I love her.
I tried to name it in other ways, because I’m a like to be sure of a thing before I agree with it.
I care about her.
I’m attached to her in a way I haven’t been attached to anyone.
None of those phrasings held enough weight.
I love her.I aminlove with her.
I’d probably been in love with Alyssa since she stormed at me acrossforty yards of grass and knocked me half a step off-balance I never got back. And on this particular Tuesday she’d pecked me on the lips and every other word I had for it quit working.
I knew what the tight feeling was. I’d had its cousin a few times in my life. The time Zion was facing five years; the call from Tre that put me on the highway across states not knowing what I’d find on the other end; Simone wheeled into surgery for Zaria with the same risk that took our mother. Those moments were the grip of:someone I love is in danger.
This moment wasn’t that exactly. This was a version with no emergency attached to it. TheI love her and she’s fine, yet that somehow makes it harder to cope withone. I’d never felt it before.
I put my hand on the squat rack to steady myself.
I could lose her.
I tried to put the thought away but it wouldn’t stay down. It sat at the edge and watched me. I tried to silently run the four-count breathing technique I’d coaxed Simone through countless times to manage her panic attacks, until my hands warmed and my pulse came off the ceiling and I was, in the operational sense, fine.
I was not fine. But I knew, in my first decision on the other side of it, that I wasn’t telling Alyssa. Not today, not this week.
I don’t say things I haven’t thought all the way through, and she deserved a man who’d worked himself out before he handed her anything. Saying it out loud was the one move I had left that I couldn’t take back. As long as I hadn’t said it, I was still the one holding it. The minute it left my mouth it was hers, and real, and out in the world where things get taken from you. I wasn’t ready to be that breakable in front of anybody, even her.Especiallyher.
So I’d wait. I didn’t know how long. But I knew I had to wait.
She’d stopped talking, and then she turned with weights in her hands, looked at me, then dropped the weights and crossed the gym in three steps.
“Julian! What’s wrong! Oh my God! Sit down. Sit down now.”
“I’m okay, Alyssa.”
“You are not okay. Sit. Are you dizzy?”
She had a hand on my face and a hand on my arm and a terror in her eyes. I sat on the bench to appease her and she knelt in front of me, both hands on my knees. “Does your chest hurt? Your shoulder?”
Does she think I’m having a heart attack?Her instincts were good. She had the organ right, but not the diagnosis. But there was no version of this moment where I told her so.
“My chest is fine,” I said. “I just got lightheaded for a second. I think I pushed too hard on the deadlifts, didn’t eat enough this morning. Give me a minute.”
She didn’t fully buy it, but she bought enough of it not to call 911.
“You need to drink water. Now.” She grabbed the bottle, brought it back, and watched me drink, counting my swallows.
“Get up. Slowly. Come to the living room.”
“Lyss, I am okay.”
“Slowly.Julian. Don’t argue with me, please.”
I got up and let her guide me to the living room couch. She rushed to the kitchen and came back in seconds shoving another glass of water into my hands, and stood in front of me holding her phone in one hand and a bottle of aspirin she’d also apparently grabbed from the kitchen.
“Put your feet up,” she said.
“Alyssa.”
