She was quiet for a long time, and I was content to wait until she broke the silence.
When she did, her question was one I wasn’t expecting—mostly because I thought the answer was obvious.
“We’re really doing this, right?” she asked softly, tilting her head back and angling her face to look up at me.
“Of course,” I replied quickly.
“I know that was a lot,” she continued, hooking her thumb in the direction of the bedroom, then dropping her hands to my wrists, where she brushed over the redness lingering from the handcuffs. “And while I do feel better, it’s not like I’m just magically cured, you know? It’s going to take time.”
“If you need that from me every time, that’s fine,” I assured her, flipping my hands so our palms pressed together, threading my fingers through hers.
Sutton laughed lightly. “That’s the thing, Lane. We can’t do that every time.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I don’t want to, for starters. I mean, I’m sure it won’t always be that emotional, but I just…”
She trailed off, her thumb tracing a nonsensical pattern on the side of my hand.
“You just what?”
“I want to give you what you need too. You say now that you’re happy to keep doing that for me, but you won’t always feel like that. And one day, you’re going to resent me for being so broken we can’t just have a normal sex life.”
Grabbing her hips, I lifted her and spun her around until we were face to face. Cupping her cheeks in both of my hands, Istared deep into her eyes, making sure to enunciate every word, ensuring she heard me clearly.
“All I need is you.”
She shook her head, trying to break free from my grasp, but I held her fast.
“What if one day you wake up and realize I’m not enough?”
“That willneverhappen.”
“You left me once before.”
I gasped, rearing away, my hands dropping with a splash into the water, back slamming against the wall of the tub. All thoughts fled my brain except that fateful day when we officially called it quits on our relationship.
In the weeks after her assault, she’d withdrawn further and further into herself. I’d been at a complete loss for what to do, for how to bring her back. Hell, I’d only been twenty. While I’d known I loved Sutton, I had been way out of my depth when it came to the emotional crater the rape had left in the center of both of our lives.
I remembered reaching for her one day, begging for her to let me hold her, and she’d flinched away.
That was the moment I’d realized things were far worse than I’d thought.
But the words that followed were a dagger, the final nail in our coffin.
“I can’t bear to be touched by you.”
I understood grief. At that time, it had only been a few years since Dad had died. But I had no idea how to grieve someone who still sat in front of me, alive if not entirely whole.
Now, sixteen years removed from the incident, I recognized my error. Neither of us were entirely without blame, but it hadn’t been Sutton’s job to manage my feelings and expectations when she’d barely been holding herself together.
“That will never happenagain,” I amended. “We have to move past it, sunny. Have to forgive each other. This won’t work if we don’t.”
She nodded, eyes falling closed, and my hands came up to her cheeks again. Her head angled, nuzzling into my palms, and I leaned forward to press a kiss to her forehead.
“You’re right,” she said. “I really want this to work, Lane. Ineedit. Needyou.”
“You have me.”
