“Goodnight,” he whispers, and steals one last, very long kiss with one hand on my waist, one hand on my face.
I get comfortable in the warm bed and try to settle my thoughts so I can fall asleep, but I can’t help the ones that keep coming up tonight. They make me realize something…that for the first time, maybe ever…I actually believe I deserve the good around me, the happiness…the guy.
I stare up at the ceiling and whisper, “Did you do this, God? Are you actually up there?” I pause, feeling overwhelmed in a good way. “Did you let me keep him?”
There’s no answer…no real one, not one I can hear…but there’s one I can feel—a steadiness in my body I can’t explain.
I turn around in my bed, looking up at the wall behind the headboard—the wall that connects to Bash’s room. I lift my hand and knock, three small taps.
There’s a beat. Then, from the other side: three taps back.
I lie my head back on the pillow and smile, letting myself drift into a peaceful kind of sleepI’m finally getting used to.
78
Bash
Five months doesn’t sound like long until it’s packedwith all the ways you’re trying to learn another person, trying to be what they need, and never wanting to mess things up.
Some days the moods dips without warning—no cause, no fix, just a low threshold. We just walk through it together, and I try to remind her softly that our brains can get stuck in these patterns. It’s doing its job; we just have to teach it that it doesn’t need to be on alert all of the time anymore, teach her brain that she’s safe. Sometimes we argue with it. Sometimes we just sit on the floor and eat cereal out of the box and name five things we can see in the room until she feels better.
I still mess up…a lot. I’ll say something in a clinical way that I swear I’m not trying to bring into our relationship, and I’ll see her shut down because it sounded like I was making her into a patient. I’ll apologize, and then try again, using my boyfriend voice, not the clinician voice. And we keep doing that until it feels like second nature and not something that has to be forced.
She’s taught me so much in this time together—that protecting someone doesn’t mean having to solve them, that I don’t need to rescue people in order to feel less guilty about not saving Isabel, thatguarding a complex heart and mind sometimes just looks like turning the music down and sometimes looks like blasting it at midnight and dancing like idiots in the campus parking lot, that the strongest thing I can say sometimes is just, “I’m not going anywhere. You’re safe with me.”
She makes me feel like I’m finally living again, like I get to become who I’m supposed to become.
I find new things I love about her every day I get to be around her. The way she’ll randomly start singing a song that correlates with a situation going on, and I always laugh because it’s always very, very accurate. The way she gets road rage and then always apologizes afterwards and starts coming up with all the ways they’re probably having a bad day and were maybe just yelling at their kid in the backseat who was crying and didn’t mean to swerve into her lane. The ways she never stops growing and questioning her journey with her faith, God, and the world around us. The ways she’s let her guard down enough for me to get to show her the soft, respectful, protective love she deserves to experience. Loving Lydia has been the most rewarding experience.
My sole purpose has become trying to show her love can be safe, that she can heal from what her father did, what Eli did, what every other man who used her and discarded her did. Lydia has such a beautiful soul, and I want her to see just how brightly she shines even in the dark depths of all the pain she’s been through—that was never once her fault or hers to carry.
Every chance I get to be around her and experience that light, I take. And Sundays are slowly becoming my favorite day of the week because it’s full of her. Not only does she love coming to church with Erik and me, but she’s roped Simone and Lani in, too. At first, it was so that she felt more comfortable and less out of place, and now it’s because they’ve all sort of just made it a thing to keep coming. Lani calls it JFD—Jesus and friends day…except Erik, she’ll always add, and we’ll always ignore laughing. Granted, she’s the only one who calls it that, but we all share the sentiment with her. We carpool together, grab lunch after, and then all rotate weeks for who gets to choose what activity we do for the day. It’s been amazing to watch her grow and to get to grow right next to her.
“You’ve put on three different sweaters, Bro,” Erik says, perched on his desk chair, tying his shoes. “Just pick one and come on. Lydia thinks you’recuteno matter what you wear.”
I glare at him in the mirror. “Don’t ever saycutewith that high-pitched voice again. It made me very uncomfortable.”
He laughs, hopping down and patting me on the back as he walks over to the door. “Let’s go, pretty boy.”
I shake my head, turning around and walking out of the door he’s holding open, thumping his head on the way out.
“Ow, dude,” he says, rubbing the back of his head. “So…howareyou two doing by the way? I mean, you have to be doing pretty good since you spend all your time with her now instead of me.”
“Do you need a tissue for the tears?” I tease him, tucking in my shirt hem under the sweater and smoothing it out as we walk down the stairs.
He rolls his eyes.
“We’re doing good,” I tell him. “Hard, some days. But the good kind.”
Erik presses his lips together and nods, impressed. “Honestly, I never thought I’d see the day you let anyone in like this, let alone wanted to bethishealthy of a partner for someone. My boy is growing up.”
He pretends to get emotional, and I shove him and laugh as we walk across the parking lot.
“Yeah,” I say, actually stopping to think about it. “I mean…it’s for her. She makes me want to grow and be better. She’s my best friend, and I want to see her happy, and if I can contribute to that happiness and calmness and peace, I want to—”
“Excuse me?” Erik asks, offended. “That was really meaningful and all, like gold star for you, really. But I’m kinda stuck on the best friend part. I thoughtIwas your best friend.”
I nudge his arm. “You are. You’re just bumped down a notch.” I shrug. “It’s performance-based and you…well, you don’t performatively make me feel the way Lydia does,” I wince. “Sorry.”
