Christian frowns. “It should have been me.”
I don’t have the heart to say,yes, it should have been.Instead Igo on, “I finished my bachelors in business online.” I don’t mention that it was his mother’s money that helped pay for it. “Then I opened the cafe. Natalia opened her bakery and Isabelle started teaching dance and… We grew up. We celebrated birthdays, holidays. For Christmas, the twins sometimes invited me to their family’s house. Sometimes I spent it alone and visited my mom. My first birthday…after… They all just invited themselves over to the apartment and forced me to go trick or treating. They told me, "What's the point of my birthday being on Halloween if I don’t go trick or treating.”
Christian snorts, but it’s sad. He’s heartbroken. Just telling him these things looks like I’ve hit a man that is already down.
“Did you date anyone?”
“Why?” I stifle a smile. “Jealous?”
His brows pinch and he nearly glaring. “No,” he grumbles.
I arch a brow with a chortle. “No?”
“A little.”
I sigh, smiling weakly. “I went on that date with Levi.”
“But before that?”
I shrug and avoid the dating questions. “I started going to the gym with Julian a lot,” I tell him, and I don’t miss the way surprise flashes in his eyes. Or maybe it’s suspicion. “He taught me a lot of work outs. Taught me a bit of kick boxing. It was nice. It felt therapeutic.” I chuckle to myself. “I broke down one day, just punching the hell out of the bag until I was screaming and sobbing. After that… I don’t know, I felt freer.”
I think about that day a lot. How much I cried upstairs in the gym and how many times Julian pushed me to hit harder, to get me to unleash my wrath. Julian held the bag on the opposite side and allowed me to release whatever it was I had trapped inside of me.
Then, panting and sweaty, I fell to my knees and wailed.Julian tore off my gloves and hugged me close, and he cried with me. We were two grieving people, and a mutual friend became one of my best friends after that day.
From that day on, we helped each other. I’d help with Grace and he’d help me get stronger physically while I worked on mental strength.
“What else?” Christian asks.
“Nothing,” I rasp, my nails scratching softly down his back and back up to his shoulders. “All of that was only after I felt like, maybe, I could move on.”
Frowning, he turns his head to press his ear to my heart. “I was empty.”
“What?”
“I was empty when I left,” he repeats quietly. “That’s why I…spiraled.”
“Spiraled?”
He tenses beneath my palms. “I’m sober now.”
I swallow. “I know.”
Something is still missing—a part of the story he has not told me yet that feels dark and dooming. A part of the story that might break me again. Something happened and he hasn’t told me because he isn’t ready, and that’s fine. But it’s just another wall, another line drawn between us. If I have to give him all of me, he has to give me all of him too.
I can’t allow myself to give him a hundred percent if I’m only getting seventy from him.
Patience wears thin eventually, the longer it’s stretched out the threads untwine and break. How long can he keep it to himself until the threads snap and we aren’t the person for each other anymore?
It’s absurd, the idea that he isn’t for me. That he isn’t my person. Heis.
I just want to scream into my pillow and hope that’s enough for all of this to fix itself.
I take a breath. “Christian, there’s something you aren’t telling me.”
Christian remains tense. “Yeah.”
I close my eyes and take a deeper breath, exhaling slowly. “Christian?—”
