“So you enjoy the time you spend together.”
“God, yeah,” I whispered. “It sucks when he’s on the road. It sucks being away from the whole team, butespecially him. It isn’t even…” I shifted a little, some more warmth rising in my cheeks. “It isn’t just the sex, you know? That part’s great and all, but…” I paused, trying to pull my thoughts into order. “I’m just happier when he’s there than when he’s gone.”
“How much of that is rooted in what he did to help you get into rehab?”
I froze. “What?”
“You’re worried your affection for him stems from him helping you,” she explained. “But everything you’ve just described—none of it sounds related to that, does it?”
I stared at the floor between us.
“It’s okay to be happy while you’re grieving, Avery,” she said softly. “It’s okay to fall in love even while you’re still sad.”
I swallowed hard. “Peyton doesn’t think it is, though.”
“Didn’t you say he’s texted a few times about it?”
“Yeah. He, um… He said he’s sorry and he thinks he fucked up.”
“Did you respond?”
I shook my head.
“Do youwantto respond?”
I had to think about that for a moment. “I want to fix things with him. I’m just afraid he’ll tell me that what I feel for him isn’t…” I trailed off when my voice threatened to crack.
“Well. Maybe what needs to happen first is you need to talk to him. And by that I mean you need to speak while he listens.”
“What do I tell him?”
“Everything we talked about. That you are still grieving for your friend, and you are grateful that Peyton helped you when things were dark, but neither of those thingsprecludes loving him.” She paused. “Honestly, if it wasn’t possible to love someone sincerely and genuinely while going through some other emotional turmoil, then no one would ever love at all.”
I blinked.
“We’re not always in the midst of a life-altering trauma,” she clarified. “But everyone is going through something all the time, whether it’s work stress or just worrying about the state of the world. No one is ever in the perfect place in their life or frame of mind to fall in love.”
I sat back again, rolling her words around in my mind. “I, um… I hadn’t thought about that.”
“It’s quite likely he hasn’t either.”
I nodded slowly as I let it all sink in.
Finally, I looked at her again. “Okay. I guess I need to talk to Peyton.”
I was distracted all the way home. Not so much that I couldn’t drive—I still had my situational awareness—but enough that nothing registered beyond traffic signals and what other cars were doing. I could’ve passed a presidential motorcade and a blazing housefire and not even noticed.
But I sure snapped into the moment when I turned up my driveway.
Peyton is here?
Oh, shit. I needed to talk to him, but I wasn’t ready for?—
I wasn’t ready to see him, and I definitely wasn’t ready for the spike of fury when I saw him. After my conversation with Shannon, I was ready to sit down and talk about this, but apparently I still needed to process things a bit, because just the sight of his car had me grinding my teeth.
“Emotions don’t always seem to make sense,”she’d told me during another session.“But they are definitely real.”
Wasn’t that the truth.
