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I don’t have time to ask what she means before she’s headed for the door.
“Text me when you get in so I know you—”
“Got home safe,” Kennedy says, finishing the rest of Diego’s comment to her. “Yeah, sure.”
As soon as the door closes behind her, Diego spins back to face me, pinning me with his gaze.
“How was your meeting? Did everything get signed?” I ask.
“Fine. What is it that you’re unsure of?” he asks, getting straight to the point.
“Diego, don’t you think this is a discussion for another time?”
“No.” His answer is firm. “Let’s have it now.”
“Seriously? It’s the end of the day and neither one of us is in a position to talk about this right now.”
“My position is solid. Because I know exactly what I want and who I want it with,” he retorts. His voice is so unyielding and solid that I don’t doubt he knows precisely what he wants.
“What is it you want?” I ask.
“A life with you. I want you to be my wife. Mother of my children if we choose to have them. To grow old together. To—”
“Take care of me when I get sick? Or to constantly hold back your deepest urges because you’re terrified of hurting me?” I throw back at him.
His head juts backward and he narrows his eyes on me.
“That’s what a life with me would be,” I tell him, finally verbalizing my fears. “You know that, right? Taking care of me if and when I get sick. Or you holding back because I’m too damn fragile.”
“Fragile?” he interjects.
“Yes. Soft, weak. Whatever. That’s really what you think, isn’t it? That I need rescuing.”
“How could you even believe that’s what I think?” he replies back with something filling his eyes. Something I can’t identify.
“Isn’t it? That’s why you hold back when we make love,” I finally say what I've been thinking for months. “You’re scared of hurting me somehow, but …” I blow out a deep breath, feeling the tightness in my chest that starts to take hold of me.
“But what?” he questions when I don’t say anything more.
“You’re hurting yourself,” I confess. “You can’t be your full self with me because you’re too frightened that I can’t handle it. Whatever it is. You think you have to constantly look out for and take care of me. That’s how I become a burden to you. Just like I was to my ex. I—”
“Don’t compare me to that son of a bitch,” he says through gritted teeth.
The anger in his eyes doesn’t frighten me. There’s never been a moment that I’ve ever had fear of Diego. Even when I’ve seen his eyes darken with rage and anonymity for someone else, it never repelled me.
But it did reveal how far he would go to protect me, which is what has the potential to get him into trouble.
“You’ll cut off parts of yourself to protect me. While I love you for it, I don’t want to be your burden,” I tell him. “Not like I was to my ex and not like I was to my mother.”
“You’ve never been a burden”
“I have!” I yell back because I can’t help the emotions that spill out of me at revealing my deepest, darkest fear. “My entire life is a burden to everyone I love. My own mother … she shouldn’t have had me. My very life started out of something horrible. How can I be anything more than a burden?”
A single tear falls from my eye as I state my biggest fear out loud.
“Baby,” Diego starts for me, but we both stop when a gasp followed by the sound of shattering glass sounds behind me.
I jump and spin to face the door. Standing there with mouth ajar and tears filling her eyes is my mother.
