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"Of what?"
I gulped. "I was afraid you wouldn't forgive me," I said. "I knew how much you wanted a family. You're Catholic, nominally anyway. I was afraid you wouldn't be able to move past it."
Brandon stared at me for a moment. Then he snorted.
"You expect me to believe that's all it was? Give me a fuckin' break, Skylar. I'm pro-choice, and you know it. I donate to three different family planning organizations for the express purpose of preventing kids from being born into the kind of shitty home life I had. But that's not the situation here. That would have never been the situation between us."
"I know that!" I sputtered. "I know that. But Brandon, consider the situation. You and I were broken up––"
"Yeah, because you broke it off!"
He took a deep breath, pulling his temper, which was plainly balanced on a knife-edge, back into check.
"You should have told me," he said with a voice clenched between his teeth. "If that was really what you wanted, you should have at least given me the chance to support you. You should have given me the chance to be your partner through all of it."
"I didn't want you to stay because you had to, like you did with Miranda," I said meekly. "I didn't want to hurt you."
"Bullshit," Brandon barked. "You didn't want to hurt yourself. That's what you were scared of."
He wasn't wrong. I had been petrified to tell him. We had spent those two months trying to rebuild the beauty of what we were together. It had all seemed so fragile, and he had seemed so happy. I hadn't wanted to ruin it by dropping another bomb in the middle of the whole thing.
"All I ever wanted was to be with you. Really be with you," Brandon continued in a voice that was starting to shake. "Skylar, I wanted to marry you, raise a family with you! "
"I didn't know that at the time!" I cried out. Tears were starting to stream down my cheeks, and I swiped them away. I hiccupped back sobs, but the feeling still wracked through my chest. "Brandon," I said, striving to even my voice. "I didn't know that."
"Come on, Skylar. I asked you to move in with me. I wanted you to share my home. You knew I loved you!"
"I wanted those things too. But I also knew you lied to me," I said bitterly as I pushed my plate away. "I knew you had a wife the entire time we were together. Still do, right? I knew I'd expressly asked you to stay out of my family's business, and you didn't! Do you think I'd be sitting here, fresh out of the hospital, if you hadn't gotten involved the way you did?"
I hadn't realized I'd felt that way until the words fell out of my mouth. I felt guilty, yes, over the abortion––guilt didn't even begin to cover the multitudes of emotions that had tortured me over the last few months. But my actions had a relatively limited effect, however heart-breaking. Brandon's had landed me in the hospital, and tossed Bubbe and my dad out of their home. We were refugees now––admittedly well cared -for refugees, but refugees nonetheless––because of his actions too.
So yes, I realized. I was also angry. But still...underneath it all...I just wanted to be us again. If I could forgive him for what he'd done...could he forgive me?
Brandon just sat there, opening and closing his mouth like a fish. His gaze traveled over my body, touching on the places where he knew I'd been hurt. My skin prickled under his gaze––over my ribs, the bruises still around my neck and shoulders, the still-sutured cut on my eyebrow, my swollen ankle propped on the stool.
He closed his eyes, clearly in pain. I wanted to reach out to him, but something beyond my injuries kept me in my seat.
"Why do we keep doing this to each other?" he asked quietly.
I paused. "Doing what?"
"Hurting each other."
It was true. We had hurt each other, so very badly, so many times. But, my conscience argued, it wasn't the same as the kind of hurts we'd both suffered at the hands of others. This wasn't my ex willfully cheating on me, or my mother, who purposefully revealed my secrets or abandoned me. This wasn't Brandon's abusive father or his drug-addicted mother. We might have been dysfunctional, it was true, but we weren't malicious. If anything, our injuries happened because we loved each other too much.
The thought oddly gave me hope. Maybe it was a problem that could be fixed. Maybe we just needed to learn how to love the right way, instead of doing it like we both tended to do: like bulls in a china shop.
But before I could say so, Brandon had pushed off his stool and was walking toward the bedroom hallway.
"Where are you going?"
"To bed. It's late."
I glanced at the big clock in the foyer. It was only nine.
"But...we're talking," I said.
Brandon paused in the hallway entrance, one hand propped wearily on the doorway as his head bowed down. "I think that's enough talking for tonight, don't you?"
