Bad timing be damned, I just need to tell him everything. I want to get it off my chest. But he—like the bulldozer man I know—interrupts me.
“Listen, you don’t have to let me down gently, or whatever you’re about to do,” he says, and I can see him start to pull away mentally before even his body does.
“No, that’s not what—”
“I get it. I came on way too strong last night. I said a lot of things, and I probably scared you. I totally understand why you felt like this morning you had to escape.”
“I didn’t—”
“I mean, you already knew I was inept because of Sarah, and maybe it’s weird that you got a front-row seat tothatimplosion, but I guess also it gives you sort of a better idea of why I’m so bad at this—”
“Stop,” I finally cut in, and he looks surprised, like he’s not used to anyone stopping his particularly terrible soliloquies. “That’s not at all what I was going to say.”
“Oh,” he says, his forehead furrowing in that adorable way that makes him look like he’s lost the plot, in the way that briefly sheds the bravado and makes him look so much more human. “Well, either way, I have to go, and I don’t know when I’m going to be back.”
I was all prepared to tell him that he had it wrong and that my hesitation wasn’t about not liking him, but nowI’mthrown off. “You don’t know when you’re going to be back?”
“My father said he’s going to put her into a long-term-care rehab facility, because he doesn’t have the time to take care of her at home.” I wince, because as much as my parents fall short (and probably would hurt each other in trying to be helpful), they wouldn’t ever just leave each other like that. “And I can’t let that happen to her. She’s too proud. She can’t be in a strange place, taken care of by strangers, while she’s in pain and recovering.”
“What about your sister?” I ask.
“She has her kids to handle. It’s not right for me to ask that of her.”
“And so your mom wants you to come?”
He looks at me like I’m asking the wrong questions, as though I’ve missed an essential part of the plot. “Of course she does.”
“So you’ve talked it over with her?”
He frowns, and I can’t help but love all the ways he’s soEli. Overbearing, know-it-all steamroller Eli on the outside, who I now know—both through getting to know him in the past few months and now suddenly seeing the shades of J all over him—is soft and tender on the inside. Of course it wouldn’t occur to him that he should ask his mother if she wants him to uproot his life. I can see him so clearly asthat child standing so small in front of his mother, as the only bulwark against his father. I can see how projecting strength became the coping mechanism for a solitary boy who wanted to be wrapped up in love instead of having to be strong for a mother who let him.
I keep thinking how much talking to a therapist, rather than pushing away the only one he’d ever been forced into seeing, could’ve helped him. But that’s an issue for another day, because I can already tell Eli is about to go back into the defensive mode I haven’t seen from him in months.
“It’s not about talking it over with her,” he says calmly but surely. “She needs help. I’m not going to let my father turn her into some ignored patient. She’s just turned seventy; she’s not a geriatric who needs to get shipped off. I can be at home with her while she recovers.”
All those shades of protective little boy are emanating from him.
And my heart sinks, because I know I can’t tell him right now.
I can’t add confusion to a man looking to take care of his mother. I can’t make this harder on him than it already is. I can’t throw this massive bombshell of intimacy and misunderstanding onto his day and confuse the hell out of him right before he gets onto a plane and enters into a circumstance I imagine his father isn’t going to exactly welcome with open arms.
And while there’s a piece of my heart that’s already hoping that perhaps in a few weeks or months, he’ll resolve things with his family and come back, there’s a more logical voice reminding me that this current dilemma isn’t the only problem. Whatever this thing is between us—and whatever I imagine it is between J and Eleonora—there’s a part of him thathasn’tbeen open. There’s a part that was hesitant to meet right away, or he would have just come out and said he was in New York when I first texted him. And that lightly lonely man, searching for but scared of connection, needs to come to that realization in his own time.
Or maybe he isn’t capable of it. And I need to not get deluded into forgetting all the reasons why that’s probably the case. And whyIcertainly can’t be the person to solve it for him. Ican’tparent anotherperson. This thing with J/Eli has taken over so much of my mental space for so many months, and I’ve worked too damn hard to let someone else’s inabilities overshadow my peace.
And while I want to believe that’s the main reason, I also know there’s another, uglier thought lurking at the edges. No one has ever chosen me for just me.
I don’t think at this point I could handle being rejected by him, now knowing everything I know. I’m not sure my heart—which I’ve worked so hard to protect and keep safe, to the point where I’ve gone this long without ever getting it crushed—could survive that.
It’s probably better this way, even if the realization hurts more than I would’ve expected.
“It’s good you’re going, then,” I finally say, clearing my throat to stop whatever emotion is bubbling up in me from rushing out. I rub his arm to give him whatever physical reassurance I can, wanting to not have these last moments together be anything but comforting for him. “And just for the record ... you didn’t come on too strong.”
Discernible relief washes over his face, and it makes me ache for him; even with one-hundredth the amount of confusing information, he’s spiraling as much as I was.
“I’m a mess, Nora,” he says quietly.
“Me too.” I shrug, and he gives me one of those slightly curved, one-sided smiles that make him look so boyish and handsome.
