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Now, it was seeping from me like I had no control of myself. Like the cracks his absence had opened were gaping too wide and letting all the nightmares out.
Rhys’s face fell and he looked startled. Confused.
“What? Why?”
“Because I’m not that person anymore, and I don’t want to be him. I want to be the person I am with you.”
Rhys’s expression gentled.
“But the person you were, the things you experienced . . . they affect who you are now.”
“No,” I insisted stubbornly. “I mean, yeah. But I don’t want to . . . I can’t . . . I can’t ruin things for you.”
“What does that mean, Matt?” he said, patience with an edge.
I was drenched in sweat, and I thought I might puke again. My heart was racing and there was a rushing in my ears.
“It means you’re . . . you’re you. You’re Rhys and you’re basically perfect and when you look at me it’s like the world can maybe, possibly be what you think it is, but if I tell you how it really is—how it was for me—then you won’t be you anymore. And I need you to be you. I need—”
Fuck, I was so selfish. I wrapped my arms around my roiling stomach.
“Matt. Slow down and tell me what you mean, please.”
My voice came out choked. “You believe that things are gonna be okay. You believe it enough for both of us. And I need you to because I . . . I can’t.”
“But,” Rhys said. “But we made vows. Don’t you . . . I mean . . . Doesn’t that mean . . .”
My head was spinning and the sweat was pouring off me. What had I done? Rhys sounded terrified. Gutted. He sounds like you. How did I close the cracks? How did I seal back up the skin of me that protected Rhys from the terrible cosmic darkness that threatened to swallow everything?
“I just . . . people can always leave.”
Rhys flinched. Then he looked furious.
“Don’t say that to me,” he said, low and dangerous. That was good. I liked him dangerous. Danger was real.
“It’s true,” I breathed.
He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. “I would never fucking leave you, Matt. Tell me you know that I would never leave you.”
I wanted to close my eyes and kiss his mouth until he stopped talking and hold him close forever. I wanted to tell him what he wanted to hear. But more than that, I wanted him to understand.
“You might,” I said.
“No!” Rhys’s eyes were wild with confusion and pain. “Why are you saying this?”
He looked scared. He looked a little bit like I felt all the time.
“Because you can’t know! Because you can’t promise how you’ll feel in the future! Because everyone fucking leaves me!” I snarled in his face. And there it was, finally.
He looked so sad for me I wanted to slap him. Punch him. Tear him apart. For daring to have such compassion. For being capable of such empathy. For loving me. I felt like I was going to pass out.
“Sweetheart,” he said, his voice unbearably tender. “Your mom was deported. It’s horrible and unfair, but I’m sure she never would’ve left you if she could’ve helped it. And Grin moved to Florida for a job. They didn’t leave you. You have to start telling a different story.”
I almost started laughing as he repeated my own elliptical half-truths back to me like they were a salve for my pain. The bits I’d told him when we first met, before I really knew him. He’d accepted them without question, and the way he’d taken pity on me and always changed the subject when it was getting hard belied his desire to know the whole truth. I hadn’t outright lied, technically speaking. But I’d let him fill in the blanks and draw his own conclusions.
And, of course, because he was Rhys, of the married parents and the picket fence, his conclusions about my past were almost always wrong. Innocently wrong. It never occurred to him that people did cruel things intentionally, or that people whose job was to help sometimes hurt instead. He wasn’t stupid, just so okay, so confident, that he assumed people shared his outlook.
How could he think that he wanted to know the truth? How could he believe he’d asked for anyone else’s truth when his very existence—his very happiness—begged for confirmation of his own?
Then I did start laughing and I couldn’t stop. It didn’t sound like laughs, though. More like gasps. I shook my head, trying to catch my breath. How was it possible to sweat this much and shake this much and still be standing?
The room spun and the branches screamed and the horse’s hooves beat out a punishing rhythm, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, drawing ever closer.
