are you willing yourself stupid?”

“A brave man would stand by a woman he loved!”

“Not if every time he looked at her he saw the very thing he needed to defeat. You compromise me. It’s that simple.”

I felt those words as though he had struck me. I could feel my birthmark throbbing with blood and anger. “It’s not simple!”

“It’s not, but I’m done talking about it. Some things you just need to know in your bones, and if you don’t know it in your bones, you never will know it at all.”

“People who love each other need to be strong together. We can be strong together.”

“I can’t, not anymore, not and do everything else I need to do. I don’t have that kind of strength, and neither do you.”

“I do!”

“I don’t.” He ran a hand over his face and stared at the dried blood on his palm. “I had to kiss you in front of them like I did to prove to those bastards that I had a right to be your man. They’ll never grant me that right, and don’t you mistake, Roxanne, it’s theirs to grant. Not yours, and not mine. I’ll never be humiliated like that again, as long as I live. I’ll kill someone first.”