The Rules of Regret

by Megan Squires

  “Do you want to know what I think?” That phrase always struck me as odd, because most people coupled it with a tone that came across condescending and belittling. But the way Torin said it, he was actually asking my permission. Asking if it was okay for him to share his thoughts and feelings on my thoughts and feelings.

  I nodded. It was.

  “The way I see it, that sixteen-year-old hardware store worker of yours—he’s got a pretty important role. Sometimes he discontinues certain colors, and sometimes he creates new ones.” I could hear Sonja at the counter behind us arguing with the paint guy about how many gallons we would need, and I left her to that task. Torin continued, “And sometimes he moves them around into an abstract design that might not seem like it makes sense to us, but he sees the whole picture and it’s his job, not ours, to interpret it.”

  “I wish I could see things that way.” I really did; I wished I could believe in something more the way Torin did.

  “Maybe someday you will,” he said. I felt his heart against my back, that soothing pulse that steadied my own.

  “It’s exhausting talking in metaphors. Like this has been the most taxing hardware store trip ever.”

  “Agreed,” he smiled, dimples and all. “But sometimes it’s easier to say what you feel when it’s masked under something else.”

  All of the quoting finally made sense.

  I flipped around to face him and ripped off my own proverbial mask.

  “I’m in love with you, Torin,” I said. “And I feel like I don’t have a whole lot to offer because I was on the path to finding myself, and now Lance is dead and now I have to create who I am without him in my life, even though he was sorta out of my life since we broke up and all. But now he’s completely gone, with no chance of coming back and I don’t know what that means for me and for us.” The sentences ran on. “And I left. I just left you there. Lance died and I freaked out and I left and didn’t answer your calls because I felt guilty since I was not only mourning Lance’s death, but had just started mourning my failed relationship with him. Which didn’t even seem fair since I’d already started falling for you. So I was so trapped in my grief, and I didn’t want you to think that me mourning Lance and his life and his death and my life with him and my death with him meant that I had stopped loving you. Because I hadn’t. I haven’t.” Torin’s eye softened with understanding, which was exactly what I needed. Always what I needed. “So I love you, and I don’t want to mask that under anything else. I want you to know that I still love you, no metaphors.”

  “I love you too, Darby.” He brought his lips down to mine and suddenly we were kissing in aisle 23, amid the paint chip samples and blue tape and the tarps and the brushes. We were kissing. Like inappropriate, you-really-should-get-a-room kissing. And I loved every second of it, because we weren’t masking anything. We weren’t hiding our feelings or holding anything back. We were full-on making out in a hardware store in front of this exhausting metaphor of paint chips.

  His hand was on my cheek; my fingers were twisted in his hair. His chest leaned into mine; I pushed back with equal pressure. It was a lot of heavy breathing, racing pulses, and lips and tongue and sighing and wanting. And it lasted for several minutes, to the point where, even though we weren’t doing the whole masking thing, we sort of had to in order to keep things decent and somewhat appropriate. While I wanted Torin to know that I loved him, I didn’t need every patron in the store getting a complete visual of just how much.

  He pulled back first, taking my bottom lip between his as he slowly broke our kiss.

  “I don’t know what I have to offer you right now, but whatever is there, it’s all yours,” I said, looking at him, trusting him with my heart, my grief, and my crazy.

  “We love the things we love for what they are.” I knew the words weren’t his own, but this time he wasn’t using them to shield his feelings at all, because I didn’t think he could have said any other combination of words to create a thought or sentence than rang truer than those in this exact moment. “I love you, Darby, for what you are. Not what you will become once you’re out of this valley.” He dipped down and pressed his lips to mine in a sudden way that made the floor completely fall out from under me. “Not what you hoped Anna would become. Not what you allowed Lance to make of you. I love you for you.”

  “Look at my feet.”

  Torin shrugged his head back into his neck, completely perplexed. “What?” But then he did as I said and a smile stretched across his face, ear to ear, as he glanced at my sandals. “Blew your socks off.”

  “You warned me you would,” I said, covering my mouth to hide the laughter.

  “You forgot to recite your, 'Who are you?' line,” he said, pulling my hand from my lips.

  “I didn’t forget,” I answered quickly. “I know exactly who you are, Torin.” Pushing up on my toes, I sealed my lips to his in one more prolonged kiss. “You’re the one who’s helping me figure out exactly who I am.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “I don’t notice a difference, really.” Torin dropped his brush into the open can of paint. “Is that bad that I don’t notice a difference?”

  “If we were still talking in metaphors, then yes, it’s catastrophically bad because then you’re saying there’s nothing special about paint chip SW4560.” I sat down in the very middle of the room and tucked my feet underneath me. “But since we’re done with that and this is just paint, I sorta agree.”

  Sonja had left a couple hours ago because her boyfriend was back in town for the weekend, so Torin and I were alone in the empty townhouse.

  “Let’s get pizza.” Torin pulled his phone out from his back pocket and his jeans rested low enough on his hips that the toned edge of his hip peeked out above it. “You hungry?”

  “I am.”

  He scrolled on his phone with his index finger and asked, “What’s around here? I honestly don’t even know where we are.” It was a funny statement coming from the guy that seemed to have a compass implanted in his brain at birth.

  “Papa Pizza’s is decent. They deliver,” I said. “And Torin?” His eyes flickered up to mine. “How did you know how to find me? I sorta left without giving you any clue.”

  He bit his bottom lip and squinted as he thumbed through the list of pizza joints. “Your application.”

  “Oh.” I guessed that made sense. It didn’t really matter how he’d found me, though. I was just glad that he had.

  “Pepperoni okay?”

  I agreed with a nod and he called in our order.

  As he conversed with the worker on the other line, I couldn’t help but stare at him. His hair curled around his ear and his dimples pressed in and out of his cheeks, sometimes more prominently with certain syllables and words than others. I tried to pinpoint which ones brought them out, because I decided those would become permanent words in my own vocabulary, hoping maybe they would rub off on him and he’d start using them more frequently, too. I really loved when those dimples made an appearance.

  He’d been so focused on ordering our late-night dinner that he didn’t really notice me gawking at him, until our eyes caught after he’d hung up the phone and dipped it back into his pocket.

  “You see something you like?” he asked, his eyebrows shooting up in a 'I totally know you were just checking me out,' kind of way.

  “Definitely,” I admitted, returning the same encouraging grin.

  But Torin didn’t need any encouragement.

  In an instant he was down at my level, his face inches from mine, his eyes locked with an intensity that made everything else disappear. And not just our surroundings. Everything in my brain disappeared, too. Every emotion that existed outside of this realm that was just the two of us completely vanished. It was only us. No grief. No anxiety. Just us.

  Like he was on the prowl, he walked his hands across the ground and pressed his chest solidly to mine. I fell onto my elbows, then onto my back completely as the tantalizing weight of
his body guided me slowly onto the carpet.

  This wasn’t at all how I pictured our first time together—on the floor in the middle of my empty shell of an apartment with an unnecessary coat of paint drying on the walls. I’d pictured it happening, obviously, but not here. And not just weeks after losing Lance in the way that I’d lost him. In the way that we’d all lost him.

  I wondered when the time would come to move on, and how that could even be determined. People moved on in their own ways and at their own speed, I supposed. Part of me—most of me, actually—began moving on over a year ago when Lance started that process on his own with another girl. What he’d given to her took from what we had, and no matter how hard we’d tried to get it back, it was hers, not mine anymore. The heart he’d once professed to me was now parceled out, and even in death, it belonged to other girls, too. He’d given himself to them and he wasn’t all mine. Maybe he never actually was. The finality of it all broke my heart beyond repair.

  I knew it wasn’t his responsibility, but I needed Torin to help put it back together.

  We kissed for a long time. I was sure our pizza delivery guy would rap on the door at any moment, but each time things started to really pick up, something in Torin’s posture shifted. There was a tangible hesitation that made me feel like maybe I was doing something wrong. I was pretty certain after all of the times I’d been with Lance that I knew what guys liked, what got them going, but Torin’s visible pause made me feel like maybe I had it all confused. The humiliating grip of insecurity took hold.

  “Torin?” I asked after a kiss that nearly made me pass out. I marshaled my breathing before I continued. “Do you want to... um... “

  He pushed his mouth to mine and swallowed my words. His tongue ran across my bottom lip and his hands roved over my body with frantic-fueled movement. There was no question that we were on our way to doing this. Our hips, our mouths, our bodies, everything begged for more and moved synchronically in a way that felt more intimate than anything I’d ever done. I wanted him. That was not the question at all. And I was ready to give all of myself to him. Completely.

  The problem was, it didn’t seem like he wanted to take it.

  “Darby.” My name came out in the form of a throaty groan. I gripped his shoulders with my hands, my nails digging into his back, just above his shoulder blades. “This is amazing.”

  And it did. Even with all the layers of clothing between us, it felt incredible. I really wanted to feel just how incredible it could be.

  “Do you think we should...?” I tried again, because even though I’d kind of hinted at it, I wasn’t entirely sure he’d gotten that hint, since we were still just limiting things to making out.

  With his hands bracketed around me, he straightened his arms and propped himself up. The hair that hung around his face and the flush that painted his cheeks made him look so incredible that I was beyond tempted to rip his clothes off right there.

  “Do I think we should have sex?”

  Hearing him actually say it made my body temperature elevate to thermometer-breaking status.

  “Um,” I gulped between breaths that I absolutely could not control. “Yeah.”

  He dropped down onto me again, pinning me beneath him with his legs twisted in mine. The kissing became too much at that point. His lips were hot against my skin as they trailed from my earlobe down the curve of my neck, stalling right around my collarbone. “I.” Another kiss on my throat. “Want.” His lips brushed back to my ear and his ragged breath echoed into it, shooting chills the entire length of my body. “To.” His fingers raked through my hair, making it stand on end. “So.” His other hand pressed flatly against my stomach, lifting the hem of my shirt to push his palm to my bare skin making my stomach quiver with anticipation. “Bad.”

  “There’s a but.” I had to acknowledge it before he did just to save a little face.

  “No, there’s no but.” His words totally shocked me and seemed to snap me out of some daydream. “I completely want to.”

  “Are you serious, Torin?” It had never taken so much effort to swallow in my entire life, but somehow I managed it. “Like... you want to... ?”

  “It’s honestly not a matter of wanting.” The kissing had stopped momentarily, mostly so we could actually get the words out, but the movement of hands, bodies, didn’t let up. “Because I’ve wanted to do unmentionable things with you from the moment I saw you. That’s not the issue.”

  “But Torin...” I couldn’t believe we were actually talking about actually doing this. “You haven’t... I mean... you said you were a virgin.”

  “I am.” His body pushed down onto mine even harder and our legs coiled together, our chests heaving against the others, and our mouths hovering no more than a sliver of space apart. “But it’s not because I have something against sex.” He really shouldn’t have, but he licked his lips—unintentionally, I was pretty certain—and it almost made me lose it. I imagined that tongue licking across my own and that was just about more than I could handle. “I'm pretty sure I have nothing against sex. Sex is good.”

  “Sex is amazing.”

  “I’m going to choose to believe that is just a blanket statement and you’re not pulling from prior experience, even though I know that’s not the case.” He smiled when he spoke and a slight laugh followed his words. “Because I don’t like thinking about you and Lance.”

  And just like that, the breaks were completely pulled.

  “I don’t like thinking about Lance,” he continued, and this time he sat up, drawing away from me. “But I can’t stop thinking about Lance.”

  Neither could I. Only in momentary waves was I able to block him out of my mind. There wasn’t much that could distract me from the fact that he was gone, and that the way we’d left things was absolutely awful. Lance was at the forefront of my mind, no matter how hard I tried to shake him free. He was there, always there.

  “And since I can’t stop thinking about him, I think maybe we shouldn’t do this,” Torin said, his voice thick with emotion and his eyes welling with that same sorrow. “Because I don't want to be thinking about Lance when we, you know, do this.”

  Of course I agreed with that. I had to. I didn’t want to be thinking about Lance, either. I just wasn’t sure when that time would come that I wouldn’t be thinking about him. I wished for some magical hour to occur when the grieving process would come to a close. But the more of life I experienced, the more I came to realize there was no end point to grief, just different stages of it. And those stages were long, drawn out, ceaseless chunks of time.

  “Okay.” I didn’t feel rejected, if anything, it was a relief because Torin seemed to have more clarity in the moment than I did.

  “I hope it is... okay with you, I mean.”

  “Of course it is, Torin.”

  A cautious smile spread across his face and he added, “Plus, you might make fun of me for this, but there are a few other quotes I’d like to say to you before we actually do it.”

  “Oh yeah?” My interested piqued. “And what would those be.”

  Even though it was nearly black, the floodlight we’d used as we painted the wall curved shadows across the room, its own painting of light and dark. Torin’s profile was illuminated and I could see his Adam’s apple pull up and down in his throat as the ball at the back of his jaw pulsed. Nerves rose to the surface and took the form of a slight twitch of his lip and the tightening of his mouth. “As long as we both shall live.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything.

  “Does that freak you out to hear that?” Torin asked quickly, a rush of words. “Because it freaks me out to say that.”

  “It doesn’t freak me out,” I said, though it did just a little. Okay, maybe more than a little. “I just wasn’t expecting that.”

  “Expecting me to quote from wedding vows? I guess I haven’t done that yet, have I?” He smiled apprehensively. “Because I realize it’s totally unconventional, but I really
like those words. How it’s just two people, committed until death. When we are together, I want it as long as we both shall live, Darby.”

  When he said that, my heart physically hurt inside my chest for Lance and the brutal fact that he didn’t have that with anyone in his final moments. He’d died alone. Without me. Without Clara. And he died in pieces, having parceled himself out to so many different people, no one to fully claim him as their own.

  Maybe he had the hope of me as he got in that car, and I prayed that hope was enough. Because in this quiet that pulsed between Torin and me, I realized how sad it would be to die without that hope of a future. To die with regret. I clung to the thought that he did have hope, and that what Torin had once said was true: that hope was stronger than regret. I needed that to be the case for Lance. I needed that to be the case for all of us.

  “Can you say something?” Torin fingers lifted my chin. I’d been staring at the carpet—I hadn’t realized that—and I’m sure I looked like I was off in some faraway place. “Is it okay for me to tell you things like that?”

  “Of course it’s okay, Torin. It’s what I want, actually.”

  “So we’ll wait. I mean, for now, we’ll wait.”

  “We’ll wait,” I agreed.

  “This is not me saying I don’t want this, Darby.” He still cupped my jaw in his palms. “Because I want to do this. Just maybe a little differently than the way you’ve done things in the past.”

  “Different is good,” I agreed. Honestly, different was probably what I needed. And since I didn’t do a very good job knowing what I needed—having up and left Quarry Summit, having repainted a wall in a house that I no longer even inhabited—I thought Torin was a good person to make those decisions for me. I needed someone to guide me.

  “When I’m with you, I want to be able to give all of myself to you, and I want to have all of you.” He reiterated, “I think a piece of you is still with him. And that’s okay, it should be.” We were sitting now, and Torin pulled me onto his lap, my legs wrapping around him, squeezing his body closer to mine. “But it wouldn’t be fair to either of us to do this until all of our pieces were put back together. When our pieces fall into place, then we’ll be ready for each other, whatever that looks like.”