Page 91 of Unraveled

“Because you don’t need me,” Gian said, his tone lowering an octave with the frankness his words took on. “Not in the grand scheme of your life, you really don’t. It might fuck you up for a while to send me on my way, but you would come out fine in the end. That’s what women like you do, right? You get hurt, brush yourself off, and get on with it—with life. Everybody fails you in one way or another, that’s what you’ve been taught.”

“Gian—”

“It’s true. Even if they don’t mean to, or it’s a by-product of someone else’s actions, they hurt you. Your parents, your siblings, or friends. And so you prep for the next person you let in to hurt you, too, and when they do, you get to fall, dust it off, and keep going with a few more bruises on your soul.”

She almost hated how he saw those things.

She wanted to hate that she had never needed to tell him those things.

“But what’s more amazing,” Gian continued, “is that you let me in. And that, in some crazy way, you still lower your walls enough to let someone climb over for a time. So here we are, you waiting for me to fuck up, even if I do love you, and even if you do love me, because it always happens, regardless. And you’ll be fine when it does—if it does—because that’s who you are, Cara Rossi. And we don’t get to be anything but exactly who we are.”

Cara’s exhale felt painful as it rushed out, but with that pain came a sense of relief. “Saves me the trouble of explaining all of that to you.”

Gian shrugged. “I never asked for an explanation.”

“No, you didn’t,” she agreed quietly. “Don’t you think it’s a little sad that you love someone who is just waiting for the other shoe to drop?”

“I think it’s sad that the woman I love feels like she has to wait on that at all.”

Well, then …

“What about all the shit I don’t like?” Cara asked. “The business you do, the things that life has taken from me, and how it hurts me? What if that bitterness I feel and the distrust that’s settled deep inside of me never goes away? Doesn’t that—in a way—reflect on us? Doesn’t that make us doomed?”

“There are a million things that could doom us, Cara,” Gian said, stepping forward to stroke her cheek and push a stray curl behind her ear. She smiled at his touch, feeling that familiar shiver race down her spine at his contact. “You know what else could doom us? That instead of taking that risk with me—jumping off the cliff that scares you—you want to debate how and why I love you inside of a liquor store at ten at night. Because that’s what you’ll keep doing, about everything, on all the little details about us, instead of just being.”

Cara frowned. “You don’t know that.”

“I know you worry about details all the time. Right now, you’re worried about the details of us, of something like love. That should be the easiest, most honest thing you can feel. And your very nature is to question it, Cara, and to question me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But you do. And you know what, that’s okay, too. As long as you be with me, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about those details and the nonsense. I don’t hear the noise of everyone else telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing with you. I don’t give a single fuck about any of that, because I love you. Nothing else matters. The rest will figure itself out on its own. I believe that entirely.”

“Why would anyone tell you not to be with me, Gian?”

That time, he was the one to look away.

Cara didn’t miss it.

“Like I said, it doesn’t matter.”

She wondered if it should, though.

“Say it, again,” Cara demanded.

Gian—once more—didn’t hesitate. “I love you, Cara.”

It became easier to hear each time he said it.

It became easier to believe.

It became easier to understand.

“I want you to say it back,” he told her, “but I don’t need you to say it because I want you to. I don’t need you to say something that scares you enough to send you running away from me for three weeks, only to call me when you can’t take it anymore. I don’t need you to justify what I already know, amore.”

“But?”

“But I do need you to be with me, Cara. That’s all.”