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It seemed such a surreal predicament. I’d never felt so out of control in loving someone. I was terrified, and when I confessed as much, and she confirmed I wasn’t alone, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever felt. At that moment, I felt cursed, like I’d lost every right to know anything at all about her.
It was enough to make me lunge for her, to grasp onto her, and beg her for any breath she gave me. In the memory of that feeling, a split second, I went from a man with an apology to a man begging for his ability to breathe. She did that to me. I had to make her understand I would suffocate without her. That I’d been breathing all wrong before we’d met.
I wiped my eyes of the emotion that threatened as she attempted to push pa
st me, and I gently gripped her shoulders and forced her to face me. The skin of her cheeks was splotched red, and tear soaked.
“Abbie, please. I was going to tell you everything tonight. I tried. I swear to God, I just needed to be with you first. Fuck, this is coming out all wrong.”
I swallowed hard, praying the right words would come. Tears clouded her vision and she did nothing to hide her hurt. Every hitched breath, every anguished cry seeped into my chest. I was ruined by her evident pain. So fucking ruined. And I had no way of getting through to her without permission she would never give. No amount of begging would do it, but I pressed on anyway with the glimmer of hope that was us. Everything we’d built. Everything we knew about the other.
“Please.”
The look in her eye leveled me as her hurt morphed into anger and my fear set in.
“There’s nothing you can say,” she cried. “Nothing.”
Her voice was raw when she spoke, inches away but it might as well have been a universe. “Leave and don’t come back. I don’t ever want to hear from you again. Please respect that. Please just leave me alone.”
“Just let me talk to you. Let me explain.”
“Whatever excuse you have, no matter what it is will never be good enough. It’s over. It’s so over.” She choked on her words as my chest sank with the weight of them.
“That’s not us, Abbie. We don’t deal in absolutes. That’s not what we’re about.”
Her lips parted, her eyes incredulous. “Was that always going to be your excuse? This is different, and you know it.”
“It’s not.” If I had any chance of getting through to her, I had to remind her of us. “This is exactly what it’s about. I need you to forget every conclusion you’ve drawn for one second and remember why we started this. Everything about what’s happening right now is then. I left her and filed for divorce eight months before I met you. It’s only been prolonged due to her mental health. Abbie, she’s a drug addict and a liar. I know that sounds like a cop-out but it’s the truth. And I can almost guarantee anything she may have told you about me is a lie. I made a huge mistake by not telling you sooner, but I swear to God it’s over between us. It has been over for years. Kat refused to acknowledge it, and that’s why I picked her up tonight. I wanted our divorce final. So we, you and me, could be free to be what we are. For our future. That’s the only reason. Please believe me. I’m not that kind of man, and you don’t believe it, or you don’t want to. I know you don’t want to believe it. I can prove every word I’m saying is true. I can take those doubts away from you. I can make you believe me, believe in me again.”
I didn’t know if it was the truth, and I hated myself for telling her things that may border on more lies, but I wanted to believe it because she made me believe. Her love made me feel like a king, a god, even if I was the Judas of our story.
I stared into her bloodshot eyes. She loved me, without a doubt, but it was the pain in them that I feared. I knew what it was capable of. It was always the pain that twisted love into a tragedy. Expectations ruined the rest.
“The phone calls,” she said in realization, “this morning, that was her?” Without admission, she jerked away from me, the look in her eyes eating away at me by the second. It was too familiar to me and foreign with her.
She was tearing me apart piece by piece with her anger and it could only destroy us. I knew all too well. I’d lived it.
“I was trying to give you what you wanted. You didn’t want to know.” She couldn’t hear me, she couldn’t hear a single word I was saying. I’d never felt so helpless. Even after all I’d been through with Kat.
“I don’t know you,” she whispered between us. “I don’t know you.”
“That’s not true, you know that’s not true.”
“Of all the questions I should have asked,” she said faintly as a tear trickled down her cheek, the light from her porch highlighting the sight of it as it sliced my chest. “The question I should have asked . . .” she said with a humorless laugh. Her eyes seared into mine, icy blue steel. “Tell me you’re not married, Cameron. Please tell me you’re not married.”
“Abbie, I wanted to tell you, I tried to tell you.”
“You hid behind our arrangement. It’s the same damn thing as lying, and you lied to me this morning! You lied to me and you told me you loved me!”
I swallowed hard, my back pressed against the rock that was my heart and the hard place I’d forced myself into.
“Tell me you’re not married, Cameron.”
“I’m married.” I only let that truth rest a half a second. “Separated—”
It was the sting of her hand and the sound of it connecting that distorted everything. The feel of it altered every intention I had by showing up at her door. The defiant look on her face and challenge in her eyes brought forth some part of me I didn’t identify with and took over at that moment. The shock filtered and remained the only thing I focused on until the anger set in.
The pieces of myself I was most proud of slipped out of my reach as I splintered.
