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“Have you told her you loved her?”
“No.”
“Did you ask her to move in? Give her any kind of commitment?”
I froze.
Commitment.
She’d used that word in the beginning, and while I hadn’t forgotten, I’d kept it buried because that wasn’t a word I used when it came to my personal life.
“I… no. I thought we had time.”
“So, you wanted her to give you everything before you were willing to give her so much as a promise?”
Crap.
I was a dickhead.
And my brother had just called me on it.
“We talked about commitment once, early on.” I gave him an abbreviated version of that conversation.
“Did it ever occur to you she was waiting? She was holding on to something that hurt her. I’m not sure why, exactly, since all reports say she did it willingly but—”
“Her ex, the guy she was living with at the same time, coerced her. I don’t have any other details, but I know she still struggles with how much she let him manipulate her.”
“And this isn’t giving you pause?” he demanded. “I mean, I’ve never even met her and I can practically feel her embarrassment, the fear she must be dealing with. Imagine being in her shoes. You’re dating someone you really like but it’s early days, no commitment, nothing but fun and great sex—the sex was good, right? There were no problems there with memories of the past or anything?”
I shook my head but hesitated again. “No, but there was a story about anal.” I hoped this wasn’t a betrayal of some kind, telling my brother something so intimate about a woman I’d been with. Remy and I talked about almost anything, but I rarely went into details like this. He knew how much I loved anal sex, though, so I hoped he would put two and two together.
“Where someone from the past hurt her?”
I nodded. “She was okay with fingers, and I didn’t push for more.”
“So she’s falling for this great guy she’s been dating, getting ready to go on the biggest tour of her career, and probably freaking out about how telling this guy her history might fuck it all up. You haven’t given her a promise. Not verbal, not physical, and not even emotional. Yet you expected her to bare her soul? Knowing it might end everything she’d worked so hard for?”
I swallowed, a sliver of shame creeping through my psyche.
“To be honest, I’d forgotten the commitment conversation, but to be fair, I’ve been trying to show her how much I care about her, since she was skittish about us dating in the first place.”
“Those were all things,” he said quietly. “Things you bought with your abundance of money. You bought her a security system, you got the guys to agree to give her the song rights because none of you would miss that money, right? And thousand-dollar shoes say ‘I want to fuck you wearing these’ more than ‘I love you and want to make you happy.’ Are you starting to understand the difference?”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.” He got up and refilled our glasses.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said after a moment.
“I can’t make that decision for you,” he said. “But you’re running out of time to fix things if that’s what you want to do.”
“Would you forgive her?” I asked quietly.
“Absolutely.”
“Would you forgive me for being an asshole if you were her?”
“I don’t know.”
