Page 213 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

He was trying to say I love you. He was always trying to say it. With his hands, with his eyes, with the way he showed up and stayed and kept showing up.

“You remember I told you that those words scared me?” His voice was quiet, like he was confessing something he’d never told anyone else. “That something bad always happened after they were said?”

I nodded.

“Nothing bad ever happened after you said them.” His thumb traced the curve of my cheekbone, slow and absent. “Every time you said those words to me, my life got better. Brighter. Like I was finally doing something right. Like I wasn’t the person my mother told me I was.”

His lips trembled. “The bad thing only happened when I didn’t say them. When I let the fear win. When I stood in that doorway and watched you leave and couldn’t make myself say the one thing that might have made you stay. I regret that night. I regret those months. I regret all the mornings I woke up next to you and didn’t tell you what you meant to me. What you are to me.”

Tears spilled down his face. I reached up and wiped them away, my thumb brushing the wetness from his skin, and he leaned into my touch like he was starving for it.

“You look so beautiful,” he said.

A watery laugh escaped me. “What does that have to do with anything right now?”

He caught the tear sliding down my face, wiping it away with the pad of his thumb. His eyes never left mine.

“You are so beautiful that I forget to breathe when I look at you. I forget there’s a world outside this room. I forget everything—every failure, every regret, every reason I told myself I didn’t deserve you.” His voice was soft, almost wondering. “How can I not mention it? Every minute of every day, I am aware. Of your laugh when you think no one is watching—it’s the sound I hear when I need to remember what happiness feels like. The way your head tilts when you’re solving something—I’ve spent hours watching you work, watching the pieces click into place behind your eyes.”

His hand slid into my hair, cradling the back of my head. “When you say my name and I can hear the laugh you’re trying to swallow—I want to bottle that sound. When your hands move through the air, mapping out something you believe in, something you’ve figured out, something you need me to understand—I could watch you for hours.”

He pulled me closer, his forehead resting against mine. “I notice everything about you, Alessia. I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. You are a collection of moments I will spend the rest of my life trying to memorize, and I will still never have enough. You don’t have to remember anything. I will remember for both of us. Just stay with me. Just let me make more memories. Let me fill the spaces you forgot with something new. Let me earn the right to keep noticing. Keep watching. Keep learning the shape of you for the rest of my life.”

“Is this one of those speeches you kept talking about?” I barely recognized my own voice.

“It’s one of them.” He was trying to smile, trying to lighten the weight between us, but his hands were still shaking against my face. His eyes were still wet. And he was still looking at me like I was the only thing in the room worth seeing.

I could feel his heartbeat through his palms, or maybe that was mine. I couldn’t tell anymore. They had found the same rhythm a long time ago.

I kept staring at his face. The words were building in my chest, pressing against my ribs, demanding to be let out. I’d been carrying them for so long, this fear that sat in my bones like something I’d been born with.

“What if you abandoned me again?”

The words were barely audible. I almost didn’t say them. Almost let them stay buried where they’d been living, where I’d learned to keep them. But they were out now, hanging in the space between us, and I couldn’t take them back.

His face crumbled. The way a building falls when the foundation is pulled out from under it. His eyes, his mouth, the careful composure he’d been holding—all of it gone, replaced by something raw and wounded and real.

“It turns out I’m very easy to abandon.” The words came out thin, stretched, pulled from somewhere I didn’t know was still open. “So what if you do it again—”

He pulled me into his arms before I could finish. His arms were tight around me, so tight I could barely breathe, like he was trying to press the words back into my chest, to undo them.

“I’m sorry.” His voice was muffled against my neck, but I heard every word. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t abandon you. I know that’s what it looked like, but I didn’t. I never intended to. I’m sorry.”

He kept saying it. Over and over, like if he said it enough times I might believe it. Like he needed to hear it as much as I did.

“I was drowning, and I thought you would always be there. I thought you were the one thing in my life that was certain. The one person who couldn’t be taken from me. I was so wrong.”

He pulled back just enough to look at me. His face was wet, his eyes red, his expression raw in a way I had never seen.

“I didn’t leave you, Alessia.” His voice broke on my name. “I just never thought you’d want to leave me. Because we were solid. Because we were us. But then you did leave. And you had every right to. I ruined everything. I made you walk away. And ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out how to live in a world where you don’t know my name. Where you look at me and feel nothing. Where the one person who knew me better than anyone else doesn’t remember a single thing about who I am.

“I will never do that again.” The words were fierce, trembling, torn from somewhere deep. “I will never let the water close over my head while you’re standing on the shore, waiting for me to come up. I will never assume you’ll be there tomorrow without making sure you know—today, now, in every moment I’m given—that I choose you. Over every deal. Every crisis. Every time. Without hesitation. Without reservation. You. Always you.”

He pulled me back into his arms, pressing his face into my hair.

“I will never leave you, Alessia.” His arms locked around me, solid and unyielding. “You’re my life. How can I abandon my life?”

I could feel him shaking, could feel the regret rolling off him in waves, hot and heavy and endless. He was sorry. He was so, so sorry.