He moved over me, forcing me to look at him, his arms coming around my head, two strong, protective steel bars.
“I—can’t—breathe.” I gasped for air. He went to move off of my body, but I shook my head violently, clutching his thin shirt in my hands. “That’s—not—what—I—meant.” It hurt to breathe, to take in air. It stabbed me like frigid, dull metal, cold water replacing all of the warm blood from the wound.
“Oh, I want him so much!” I cried even louder, not even sure where the thought came from. It was all that I felt. All consuming. “I want him so much.”
“I know,” Brando said. He trembled, and I could feel it coming, whatever it was that he meant to say, whatever he was hiding from me. It was the thing that clutched at him, refusing to give his body what it needed to survive—his mind and heart back. Perhaps even his soul.
My voice became incomprehensible to me. Perhaps even to him. He lifted us both, coming to kneel in front of each other on the bed. I refused to let his shirt go, and he wrapped his arms around my lower back, keeping me steady.
“Do you love him?” I heard that. The question dislodged my heart, throwing it out into the open, right before my soul fled in search of refuge.
“Più della mia stessa vita,” he said, his hold on me becoming a vise. He kept repeating it over and over—more than my own life.
My tears came in floods, his came in slow drops, but I knew they cost him no less than mine. Perhaps even more. It was like draining blood from a man made of stone.
His uncovered hands wrapped around my arms, and he shook me a bit. “More than my own life! Do you hear me? I love him more than my own life. He’s—” He seemed to inhale the air like a madman attempting to breathe after his heart had stopped. “He’s part of my wife, my entire life.”
Despite my mind being as clouded as it was, my heart and soul so consumed by emotion that my mind was numb, I understood why Brando truly didn’t want children. Not because he couldn’t love them, but because he loved the thought of them so much that he couldn’t bear the thought of hurting them, even unintentionally.
He rarely refused me anything, but this one thing that I wanted the most. He refused me because of what he could do to a child of his blood, because it had been done to him. He thought he was putting us first.
I sobbed even harder. Why couldn’t he see what I did? He was so much more than what he felt he was. And he slipped from me, nothing but a touch away. “I refuse to letyougo! Do you hear me? You are allIhave, Brando Fausti! All I have. I can’t lose you too. I can’t. I. Just. Want. You.”
“You won’t be able to forgive me,” he said, voice broken and in pieces. “I can’t forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive. Even if there was, which there isn’t, my mercy for you has no end.” Every word trembled out, but they lacked nothing in conviction. “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t want children. You made that clear. Still—you love him. It’s not your fault!” It was mine. I did this to him. I did this to the both of them. I should’ve never— “Is that why you won’t sleep with me anymore? BecauseIdid this. I should’ve never stopped taking my—”
“No.” He shook his head, truly shocked. “No. Is that what you think?”
I sniffed. “I didn’t think—you could look me in the eye. You haven’t looked at me, truly looked at me, since it happened.”
I couldn’t understand his face, or all of the thoughts that seemed to be running through his mind. Whatever he was going through, though, his eyes were solid on mine for the first time in months.
There it was, all that lay between us, exposed. Our past, the then and there, our future, the attraction, desire and ache, the comfort, the safety, our very home, but there was also despair, anguish, confusion, tears, sweat, blood, all reflected and shared.
He took a deep breath. “It’s not your fault either.”
I nodded, swallowing hard. The tightness in my throat was painful. “We can make room—for this. We can learn to live with the loss. Us. Together. The only two people who can truly understand how this feels. He was ours. Yours and mine.”
He watched me for a moment. “If you can forgive me, I can live through it. And he’s ours. Still.”
“Still,” I said on a shaky breath.
“You can’t keep letting it consume you. I’m there with you, keeping you sheltered, but it’s time. It’s time to feel it, but rise above it. Or his life was lost in vain. Do you hear me? We have to get used to it. Show it that it has a place in our life so we’re in control of what it can do to us. I refused to let you go before. I’ll be damned if you go now. I refuse to lose you. I won’t fucking allow it.”
An awful sob almost ripped me in two. Or perhaps it was my heart and soul, and all the pain that consumed them.
I had run from my brother’s death as long as I could. I told the hurt that I’d be there in a second, and then took off, hiding in the darkest corner imaginable while it slowly inched its way toward me, sniffing out the vulnerability in me. Though I couldn’t even compare the two. This loss—it took my entire heart and soul, and I was left with death—Matteo’s and mine.
After coming to my senses, the air of life flooding in, I had been trying to snatch pieces back—life, heart, soul—but was finding it difficult to do.
I was doing the same thing at the villa, allowing it to consume me, not even bothering to fight for my vital pieces. My husband knew it. He allowed me to drift aimlessly for as long as he could stand it. He had never been far from me. It was my own perception hiding the truth—the pain was blinding.
A man accustomed to meeting life head on, shrinking from no one or nothing, he had somehow learned how to master it, even unimaginable pain.Let it show its face. Then we sit with it, acknowledge its presence in our life, give it its due, while becoming the new us—the woman and man who live with this.
Unless the pain had to do with me—if I didn’t exist, somehow he didn’t either, and vice versa. We were tethered together through the connection. As our son was and would forever be. He was worth the unimaginable amount of love, just as he was worth the unimaginable amount of pain.
We came together even harder, holding on under unimaginable dark depths, cold and unfamiliar, until the sun rose, shedding light and warmth. With our hands connected, we rose to the surface, finally together.
