LWLU – Finding Closure

Michael pulled away slowly and met her eyes with caution. “Say that again.”

A faint smile touched her lips. “I said I love you, Michael. I always have.”

“I knew it.” His grin stretched from ear to ear and his arms snaked around her waist. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to hear those words from you again.”

“Michael…”

He cut off her words with a kiss, practically dancing her away from the stairs. The door was closing with a faint click before Sara realized they were alone in her room. That was probably best. They needed privacy for what came next.

Sara extricated herself from his embrace and stepped back. The sight of him was nearly more than she could take. He looked so…happy.

She could almost believe it was real.

“Michael, you didn’t let me finish.”

“You finally admitted you still love me. There’s nothing more to say.” He studied her expression for a moment and his smile faded. “There’s more to say?”

She sat on the edge of the mattress and patted the comforter beside her. “Come here.”

With a full frown, he sat, brows furrowed while he waited for her to speak.

“It’s been stupid for me to deny my feelings for you.” She took his hands in hers, fighting to ignore the electricity between them each time they touched. “Regardless of the way things ended up, I thought we had something special at the time and…”

“It was special. It was real.” Desperation crept into his tone. “Please just let me…”

Taking a page from Michael’s book, she silenced him with a soft brush of her lips over his. Eyes closed, she rested her forehead against his. “Please let me say what I need to tell you without interrupting.”

He grasped at her fingers, squeezing with emotion while bringing his lips to hers in a lingering caress. “Okay.”

“Like I was saying…” She pulled away from him, desperate for a breath that would give her the strength to get through this. “Whatever it was we had…I’m always going to love you because of it.” She flicked her tongue over her suddenly dry lips to wet them. “On some level.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but remembered her request and snapped it shut. Wordless, his eyes pleaded with her, implored her words to drift from their current course. Of the two of them, Sara knew he’d always been the smart one.

Michael already knew what she was going to say.

Somehow, knowing that made it all the more difficult…

She swallowed over the growing lump of emotion in her throat. Why was there suddenly so much saliva in her mouth?

“But what we had…Michael…it’s in the past. It’s been over for years.” She released his hands. “I will always love you as a friend, but…You aren’t the right man for me.” She swallowed, hard. “I think we both need to face the fact that you and I were never supposed to be together. If we were, well…we already would be.”

She tried to stand, but Michael grabbed her elbow to stop her. “That’s not true. I tried to talk to you after the party…after the funeral, but…”

“I know. Veronica told me.”

“Then you have to understand that forces…people…we were supposed to be together and everything kept us apart.”

Sara nodded. “I know that.” The frenzy of pain and frustration mingling in his eyes sliced through her heart. She removed his hand from her arm. “Don’t you think that if we were really meant to be together that the universe would have been conspiring to bring us together, not keep us apart?”

Adamant, he shook his head. “No. We just needed to grow up first. Now…”

“There is no now, Michael. Not for us. It’s not…”

In a flash, his hands were on either side of her face, pulling her near. His kiss was soft yet firm, insistent. Their lips molded against each other with the practiced skill one can only find with that one first great love of their life, but a simple truth remained a sharp barb between them, a poignant reminder of why this was, in fact, a goodbye kiss.

No matter what they felt for one another, no matter how easily their bodies remembered what they once shared, the bitter pill of knowledge remained. While Sara knew that Michael Scofield was everything she once wanted, he was never what she needed. And even if she could somehow fight past that knowledge, another darker truth remained poised to destroy them both.

For just a moment longer, Sara wanted to enjoy the kiss. She wanted to remember the way he smelled and felt and tasted. But he tasted only like his own tears, the ones falling freely from his eyes. Though he didn’t understand why, he knew this was their final kiss for a lifetime. One to end their doomed relationship once and for all, like a bookend to be forever juxtaposed across from that first hesitant kiss of foolish youth.

Of course, Sara herself hammered the first nail into the coffin of their love five years ago. Michael didn’t know about the murder. If he knew about the life she took all that time ago…

It didn’t matter. Not anymore.

With the same abrupt manner in which Michael began the kiss, Sara ended it, rising to her feet and turning from him. His fingers remained lightly interlocked with hers, but she didn’t pull away. She couldn’t.

“You have to let me go, Michael. You have to move on.”

“I can’t.” His voice was barely audible. “I don’t know how.”

She gathered in a breath and turned to look at him over her shoulder. “I’m going to marry Paul. You have to accept that or we can’t be in each other’s lives once the ice keeping us here melts.”

“I need more than that,” he whispered.

Sara turned away from him. “Friendship is the only thing I have left to offer you. Please don’t destroy that like everything else I’ve given you.”

Gradually, his fingers slid away from hers and Sara left the room, outwardly calm despite her inner heartache.

Continue reading…

…Go back

© 2010, Sydney Katt. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use of content will result in dragon attacks.