“I spent so many years not even liking him.”
“Is it that simple? Did you not like him? Or were you just desperate for him, and it felt like dislike? Desperate for his attention while he was seducing other women, and in general being mean to you.”
“I…”
Desperate for his attention.That resonated. It echoed inside of her. Yes, she had been desperate for his attention. Desperate for him to see her. She had tried to shape herself into the kind of girl that would interest him, that would catch his focus, and when all she could get was his disdain, she had learned to feed off of that.
“We’re worse than I thought. Because you’re right. I never hated him. At all. I wanted him desperately in whatever form that took. And I was willing to have it be hard. Mean.”
Catherine reached out and squeezed Heather’s arm. “You’re just a girl.”
“What does that mean?”
“Who among us hasn’t been absolutely wretched for a gorgeous man? A man who captures us no matter how bad of an idea it is. It is definitive proof that you can’t choose your sexuality. Because God knows I would’ve been done with men ages ago.”
She was about to protest again. There was no way they could love each other because there was so much…anger there.
But there hadn’t been. Not recently. He was the first person that she texted in the morning, and the last before she went to bed. He had been her first thought all day, every day for the last fifteen years.
She wished she could deny that it was love.
She wished she could write it off as obsession. As something temporary or shallow, but nothing with teeth that penetrated this deeply could ever be shallow.
Nothing that had lasted this long.
She couldn’t think about other men. She couldn’t want them. She cared what he thought about her, so much so that she’d been performing at him in a variety of ways for years. She’d been sick over him, so much so she’d hoped to never see him again and then had destroyed that plan by sleeping with him, getting pregnant with his baby.
And now she knew they could actually like each other too.
That she could enjoy his company instead of only feeling like her skin was too tight when she was near him.
“I love him,” she whispered.
“Yes, you do,” Catherine said. “It really is a good thing that you’re marrying him.”
“I suppose.”
But he had said that they needed to continue to pursue the friendship part of things. But there would never be another man for her. Not ever. And she wasn’t prepared to let him go off and be with other women. She wasn’t… She wasn’t only doing this for their child. She was doing this for her too. Because she wanted him. She didn’t just want to be a vessel for this life inside of her. She didn’t just want to be a mother. She wanted to be a whole woman. Who had love. It was one thing she had never begrudged her mother, not just because it had improved their circumstances, but because Heather had always known that her mother deserved that kind of happiness.
Romeo simply hadn’t been raised by a woman who had allowed him that feeling. His mother had often been miserable, and she had made her son feel miserable when she did.
His emotional state was so tied to her that of course he saw it more simply.
If they were happy, and at peace, their child would be.
But life was too dynamic for that.
And they were already too complicated. But that wasn’t something to run from.
“You don’t look happy.”
“I am,” Heather said.
Because for the first time, everything made sense. For the first time, she made sense. For the first time, all of this felt right.
She wasn’t going to let him run away from this.
She had to believe that she still had power. To change his mind. To make things shift.
