“True…” I said slowly. It was a common adage that I had used at work with my business clients but hearing it come out of his mouth made it sound so much smoother. Not just because I had become completely infatuated with him. More than that. Whatever this was with Henry had moved so much further than infatuation. What he said out loud was what I felt… and this just gave me more confirmation that all of this was real. Of course this was real. How couldn’t it have been? He had bought me a wardrobe, offered me the rose of commitment, shared with me his deepest secrets and still I was questioning it all. Why was it that I only thought that feelings were real until we were locked into a set commitment? Until the world knew that we were choosing life together? Until we made it goddamn Instagram official? And yet I should be feeling this way because we were days away from being at that stage. All I had to do was to accept that rose. For now, I couldn’t wait to see if I could uncover even more about my incredible dream man.
“I like how you think…” I said, picking up some of the cards.
“Well, this is a long way from thinking that I found out everything that there is to know about you from the moment that we first met,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “I guess you’ve found out a lot more since then, but I don’t know if there’s much more,” I joked. Henry leaned forward, taking some of the cards.
“Give me some of those,” he said.
“Okay, I’ll go first,” I said, immediately speaking out the first card on the top of my pile. “If you could relive any moment in your life, what would it be?” I asked.
“There’s nothing that I would want to relive again. Not at all,” he said bluntly.
“Not at all?”
“Not at all, and I can say that confidently, because I hope that you believe me when I say that there really isn’t anywhere else, I would rather be than right here, right now, with you. This is a moment that I would like to stay in for some time,” he said, holding my gaze with every word. My body felt weak as I raised my glass to my lips, hoping it would cover the heat that I felt rising to my cheeks.
“I really do mean that, Molly. I feel very lucky that you’re here with me.”
I nodded. “I know I feel it, and I feel the same.”
He smiled, gazing down at his pile of cards and if I wasn’t mistaken, his cheeks were now blushing too. “Oh, interesting, this is a two-part question. First is, if you could add three events that you knew were going to happen in your future or if you could change three events about your past which would you choose?”
What would I choose, I knew that I would choose him. I knew that I would choose a new career, one that would reignite the fire and energy in me that I had let flatten. But then thinking about all the things that I would have changed in my past, my heart instantly sank and I felt a lump rising in my throat. I didn’t need to say anything else for Henry to jump out of his beanbag, and run around to my side of the table, taking a seat down next to me. He wrapped me up in his arms before any tears could fall. I wanted to sniff them back. I wanted to paint a smile on my face. The last thing that I wanted was toruin any part of this moment. This very moment that only minutes before he was telling me, was one of his favorites.
Two tears fell from my eyes before I sniffed the rest away.
“I’m sorry, Molly. I shouldn’t have even asked that question. Of course, I already knew the answer to it. It was completely uncalled for.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said shaking my head and wiping my cheeks. “It was a good question. I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said, sniffling. “You know it’s just something that I will never quite understand. I have been through years and years of therapy, and I can go for so long feeling fine and then still, twenty years later and sometimes it just hits me as though it all happened yesterday. I can never tell when it’s going to happen, but sometimes it just takes over me, as though even after all this time it will never get any better.”
“I understand more than you know,” he said. And after knowing what he had been though, other than my sister, he was the only person that could say those words and actually mean them.
“You feel like that sometimes too?” I said loosening myself from his hold, so I could turn to face him.
He nodded. “Absolutely, and I’ve come to accept that it is a part of my life, it’s an emotion that is imbedded in me and sometimes comes out. It’s not something that I can ever escape. It gets the better of me, whenever life begins to get a little too much and things become overwhelming, it starts out as a sick feeling and then it can just completely take over and I’mthat little boy, curled up on the street, staring up at the stars. So I guess that I’ve come to accept that it’s just something that we must live with, something that can take over in moments and it can feel like you haven’t made any progress at all… but there have been some things that I focus on and have put into place in my life, to at least ease some of the pain or help me ride the wave a little better.”
“Like what?”
“I think about the life that I have now, and I give myself grace knowing that I can only control what I can. There are so many bad things that happen in this world, and the ones that happened to me did, but they are situations that I couldn’t change. And as horrible as it was losing my parents so young in the way that I did at the same time, if that didn’t happen to me, I don’t think that I would be the man that I am now. And I’m really happy with who I’ve become. To get myself out of it, I think of the positives, give myself grace and then do something for myself that makes me feel really good. It sounds self-indulgent I know but… it’s helped… it might help you too.”
I had had similar thoughts to Henry’s many times. I wouldn’t have become the person that I am today without everything that had happened. It was also another reason why I didn’t like the fact that I felt stuck inside the life that I had been blessed with, when in the same accident my parents had theirs taken from them.
“What makes you feel good? What do you do when you just want to do something for yourself?” I asked.
“It varies,” he said. “It could be as simple as making myself a drink. Vegging out in front of the television, or sometimes it means going to play basketball with some of the kids from the boys’ home or I go and visit the hospital up the road from my building.”
“The hospital?” I said confused.
“Yeah, I invest a lot of money there as well.”
“Oh,” I said.
Then he leaned into my ear and whispered, “But I love to walk the halls and smell the blood, too.”
My body stiffened. It was far cry from the sexy image that I had of him sucking on my shirt. But before I could answer any more questions, the elevator dinged as Jackie walked out with a large tray in her hands. “Dinner is served.”
Chapter Fourteen
