"How did I know you would show up here tonight?" The sardonic question was out of my mouth before I could think it through.

A corner of Nik's mouth tilted up. "You did?" He looked far too pleased at my reaction to be even the slightest bit embarrassed at his own transparency.

I stood staring at him for a long moment, the fluttering in my stomach moving upwards to my chest. It was still a toss up as to which was easier to endure, but I would take what I could – at least my heart had stopped aching now.

"Why?" I asked simply. There were so many ways to continue my question. Why did you sit with us? Why are you here now? Why are we behaving like this?

Why couldn't you have stayed gone?

Instead of asking any of them, I stopped and let that one word hang in the air. In a way, it was fitting. It encompassed everything I wanted to ask.

Nik slowly slid his hands into the pockets of his coat. "I don't know," he said, as if he knew exactly what I was thinking. "Maybe I just can't stay away from you."

I blinked at that bald declaration. A slow shiver worked its way down the nape of my neck.

"You know," I said finally, as he stood waiting for a response that eluded me, "this might very well be called 'stalking'." I waved a hand at the air between us.

Nik shrugged. "You don't have to invite me in if you don't want to."

For a moment, I let myself think about it. Stepping back into the comfort of my apartment; closing the door in his face. Lying sleepless beneath the covers for the rest of the night, my heart flitting about under crawling skin.

But I also remembered the last time we had been alone together in an apartment – and that prospect was equally appalling.

I miss you, Tamy, he had said, the glittering earnestness shining in his eyes. And I want you back in my life.

"You have to know I didn't plan the meeting at the pizza place," Nik continued, when I made no move to either concede or reject his presence.

"No?" I asked, my eyebrows lifting.

"No," Nik said. "It was a coincidence." Then he shrugged. "A convenient coincidence."

"So you hijacked our table."

"I didn't hijack anything," he protested. "We needed a table – and you had a nice one."

I rolled my eyes. Then I stepped back and scowled at him.

He smiled.

As he stepped in, I folded my arms across my chest. "So why are you here?"

He stood a little inside of the door, sliding off his shoes and shrugging off his coat before replying. "I don't know. We didn't get to talk at dinner, so..."

I shrugged, watching him carefully place his shoes on the rack. "We don't have much to talk about, do we?"

He lifted his eyes to meet mine. "I seem to remember differently."

I pressed my lips together. "I don't have anything I want to talk to you about."

"Don't you? You let me in."

I kept silent.

Nik waited a long beat, then loosely lifted a shoulder before letting it drop back down. "That wasn't a no," he said.

I gritted my teeth. He could be so annoying. How had I forgotten that about him?

"Are you just going to keep showing up out of nowhere?" I asked.

He shrugged again, but didn't reply.

I steadied myself by placing a steadying palm on the door frame. My hand was still trembling just the slightest bit. I took a deep breath and slowly let it out.

In all that time, Nik hadn't yet said anything.

"This is getting old," I said finally. "I haven't seen you in all these years, and then – all of a sudden – you're appearing everywhere in my life." I let out a half-snort, half-laugh. "What do you want from me?"

"I've told you." Nik spread his hands, looking in all the world like he was physically laying out cards. "I've told you what I feel, what I want. And you haven't given me an answer."

I pressed my lips together. I imagined that if it had been possible, I would have pushed them into inexistence.

Nik took a step forward. "Tamy," he murmured. I felt his hand land on my elbow, his thumb caressing my skin. I could feel goosebumps beginning to bloom on my arms.

"I don't know," I said. It came out as a strangled noise, my throat clenching around the words. "I really... I don't know." My voice rose on the last word. My face was screwed up; my heart was thumping erratically.

"The question is simple, Tamy," Nik said, the calmness of his tone the complete opposite of mine. "Do you still have feelings for me?"

His eyes caught mine and, try as I might, I couldn't look away.

For the briefest of moments, I considered lying. I considered telling him that I was over him, that he should leave me alone.

And then I considered not ever seeing him again.

When I answered, it was in a whisper. "You know I do."

Nik smiled, his lips curling upward into a Cheshire's grin.

"But," I said, moving back to put some space between us, "I don't think we should do anything about it."

The smile fell off his face with a suddenness that might have been comical in a different situation.

"We tried once and look how that turned out." I tried shrugging off the physical ache flowering in my chest at his expression. "It's a bad idea. You can't deny that."

"You don't know that."

"Of course not," I muttered. Because of course he would do the exact thing I'd just said he couldn't.

"I mean it, Tamy." Nik took a step forward. This time, I didn't move back, even when he reached for my hand. "How do you know if we don't try?"

"We've tried," I pointed out. I tugged at my hand, but he held fast.

"Yes," he said, "but we were kids back then. We didn't – I didn't know what I wanted yet."

"And you do now?" I hadn't meant to sound accusatory, but the sharpness in my tone crept out of its own accord.

There was a moment of silence, during which I shifted from foot to foot under his scrutiny. Then he said, in the quietest voice I've heard from him so far, "Yes, I do."

"Well," I conceded, "maybe you do." My gaze slid away from his. "But maybe I don't."

He frowned. "What?"

"Maybe I still don't know what I want yet," I said. And even as I spoke the words, I could hear the ring of truth in them.

There was another long pause. And then Nik said, sounding like a balloon that had just suffered a needle to the side, "Oh."

His hand dropped away. I felt a spasm in my fingers as they instinctively grabbed at him and missed. Then I came to my senses and let my hand fall back to my side.

It would be so easy to let it go – to let him go. But I opened my mouth. "No, I mean..."

Nik, in the process of turning away, stopped.

"It's just..." I trailed off, twisting my lips this way and that, as if the action in itself could help me to find the words I was missing. "You've been somewhere – seen and done so many new things, while I've always just been here. I didn't realise it before, but... It feels like I haven't properly lived my life."

It had been his Facebook page. Seeing all the pictures, all the people he had met and all the places he had visited had triggered something in me. All of a sudden, my life had seemed drab. Pathetic, even.

Nik had gone out and seen the world. After our break up, he had moved on with his life. All I had done was to lower my head into my academic work and ploughed on. And now Nik was back, surer of himself than ever, and I was still that same old Tamy.

Now, Nik was frowning at me. "So... what are you saying? That you want to travel?"

"Maybe." I shrugged. "I don't know. That's the issue – I don't know what I want to do after graduation. Maybe I'll find a teaching job, but... maybe not. Maybe I'll want to do something else."

"Okay," he said slowly. "And what does that have to do with us?"

Us. He thought he could pop back in three years later and say it so easily again.

But that was a battle I didn't want to fight right now, so I lifted my hands in a gesture of helplessness. "I don't know. I'm just saying that I don't know what I want, and that includes..." I waved a hand vaguely. Us.

Nik smiled flatly. "You mean, you don't know if you want to be with me again."

My gaze stuttered and flinched away. "How can I ever be sure?" I asked in a whisper. "How can I ever trust that you won't run away again, as soon as the going gets tough?"

A poignant silence followed. I assumed it was because he knew – if he said anything to the contrary, it could only be a lie.

"How can I be sure," I said, "that you won't be secretly wishing it was over?"

That made his brow scrunch up. "I wasn't secretly wishing for it to be over."

I held his gaze. Slowly, his head went back down.

"Okay," he said finally – quietly. "Maybe a part of me did want it to be over back then."

It was only when I tasted blood that I realised I was biting down, hard, on my bottom lip. "Well," I said, my tone as flat as the look I levelled at him – a look that was completely wasted on him. "You got your wish, then."

"No." Nik had regained his composure by now, head lifting as he got back on track. "I made a mistake. I realised that the moment it was over."

"Yeah, right," I snorted. "You expect me to believe that after three years of radio silence?"

"How was I going to contact you?" he demanded, "I was on the other side of the world. You blocked my number, blocked my email address, blocked me on Facebook... Hell, even Ansel wasn't replying to any of my messages. Everyone else I asked refused to talk about you. The only way to get you to speak to me was to come back. And I booked my plane ticket as soon as I graduated."

A part of me wanted to snarl that Nadine could have passed on a message – any message – instead of all the accusations she had thrown my way instead. Rather than give voice to it my indignation, I said nothing.

Nik took two determined steps towards me – a hunter stalking its prey. It took everything in me to stand my ground, even when his hands came up and grasped my shoulders.

"I need to know, Tamy," he said. "Why did you come that night?"

Distracted by the weight of his touch, it took me more than a second to realign my train of thought to match his. "What?"

"If you're done with us," Nik said, "why did you come with the others to pick me up that night?"

"What's your obsession with that?" I asked. "Nadine made me come. It didn't mean anything."

"She couldn't have forced you to do something you didn't want to do."

"Fine," I snapped. "I didn't need to go. But she kept harassing me, Ansel was going, and maybe I was curious, all right?"

I didn't add that Ansel had only come along to watch out for me.

"So you did wonder," he said. He was like a dog that had dug up an old bone and was growling at anyone who tired to take it away. "About us. About whether three years had changed anything. About... whether we still had a chance."

It was less of a question and more of a statement. He didn't need to ask. He knew it for a fact. So did everyone else – that was why Lux, Nadine, Wolf, and even Ansel had all felt the need to warn me off him.

At that thought, I succumbed to my initial instinct and took a step back, so that he could no longer reach me. I touched a finger to my bottom lip, feeling the flesh tremble.

When I didn't respond, I heard Nik ask, with the slightest waver in his voice, "Didn't you?"

Then I made a mistake – I looked up. Nik was staring intently at me, his countenance so still it almost looked like he was holding his breath.

For the longest time, I stood, tied to the invisible bond between us, breathing deeply. Finally, I said, in barely a squeak of a voice, "Maybe."

It took him a moment to decipher the noise that had come out of my mouth. Then his eyes closed and I saw his shoulders fall on a long exhalation. He didn't say anything, but the cadence of his breath sounded a lot like the words, Thank God.

"But that doesn't mean anything," I hurried to add. If I spoke loud enough, fast enough, maybe it could erase that one word from before.

"No," he countered, suddenly back to his old self, "It means everything."

"Plenty of people wonder about what could have been," I said. "It doesn't mean they have to act upon it. Some married people develop feelings for someone else, but they stay away so they can keep their marriage."

Nik stared at me. "Tamy," he said slowly, "we are not married to other people."

I moved my hands around in a restless gesture. "I'm just saying."

The relief was now fully gone, frustration replacing it as the primary emotion on his face. "But there's no reason for us to stay away from each other," he said.

"There are plenty," I said, and lifted my fingers with my next words. "They're called Nadine, Lux, Wolf, and Ansel."

He made a strangled noise between a snort and a groan. "They will just have to deal with it. It's not their lives."

"But it is mine," I said. "And I still have a lot of living I want to do. I don't want to give it all up."

There was a beat of silence as Nik frowned over that. "I'm not asking you to give up your life," he said, slowly, like he didn't understand what the connection could be. "I'm just asking you to give us another chance. We can take it as slow as you want."

"But I..." I struggled for the words I needed. "I don't want to give up my life again. I may not know what I want, but I do know I want to do something."

"Your life doesn't have to stop just because you are in a relationship," Nik said. The frustration edging his words was a palpable entity, growing in size by the moment. In a second, it would be looming up and over me.

"But it did!" I snapped, my own voice strained. And then softer, "Back then, it did. The moment we got together, my life started revolving around you. I had no plans of my own anymore. Even Lux got sick of me because I was always either with you or talking about you."

I took a deep breath, then let it out on the last statement, "I lost myself in our relationship." The admission was hard to make.

Nik didn't disagree. He knew it was true. It was what had made him pull away in the first place. He had felt smothered by the intensity of my love. And so, he had discarded it the way one throws away a used wrapper from a candy that had long since melted.

"We're different people now," he said finally. "What happened before won't happen again."

"You don't know that."

"I do," he said, and I could almost see the thorns growing on the words as they left his mouth.

"You can't control the future," I said. "You don't know what's going to happen."

"I don't," he said, "but I know myself. I know that, after all this time, I won't make the same mistakes again."

"No," I said, "you'll just make new ones."

His brows drew together, and I could almost sense the shift in his attitude. He had been cajoling, almost conciliatory, but now his back straightened and his mouth flattened.

"So you think–" he started, but I cut him off.

"No, I only mean that everyone makes mistakes. And you can think all you want that you will be able to avoid what you see coming – but the truth is, you won't be able to see some things coming, because they're going to be new problems."

"Well..." I saw his shoulders tense as he racked his brain for a counterpoint, before he shrugged. "Yeah. That's true. But that's what it means to learn from past experiences. That's how people get better."

He took a step forward, advancing physically with his every point. "But for that to happen, we need to give each other second chances."

I watched the space between us diminish.

"I've spent the past three years building myself back up," I said. My voice choked up a little as a wave of emotion swept through me. I was blinking back tears of remembered pain as I went on. "I don't want to lose all of that again."

"But you don't have to," he said. "That's not what a relationship is about. It's not about becoming part of another person. It's about two people coming together to help each other become better people – that's what a healthy relationship should be about."

"Then maybe I've never been in a healthy relationship."

Nik stopped, so suddenly that my instinctive reaction was to look around, to make sure that nothing had gone wrong – that the apartment wasn't on fire or something equally urgent. Then I looked back at him and was met with the full force of his stare.

"Maybe," he said quietly, "it's time to start."

There was suddenly something lodged in my throat. I tried swallowing around it, but my mouth was so dry, it felt like the walls of my throat were pieces of sandpaper rubbing against each other.

"I don't even know how to go about doing that," I croaked finally, and we both heard the capitulation in my voice.

The hopeful light in Nik's eyes was blinding. "We can figure it out together. That's the whole point, right?"

A loud exhalation escaped me at his claim. Together. How could he really believe that? He was the one who held all the cards. I had always been the one to give in, to compromise in an attempt to hold onto him. He had no idea what it felt like to be the one to love more.

We were not in this together.

My lips mouthed the words, but my throat lent no sound to them.

"Tamy," Nik whispered. He reached out, waiting.

I looked at his outstretched hand, then back up at him. Slowly, I lifted my own hand and allowed him to thread his fingers through mine.

He took another step forward, so that our bodies were flush against each other.

I stared at him, my heart hammering out a tattoo of acidity that spread through my chest. He leaned in, light blue eyes mesmerising, and I knew there was no escape. I was caught, like a fly in the middle of a spider's web.

That was the single thought playing through my mind as Nik's lips pressed onto mine.

***