“Did you drive away from me with tears in your eyes and hurt I put in your heart and spend five days not sleeping or eating?”
I did.
“I ate.” That wasn’t a lie. I just didn’t eat very much.
“Babe,” he growled.
“No one saw me,” I blurted.
His head ticked. “Sorry?”
“No one saw me. That’s why I sold the pictures. All my life, I felt like I’d gone unseen.”
“Baby.” Now he was whispering.
I sucked it up and carried on.
“After I narrowly missed living a wretched life with a man like Chad, the man my mother wanted for me, I took a long, hard look at myself. How I behaved. How I treated people. What I’d done. Who I was becoming. And I realized that was why I did it. I didn’t care if the attention was negative. I just wanted people to see me.”
“Ye dinnae have to explain this to me.”
“I know. But sharing it with you is like explaining it to myself. And I do need to do that.”
He nodded, and his hand was still at my ribs, so his thumb started stroking.
And at his nod, his touch, it struck me, he was listening.
Really listening.
And he saw me.
Before our blip last weekend, he was the first one in my life who really saw me.
And that strike was like a bolt of lightning, because I felt safe here with Dair, telling him these things, unlike how I felt my whole life, including when he laid me out in his living room.
But I was safe now.
With him.
And now that we were beyond that blip, with all he said while I was lying on those wet leaves, I knew I’d always be safe.
With Dair.
So I kept going.
“That’s why I acted out too. But it was more. It was a way to hold people back. If I was a bitch, if I was difficult, if I wasn’t so much fun to be around, I could insulate myself.”
“Insulate yourself from what, darling?” he asked.
“From love,” I answered. “Because what I knew of it, love hurt a lot, and what I didn’t realize, but how I was acting, was that I didn’t want any part of it.”
He closed his eyes, dropping into me, growling unintelligibly, and his forehead came to rest on mine.
Good Lord, this man, this glorious, glorious man really, really loved me.
“And then came you,” I told him.
That caused him to groan and shift his head so he was kissing me.
