I looked at her for a while.
“I started something with somebody else,” I said. “Somebody who kept it real from jump. Somebody who showed up for me in ways I wasn’t used to being shown up for.” I leaned forward. “And now you’re sitting in front of me telling me everything I needed to hear for thirteen years. And I don’t know what to do with that Bri.”
“I know. But you don’t love her the way you love me. Yeah it looks good to the public but you know that I have your heart! She don’t deserve you!”
“You never chose me. Every time it came down to it you walked away. Why would this time be different?”
She got up from the bed.
She crossed the room and stood in front of me and put both of her hands on my face, then she kissed me. I felt everything behind it that I had been trying to talk myself out of feeling for years.
When she pulled back she looked at me straight.
“Because I’m your soulmate,” she said. “And you know it. Nobody is going to make you feel what I make you feel. Nobody ever has and nobody ever will and you know that’s true.”
I hated that she was right.
I hated how well she knew me and how little defense I had against it when she was standing this close saying the right things in the right voice.
“If I give up everything for you,” I said. “There’s no second chance after this. You understand that? This is it. I’m not doing another decade of almost.”
“I know. I gave up my father to be with you. I chose you and I’ll always choose you from now on Xavier.”
“Say it like you mean it Brielle. I’m about to drop everything and need to know you all the way in.”
“I mean it Xavier. You before everybody. Every time. From right now until I don’t have any more time left. I promise you that.”
I looked at her.
And I believed her.
Not because she said it perfectly. Because I could see it costing her something to say it. She’s been proving herself to me this go round.
I pulled her in and held her tight. She held back and we stayed like that for a long time in the quiet of that room.
What happened after was the best sex we’d ever had. Years of everything we had been holding back finally coming to surface. She rode me like she had something to prove, and I let her prove it. I knew, there was nowhere else I’d rather be. Finally, I knew she was fully mine.
—
She was asleep, cuddle underneath me when my phone lit up on the nightstand.
Kyla was calling me.
I looked at the screen for a second. Two weeks of nothing and now a call at eleven thirty at night. I slid out of bed without waking Brielle and went into the hallway and answered.
“Kyla?”
She was crying before she said a word. This cry was heavy as hell. The kind that had been building for a long time and had finally gotten too heavy to hold.
“I need you to come over,” she said. “Please. I know I don’t have the right to ask you for anything right now but please just come.”
I looked back at the bedroom door.
“Are you okay. Are you safe.”
“I’m safe. Just please come.”
I grabbed my keys.
