I could believe it. Ididbelieve it. “Keep talking.”
“Can we sit on your bed?”
“Of course.”
I led him across the room. Micah limped behind me, his leg dragging more than usual, but I held my tongue and motioned for him to sit.
He obeyed, still holding my hands in a death grip, and I remembered the long trip north, rocking along with the train while he held onto me for dear life.
I pried one hand free and thumbed the worry lines on his face. “Talk, Micah. Please?”
“I’m trying.”
“I know.”
Micah sighed. Again. “They said the anti-depressants and mood stabilisers would make me feel like a zombie for a while. I never told them I already did. But... it didn’t work out like that. I started taking them a few weeks before we met, and everything’s been different since then. It scares me.”
“Why?”
“Cos I don’t know what’s real. What’s me and what’s the magic pills. I won’t be on them forever, and then what? What if my brain shuts down again and I forget that I love you too?”
He loves me. His other words sunk in, but those precious three hovered at the surface. “You love me?”
Micah’s troubled frown turned incredulous. “Of course I do. I always have. How can you not know that?”
“Because you’ve never told me. I’m not a mind reader.” I spoke with a smile, but inside, I was reeling. Micah loved me. All this time and I’d had no idea, even when he’d confessed that he wanted to kiss me. That he’d wanted to kiss me for a long time.
Micah flopped back on my bed, taking me with him. “I’m such a dick.”
“Not in a bad way.”
“Huh?”
I found a grin and stroked his face again: the smudges under his eyes, his sculpted cheekbones, and strong jaw. “I like your dick.”
“Very funny.”
“I try.”
Humour flared in his dark eyes, but it was gone in a flash. He rolled onto his side to face me. “I want to love you. You know that, don’t you?”
I didn’t. How could I when so much of this conversation had said the opposite? But I couldn’t bear his raw panic. It struck my heart with its blunt blade and I needed it gone. “Let’s think about it logically,” I said. “Anti-depressants take months to start working. You said everything changed when we met, which was only a few weeks after you started taking them. What did you mean?”
A shy smile threatened Micah’s frown. “Aw, don’t make me say it.”
I sat up and loomed over him. “I have to. It’s the law.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. You can’t tell me you love me and not fill in the blanks.”
“It was the way you looked at me.”
“How so?”
Micah shrugged. “Like you’d never seen me before. I mean, I knew the moment you realised you had, but it didn’t matter cos you didn’t change, and I loved you for that from the start.”
He’d once told me that confronting his emotions, for better or worse, exhausted him. And I’d seen him after therapy sessions often enough to know that he was done talking. There was no more, at least, not today.
