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I bit my lip and nodded.
“Are you just placating me right now?”
Was I? I looked around. At our dog. At the kitchen, where Rhys had bought me one of those overly sweet grocery store cakes that I loved. At our keys hung next to each other by the door. Rhys was generous as hell, but he didn’t do many things that he didn’t want to do. He didn’t have to. So, if I was here, it was because he wanted me here. That much I believed.
“No.”
Rhys leaned in and kissed me, so slowly I felt like the whole world was moving in slow motion. I gasped into the kiss, the shock that I could still have this rocking through me. As Rhys let me go, he took a deep breath.
“You really feel like shit all the time?” he asked. His voice was calmer now, tears slowing.
“No, I— Kinda. No. I mean, I do when I feel like I’m fucking this all up. Or when I just can’t . . . um . . . relax. Not, like, every minute of every day.”
He nodded slowly.
“I didn’t think much about how different our ideas of marriage would be,” he said after a while.
“You mean because your parents had a perfect marriage and they love each other and I was basically scraped off the ground like old gum?”
Rhys snorted in amusement.
“Don’t say shit like that, baby. But, yeah.”
He slid his fingers into my hair.
“I never wondered what it meant to be married. It just felt normal to me. I know we had kind of a whirlwind thing and all, but once you’d moved in here, I just . . . I guess I just went about my business cuz to me, once you’re married, that’s it. You’re together now and that’s the end.”
“To me, it was a beginning,” I said and watched Rhys melt. He slid his hand to the back of my neck and tipped our foreheads together.
“You feel like our life together could be taken away at any moment because that’s what’s always happened to you. I want to prove to you that won’t happen. It seems like the only thing that’ll prove it to you is time.”
“Time.”
“Yeah. I love you. I love you so much. Can you give us time?”
Tears flooded my eyes again. I bit my thumbnail and nodded.
“Okay,” he said, and his inhale of relief seemed to come from the depths of his being. “Okay, that’s good. That’s so good, Matty.”
“Okay,” I echoed. I was so tired. I felt like I’d gotten run over by a train.
“We keep telling the truth,” he said, looking into my eyes. “We keep talking. Nobody leaves.”
Nobody leaves, nobody leaves.
“N-nobody leaves,” I breathed.
* * *
—
I woke to the distant sound of Rhys talking low. It was very early and my limbs felt heavy, my head still fuzzy from the night before. Then I heard footsteps, but he didn’t come back to bed.
I crept out of bed and looked out the window. Caleb’s truck was outside as it had been so many times when he came over, needing Rhys. I followed the sound of their voices. Sitting at the top of the stairs I could hear them in the living room. I’d sat here listening to them talk once before, afraid I’d overhear words of love and instead heard Caleb’s choked pain and shame.
Poor Rhys. For all his light, he seemed drawn to darkness.
“. . . wrong with me,” Rhys was saying. “Because I thought everything was going well. Again. And I missed it, again. It’s like I’m doomed to be oblivious to warning signs that the people I care about the most are struggling. I fucking missed it, Caleb. I was adopting dogs and buying candy for Halloween and looking at Matty, picturing how maybe someday we’d take our own kids trick-or-treating, and thinking what an amazing dad he’d make because he’s the sweetest, most caring . . . and he was—fuck, he was hurting so much.”
My heart broke for Rhys, but as it cracked open, something bright and unexpected took wing. I had never, not once, thought about having children. It was a blank spot in my mind. But Rhys thinking I would make a good dad? Rhys thinking about me that way at all? It felt like the world grew somehow bigger around me.
“Look,” Caleb said, gravelly voice even lower than usual. “You gotta stop judging Matt by your own standards of happiness. It’s not something you can master like you learned to play guitar. He’s probably not just gonna get happier and happier. And if that’s your expectation then you’re gonna be disappointed. And then you’re gonna make him feel like crap.”
Rhys garbled something I couldn’t make out.
“I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying Matt has had a rough go of things and never dealt with them. And then you came along. Big old beast of sunshine and plans and charisma and a steady damn hand. And he fell in love with you. And suddenly Matt—with all that shit in his past—was hanging out with you all the time. Where do you think that shit went? It didn’t disappear. It didn’t transform from pain to joy like water to fucking wine, Nyland.”
