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Chapter 10
"You do realize that's going to have you dying to pee in about five minutes flat, right?" Ezekiel asks, turning in the front seat to hand me my drink.
I take the thirty-ounce slushy and wave away his concern. "This is not my first rodeo. And how can you pass up when a drive thru place has a drink this big for two dollars?"
"Yeah, because it's probably ninety percent sugar." Jeremiah chuckles.
"I'll take it. Maybe one of you will lick the syrup off my lips later."
"I seem to remember a time when you accused me of making everything sound sexual," Ezekiel says.
"Well, that was when I was still irritated by your very presence."
Ezekiel barks out a laugh. "Oh, my presence never irritated you. It aroused you and you hated it. Every time you looked at either of us, you'd start breathing faster, and that pretty flush would creep up your skin. Even narrowing your eyes didn't hide the desire in them."
"Or it was all in your imagination until I was desperate enough to end up in your room at the hotel and changed my mind?"
"Desperate?" Jeremiah exclaims. "As I recall, all you were desperate for that night was an orgasm."
"Orgasms," Ezekiel empathizes. "Plural."
I roll my eyes and know Jeremiah sees me in the rearview mirror from his laughter.
"Still in denial back there?" he asks.
"Denial about..." I question right back.
"Your ability to have these little things called feelings."
I sigh, because hell no, I am not still in denial about that. But still, I don't say it to them, that I've realized I love them. That I'm done running from my feelings. That I am wholly theirs. It feels weird to proclaim love though, when they still see me as the woman who has avoided it like the plague all my life. Maybe it will be easier if I begin by explaining to them why I never wanted feelings in the first place.
"I was never in denial," I begin, hedging into it. "More like I...just never wanted to end up in the situation that I felt loving someone put you in."
"Which is?" Ezekiel inquires.
"Love has always seemed to me—"Seemedbecause it very much does not anymore. “—that love was a shackle. A word people said to make you easily comply with their shaping you into what they wanted you to be. To make you blind to the fact they were constricting you, making you smaller and lesser until you fit into their perfect little box. On the other end, I've watched people use love as their excuse for losing themselves to become what the other person needed, sacrificing piece after piece of who they are until they don't even notice who's staring back at them in the mirror."
"You watched?" Jeremiah asks. "Who have you watched?"
I sigh. "My mother. Time and time again, falling into whatever she considers to be love, falling into whomever she thought might love her. She changed the way she dressed, the way she spoke, what she liked and disliked, everything, each time, for the newest love of her life. With one man, she loved basketball, and the next it was football. With one, her favorite kind of food was Italian, the next, French. On and on, while I just watched the newest version of my mother evolve each time. As I watched these men let her mold herself into their perfect woman, all the while, knowing they weren't going to stay. That they would leave me to pick up the broken pieces. Because it was always me that she cried to, that she confided in, that brought her tissues and cleaned up when she spent the next few weeks in bed, mourning love lost. So yeah, it wasn't denial that I could one day have feelings, it was rebuking them because I never wanted to end up that way. Either being the person who changed every single thing about themselves for someone else and wound up broken hearted in the end, nor the one who allowed someone to change themselves so completely for me, only to break their heart in the end. If that was love, I wanted no part of it."
"That's just it, though," Ezekiel says. "That wasn't love. Not real love. Real love would never want you to change all of who you are, but they'd be telling you that who you are is already enough. Real love wouldn't point out all the ways that you're not worthy, but instead, be letting you know how perfect you are. Real love wouldn't make you doubt, or make you feel less than."
"You said all of this in the past tense though," Jeremiah points out, making me swallow with my nerves at him noticing as much. "So, do you no longer feel the same way? Have you changed your mind on what love looks like and means?"
I lick my lips and release a breath filled with anxiety. "I have."
Ezekiel looks at me over his shoulder, giving me a smile, so I ask him something I've been wondering, especially a lot during last night and the way he seemed to be much more comfortable being with me and Jeremiah by the time we left the restaurant.
"And you, have you decided to trust again?"
That smile fades in an instant and his eyes cut to Jeremiah, narrowing. "What did you tell her?"
I go still. I had assumed Jeremiah told him about the talk we'd had since he'd certainly told him about us being together in the shower after. Clearly, I was wrong. Jeremiah's hands tighten on the steering wheel while Ezekiel stares daggers into him.
"She deserved to know," Jeremiah defends himself.
"Know what?" Ezekiel snaps.
