AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And that makes me incredibly sad.”
“Maybe because you’re still in love with him.”
She didn’t want that to be true. Didn’t think it was. She needed a man who could support her when she showed some emotion other than passion.
One who didn’t make her feel ashamed when she burst into tears or got all excited about something.
Like she knew she would when she finally heard that she was pregnant again. Once she got over the initial spate of anxiety.
The thought struck her in the heart. She didn’t want to know for sure if she was pregnant because then there’d be something to lose.
Fear was an insidious beast. It had snuck up without her knowing. And being with Tamara, her free zone where whatever thoughts she had were safe, had let her see something she’d been trying so desperately to avoid...as much as she wanted the baby, was willing to go it alone, she was scared to death, too.
“It’s not a crime, you know,” her friend said, bringing her back to their current conversation about Braden and still being in love with him.
Which she was not.
But she was afraid to take that pregnancy test. Maybe as much as she was excited to do so. And not just because she
might be disappointed with a negative response—though there was definitely that, too.
She was a cesspool of emotion. It was a good thing Braden was out of town.
Her expression must have been giving away some of her thoughts because Tamara spoke up.
“If you’re in love with him, you are. It’s nothing to feel badly about,” she said.
“I’m not still in love with him. We’ve hurt each other too much. It’s there between us—this mistrust of each other in an emotional sense. I trust him to die for me, but not to hold me if I cry.”
“Has he ever?”
She thought back through her memories.
“When we were first married, he used to hold me when we watched sad movies and I started to cry. It wasn’t a big deal. He never said a word. He’d just move closer and hold me.”
Where had that man gone? And when?
Before Tucker died, she knew that for sure. It wasn’t just their son’s death that had come between them. Losing Tucker had been the trigger, but things had already been coming apart.
Why hadn’t she known that?
“I let him down, too,” she said now. “He doesn’t trust me to meet his needs in the moment, or in a relationship sense.”
Not just sexually, but in other things. He wanted to come first.
It wasn’t an unnatural desire.
She just hadn’t been good at putting two people first. In fact, she’d sucked at it. Strange, because she tended to thirty kids in any given hour and made them all feel special.
“Besides, he’s too unemotional, you know that,” she said now. And she knew why. Understood why. Growing up as he did, the only male in the house with two drama queens—his mother and sister—had forced him to be the practical one at all times.
She didn’t blame him.
She just wasn’t good for him. Or he for her. She was truly more at peace, less stressed, when she didn’t have to worry about his reactions. And she knew it was the same for him.
Which was why their friendship had such clear boundaries.
“And yet,” Tamara said, “his moving leaves you with incredible sadness.”
