Lone eagle

They had nothing left to say to each other, and she was beginning to cling to him in desperation. She didn't want him to go, didn't want anything to happen to him, didn't want to lose the only man she had ever loved."

"“I love you,” she whispered to him again, and he looked pained. This wasn't what he'd had in mind when he came to spend the day with her. He had somehow felt that they had a silent pact not to say those kinds of things to each other, but she wasn't sticking to it. She just couldn't. She could not let him go without telling him she loved him.

In her opinion, he had a right to know. What she didn't understand was how much harder it was for him once she said the words. Until then, whatever his feelings for her, or how powerful his attraction to her, he had been able to delude himself that they were just good friends. But now there was no hiding from the fact that they weren't. They were far more than that, no matter how strenuously he tried to pretend it wasn't so.

Her words were her final gift to him, the only thing she had to give him of any real value.

And they brought reality to both of them. For just a fraction of an instant, he sensed his own vulnerability, and glimpsed the possibility that he might never come this way again. Suddenly, as he looked at her, he was grateful for every instant they had shared. He knew that he would never meet another woman like her, with as much fire and joy and excitement, and no matter where he went, or what happened to him, he would always remember her. All they had before they left each other were these last moments to share.

And as they called his flight for the last time, he bent and kissed her, standing in the airport with his arms around her. It was too late to stop the tides. He had been kidding himself, he knew, if he thought he could reverse them or even hold them back. Their feelings for each other were as inevitable as the passing of time. Whatever it was that had happened between them, they both knew without promises or words, that it was very rare, and not something that either of them would have changed, or would ever find again.

“Take care of yourself,” he said hoarsely, in a whisper.

“I love you,” she said again. She looked him right in the eye as she said it, and he nodded, unable to say the words, despite all that he felt for her. They were words to describe feelings that he had fled for thirty years.

He held her close and kissed her again, and then he knew he had to leave her.