15
Ryan
Move in?
My brain was starting to short circuit. He didn’t really mean that he wanted me to move in…did he? I’m the worst person to live with. I’d wreck everything, and I loved what we had. I didn’t want to wreck it. If I moved in, it’d mess everything up. I had been able to dodge this conversation before, several times, in fact. But he was right, we just needed to have this conversation so that he’d understand, and we could stop having this conversation.
“Move in?” I finally managed to ask, just to be sure he was really talking about me physically moving in.
“Yes, Ryan. I would love for you to move in,” Russell said with a smile.
Was he really happy?
“But,” I started and stopped. I just needed to bite this bullet and talk to him about it. “But, I’m terrible to live with,” I admitted.
“I happen to know that is false, Ryan. You’ve stayed here overnight before and for weekends at a time on occasion. You aren’t terrible to live with. You’re a delight and when you’re here, you make my house a home. You make me happy when you’re here and I ache when you leave. And I know you ache, as well.”
“I wreck things. The past—”
“Is just that, Ryan. It is your past. It’s not your present or your future. I am.”
“But I wrecked the relationships with my past girlfriends. I’m not a good boyfriend.”
“They didn’t knowhowto love you, Ryan. I do. And, we’ve established that I’m not looking for a boyfriend. I have already found the person that I want to spend my life with. What we have is unique and special.”
“But if I move in, I’ll wreck the good thing that we have. I love what we have, and I don’t want to mess it up.”
“Ryan, our bond will only strengthen.”
I shook my head at his confidence. He didn’t understand that I was a curse to relationships.
“I’ll mess it up.”
“Explain to me how you think you’ll mess it up?”
I took a deep breath to calm my breathing down because I felt like the walls were closing in on me.
“I need space,” I shrugged. “I need space when I wake up sometimes. I know you want to be there for me and offer help, but it can be claustrophobic to me, and I just want to close everything off until I feel grounded again. So, when I do that, you’ll feel like I’m pushing you away. Then it’ll lead to arguments and then you’ll leave.”
“That’s not going to happen, Ryan—”
I felt the panic coming on; I felt warm and as though my pulse was racing.
“Only, this will be worse because I will be without a home. If I move in with you, then I’ll have to get rid of my house. Then if you leave, I won’t have a home.”
Why were my fucking eyes watering? I quickly wiped at them.
“And I don’t even have any friends here that I would be able to call and ask if I could crash at their place until I was able to rent something.”
“Ryan, relax. You’re jumping at shadows, my boy.”
He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand how I am poison to relationships. We continued this conversation through the night. A lot of what he said sounded so good, but I just know how I am in a live-in situation. On top of which, I just couldn’t handle moving out of my only place. And why I continued to entertain this dumb idea, was beyond me.
“What about my place?” I asked him in the middle of the night.
“Well, there are a couple options, Ryan,” he began as he propped himself up on his elbow. “We could sell your house, or if you’d like to retain it, we could rent it out.”
I thought about what he had said while he rubbed on my stomach. He made mention of ‘we’ versus ‘me.’ Kind of like, together we would decide what to do, and that it just wasn’t all on my shoulders.
