“You’ve decided they don’t need this on them, so you’ve carried it. And they let you, because they love what you did for them too much to push you. They haven’t pushed because they respect you. That’s not the same as agreeing. What if they want to handle it differently. What if yousharedthe weight of these decisions, instead of carrying the entire load on your back?”
He was quiet.
“They might be all right getting him, Julian. They might even want to.”
I felt him start to pull back and I kept my hand where it was. “I’m not saying you’ve been wrong,” I said. “I’m saying you’ve been carrying it all alone. And you don’t have to.”
I watched the side of his face. “You’ve been everything to them. But let me ask you one thing. Who has that for you?”
He looked at me, and then he looked away. “That’s not the point.”
“Who’s been protecting you, while you protected everybody else, Julian? Don’t you think you’re allowed to set it down, and find out the ceiling stays up?”
He didn’t look up. I reached over and covered his hand with mine.
“Julian, you know I went to therapy after everything happened with me.”
“I know.”
“Two years. Every week. It was hard, but it really helped. Havingsomebody whoseonlyjob was to help me through it. My siblings weren’t enough. My mother sure wasn’t.Even I wasn’t enough on my own. Sometimes it has to be a person who isn’t standing inside or adjacent to the thing with you.”
He was very still. “Lyss…”
“Somebody has to say it, and nobody else is going to. Will you just think about it?”
He didn’t answer, he looked at me, and I watched him take it in, hold it a second, and decide… not to.
He reached for me instead. His hand came up to the back of my neck and he drew my face to his and kissed me, and I let him, because the only other option was making him keep talking past a door he’d just shut.
“Lyss,” he said against my mouth.
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“But —”
“Shh.” He kissed the side of my throat and breathed me in. “Need to feel you.”
He turned me toward him on the couch, his hand finding the side of my face, and looked at me. I saw what he was doing, deflecting, and I let him. I dropped it and didn’t say anything else.
“Bedroom.” His mouth was at my ear.
“Okay.” I nodded.
And we went, and left the question I’d asked him, and the therapy I’d asked him to think about, sitting out there in his dark living room, waiting to be picked up.
40/
she is here
julian
fourteen years ago
I was twenty-five,and I had held it together for over four years, and cracked on an ordinary Tuesday.
Nothing about the day was special. It just all came due at once. Zion had been arrested again two nights before, his fourth fight that year. This one worse than the others, a charge that wasn’t going to disappear because I called in a favor. We’d spent the morning on the phone with a lawyer explaining to us that Zion could be facing five years in prison. I reassured him with a voice that saidI have this handled. But I didn’t really know if I actually could handle it. That was new.
