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Like it was so ridiculous, it was. But somehow at the same time it was all the ways people almost lost each other, over everything they couldn’t say.This is the way the world ends,she thought.Not with a fight, but with a single word left unsaid.
Then felt like crying again.
Shewascrying again.
It was the reason he stroked his thumb over her cheek as she spoke.
“I shouldn’t have told you it was killing me. I can see that now,” she said.
“And I can see that I shouldn’t have listened. I shouldn’t have let you go.”
“You thought you were doing the right thing. That you were helping me.”
“I did. But now I wonder how on earth I didn’t know.”
He sighed and closed his eyes briefly.
Before he put the pieces together for himself.
“It was loving me that was killing you, wasn’t it,” he said. “Loving me and thinking I didn’t love you. Even though I did, god, I did, Lord, I’ve never loved anyone in my life the way I love you. And I want you to know that now. I want you to feel it. I want it to be real for you, instead of whatever pretend scraps we fed ourselves because we thought that was all we could get.”
“So that’s why you wanted to do it. You thought it was all you could get.”
“Of course it is. Of course it was. Even if I didn’t always know it. Even though I told myself that we were doing it for the right reasons. That I was doing it for the right reasons. Deep down, I think I really just hoped that you would start to see what life with me could be like,” he said, so wistfully she couldn’t stop herself touching his face, the way he had touched hers. She didn’twantto stop herself. She didn’t need to. It was okay, now, to just be as affectionate as she’d always wanted to be with him.
And say all the things she’d kept inside for so long.
“Love, I knew what life with you could be like before a single second of the pretending. You told me when you were sorry, without ever actually doing anything wrong. When you made sure I was safe and comfortable, and defended me, at every opportunity you got. When you shared yourself with me, over and over, even when it scared you to do it.” She took a breath. A hitching, emotional breath, just thinking of it all. Before she finished the last and most difficult bit. “I just wish I’d done even one tenth of the same for you. Because I would. I would make sure you were safe and defended with the last breath in me.”
Then she dared to meet his gaze, and oh.
Oh, the many emotions now in it.
And the hitch inhisvoice when he answered her.
“But you already did. You already have,” he said.
Which was baffling, it was, but only for a moment.
Because when she said:
“Against what? Against who?”
He answered like this:
“Against myself, love.”
Softly, softly, so she could fully take it in, before he continued. “You made me see that all the parts of me I hated and hid—they are the best things about me. My greatest strengths, the qualities I should be the most proud of. And I am proud of them now, thanks to you. You can see I am. I put them all in a book, in my own words, for everybody to see. I am wholly myself now. Wholly the man I want to be.”
And after that she couldn’t help it.
She kissed him. She kissed him. She kissed him.
Hard, and as desperate about it as she’d never let herself be.
She hadn’t allowed it before, but couldn’t see why now. Because oh, the way he responded. It was like feeling someone fall and catching them in your arms. Like he’d been lost somewhere, and now finally someone was showing him the way home. And when finally, finally they pulled apart, he didn’t let her go. He held her tight as she whispered up at him.
“So what do we do now, then?”
