I reach out suddenly and pull her into my lap, wrapping her in my arms as tight as I can, holding her close, my face nestled in that perfect spot between her head and her shoulder, where I take deep inhales of that spicy, floral scent that’s just her. My Wonder Woman. My everything. I let out the last of my tears, and I can feel hers dampening my chest, too, as I rock her back and forth for an endless amount of time.
Eventually, I speak against her temple. “You want to know why I call you Di? Why ever since I saw you bring life into this world for the first time, that’s the only thing I can think of you as? It’s not after a princess. I know that’s what you thought.”
Of all the things I could’ve said, I’m one-hundred percent sure that this isnotwhat she expected to hear, but she doesn’t stop me.
With how many times she’s asked me over the last nine years, I know she’s been dying to know. I think she’d all but given up on ever getting a straight answer out of me on it, but it seems important to share it with her now. To let her see herself through my eyes.
“It’s because I never realized until that day how truly astonishing you are. How much strength you have. How much power. I call you Diana because that’s the first name of Wonder Woman, and that was the only comparison my dumb brain could make that day. You were out of this fucking world, like a literal goddamn superhero. I had no idea what true strength was until that day. And I didn’t think I could love you more than I already did until you brought our first son into the world. And then you did it again. And again, and again. And I was just in awe of you. I still am, baby.”
One of my hands cups her face, sweeping her cheek, caressing it. The emotion staring back at me swarms me, and my own eyes find a way to water yet again.
She’s fucking speechless, my girl, and that’s a rare thing. Her mouth is opening and closing, but no sound comes out (sorta like what would happen if we took Paul Rudd’s most iconic character—I said what I said—out of his bowl in the kitchen), so I keep talking.
“I don’t think I could ever make you as happy as you have made me through this family we’ve built together, and I’m not sure I can ever repay you for the life you’ve given me. But I have spent every day since Bradshaw was born trying.”
The look on her face… She makes me feel like my words are slicing her chest open and healing each wound directly on that beautiful heart with precision, one word at a time.
She’s crying freely, not even trying to stop the flow of tears streaming down her face, and I just hold her and watch her heal right in front of me.
Her head tucked into my chest, my arms wrapped around her, our entire world asleep inside the walls next to us… This is the closest to whole I’ve felt in years.
Eventually, I think I’ve gotten out a decade’s worth of emotion, and I’m pretty sure she’s stopped crying, too. I can’t speak for her, but that giant rift in my gut that’s been growing for months and reached a new low tonight, it’s slowly started stitching back together when I had her in my arms again.
I gently pull back just enough to look her in the eyes. Her hazel eyes are shimmering, and though they’re reddened from all the activity in her tear ducts, they look hopeful again, but I can see she has more to say, so I let her.
“Why did you stop touching me?”
This makes me pause.
“I’ve been touching you, baby.”
“Not since…the dates. But before. After the kids were born. You used to touch me all the time, in public, in private. Keep a hand on my back, slap my ass, put an arm around my shoulder. Or you’d come up behind me a lot, wrap your arms around me, hold me close. You stopped doing all that. I thought it was because you weren’t attracted to me anymore.”
I actually thought she didn’t want me touching her; she always seemed so closed off after I would initiate physical contact after a certain point. It might have been subconscious, but I’m pretty sure on some level, I pulled back from her to stop feeling rejected by her.
“No, baby. Fuck, no. I remember this one time, I think it was at the Christmas party a couple years ago, at Ellie’s parents’ house. I came up behind you and wrapped my arms around your middle and tried to rest my head on your shoulder while you were chatting with Ellie and some of the girls from the office. You, like, froze up, and started pushing my hands away from you. I think that was the first time I really noticed it, but after that I started seeing it happen a lot. I’d reach out, try to touch you, try to hold you, and sometimes you’d, kinda, gently step away from me, this like subtle rejection. And other times you’d straight up cringe. It got more and more frequent.” A frown tugs at my mouth. “Then when we stopped having sex, it solidified those thoughts I had that it was me, that I was repulsing you. That you didn’t want me touching you anymore. I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out what I did.”
Another thought hits me. “But that night, that fucking night that you saw me, that didn’t happen until ages after the Christmas party. Did I do something before that night? Something that made you pull back from me?”
She looks up at the awning over our heads for a moment, shaking her head and regaining her strength to keep sharing her deepest fears and insecurities with me. She’s such a strong woman, normally so fucking confident and such a ballbuster in every situation, I know this is hard for her. Maybe harder for her than it is for me, and I’ve been ready to puke for the last forty-five minutes, at least.
“I remember the Christmas party, too, Chance. I still had a lot of the pooch that I couldn’t get rid of after Lea was born, and when you came up behind me, you set your handsrighton it. Like it was what you noticed most about me. It was like a magnet for your hands, I swear to god. All my biggest flaws were. In the kitchen, you’d grab my love handles, or those fucking saddlebags on the sides of my thighs. You’d reach out to touch me in bed, and your hand would gravitate right to that belly, or the flab on my arm. It felt like you were bringing attention to the weight that I gained, how different my body had become over the years, everything I hated about it. Every touch made me want to die a little bit more.”
I shake my head in denial, so fucking annoyed that neither of us thought to talk this out with the other until now. I’ve spent all this time wanting her, thinking she didn’t want me, and all along, she’s been thinking I didn’t want her. She was ready to give up on us because she didn’t believe I was still as into her as I’ve always been.
We were both so, so wrong, and I hate that we wasted all these months, or maybe it’s been years at this point, missing out on what we both needed from one another, all because we were afraid of what might come out of that confrontation. I wish so badly we’d done this the night of the Christmas party. Or whenever this divide between us actually started.
While I can’t change the past, I can control the future, to some extent. I make a vow with myself right here and now to never let an upset between us go unaddressed like this ever again. To tackle it, head on, no matter how scared I am of what the outcome could be. To believe in the love we have for each other, all the good there is between us, that it could overpower almost anything else we might face.
So I start right now, tell her how I really feel, make sure she has absolutely zero doubts left about how much I adore her and always have.
“I love your body, baby. No matter what shape, what size you are. Your curves are fucking beautiful. I fell in love with you when you were a teeny little thing, but I’ve loved you more and more with every change your body has gone through over the years. Iloveseeing the reminders on your body of this life we’ve built together. This beautiful family you’ve given me. It makes me fucking primal, like this ancient fucking instinct flares up to protect you and the kids. If anything, I was trying to worship those changes in your body and what they remind me of.”
Another tear escapes her eye and runs down her cheek at those words, and I can see all of the hurt she’s been holding onto melting away as my sincerity sets in, the truth in my words sinking deep into her bones, filling those months and months of doubts and insecurities and replacing them with love. All that pain of feeling unwanted by the one man whose job it was to cherish her needs to fuck all the way off. I keep talking because she needs to never doubt this again.
“Seeing what you’ve gone through, the incredible woman you are...fuck. Every passing year I am more and more amazed at the person you’ve become, the family you’ve built for us, all you do for us day in and day out. How could I not love your body after all it’s done for us? Even if I didn’t find your curves sexy as all hell, which I fucking do, by the way, I admire you so goddamn much, baby, and I want to die that I made you feel any other way. I can’t believe you’ve been sitting on this for months. I hate that I put you through this.”
Her lips part on an exhale, chest falling, and she tells me earnestly, honestly, “I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear it if that was what you wanted, if some younger chick, some tighter chick, was what you needed. I wasn’t brave enough to hear you say it. I wouldn’t have been able to take it. I tried to take what you were offering to me, and just come to peace with the fact that you needed more than I could give you outside of that. But I couldn’t. It kept haunting me.”
