“Hey,” he said, when he felt me come up. “How you feel?”
I ran my reflexes through my mind.Fine, slept great, all better,sorry about last night.But they did not fit my mouth. “Wrung out,” I said honestly. “But lighter, though.”
He didn't answer that, just pressed his mouth to the top of my head and left it there as the morning came up around us, and I lay there letting myself be held.
42/
steal it for him
alyssa
I couldn’t letit go.
A week had passed since Julian made it crystal clear that his trauma, his grief, his father, were all subjects marked “Do Not Enter” in permanent red ink, and then went right back to being perfectly, attentively normal with me, the walls behind his eyes reinforced now with steel.
It was a Tuesday evening, and Julian was in his office taking a late call with someone in LA. Micah was at basketball practice with Zhaire and Raschad. I was supposed to be reviewing case files, but instead I sat at Julian’s table staring at my laptop screen, unable to focus on anything except the man down the hall who gave me everything while refusing to take anything in return.
That was what I couldn’t get past. The inequality of it.
Julian had spent months creating a safe space for me and all the ways trauma shaped me into someone who struggled to receive love even when I desperately wanted it. He’d created a space soft enough that I’d started to finally set my weight down in it. And I couldn’t do the same for him, because his walls were higher than mine, built out of years of being the man who solves the problem instead of the man who has them.
The irony would have been funny if it hadn’t been so heartbreaking. I fought receiving. He fought needing. And somehow we’d found this dynamic where we could each see exactly what the other required and battle to give it to them, while being unable to accept it ourselves.
Except Julian’s battle was so much harder than mine because he was fighting against everything he thought it meant to be a man, a leader, the head of his family. Nobody really questioned why Alyssa struggled to accept help. Everyone expected Julian to be the one providing it.
Which left me with one fact, turning it over at his kitchen table while he took a late call down the hall: Julian would never walk into a therapist’s office for himself. Not in this life. But he had never once, in the time we’d been together, been able to say no to me when I needed him.
That was the door. It had been the door the whole time.
I grabbed my phone and started googling “grief support groups Lennox Falls area.” I needed one that met in the evening, one that allowed support people to attend, one that focused on general grief rather than specific types of loss.
Twenty minutes later I had it: Hope & Healing, Thursday nights at a church, seven o’clock, run by a counselor named Candace. Partners welcome, the site said. Especially for the first few sessions.
I wasn’t naive enough to think one night would fix a man who’d spent eighteen years refusing to be fixed. That wasn’t my plan. My plan was smaller, and the smallness of it was what I told myself made it forgivable: just get him in the room. Make him sit in it. Let him hear strangers say the quiet parts out loud, and trust that a man as smart as Julian, once he’d actuallyfeltwhat that room did, would do the rest himself. He would decide, on his own, that maybe itwassomething he needed.
Now I just needed a reason to suddenly need grief counseling that wouldn’t make him suspicious.
I thought about the night I got the email from Malik’s mistress and how I fell apart in Julian’s arms over it until there was nothing left in me but exhaustion and, somehow, peace.
He didn’t know that the thing that healed me that night washim. I was essentially over it. Accepted it. But… I could use that. God help me, I could use that as a cover story.
He came back from his call and dropped into the chair across from me, that tension around his eyes that meant the LA people had been difficult. He reached over and squeezed my hand. “You okay? You seem far away.”
There it was. The opening, handed to me by his own care.
“I’ve been thinking. About Malik’s daughter.” I let the real part of it into my voice, because that part was true. “It’s bringing up more than I expected. I think I want to talk to somebody about it.”
His face shifted straight to concern. “Okay. I can find you somebody. Private, one-on-one, whenever works for your schedule. You don’t have to —”
“I don’t want one-on-one. Not at first.” It came out faster than I meant it, and I had to slow down and build the rest while he watched me. “I mean — I’m sure I might, eventually, if I need it. But there’ssomething about being in a room with other people who’ve gone through similar things. Knowing you’re not the only one. I found a group. It meets Thursdays.”
“A group?” I watched him weigh it, looking for the more efficient solution. “Strangers in a circle, Lyss?”
“I’ve done it before. You’d be surprised.” Then I reached for the part that would close it, and it had the advantage of being true. “Do you mind taking me? It’s at night. Seven o’clock. Church basement.”
I didn’t need to say the rest, I knew his wheels would be turning. I’d be walking into a building full of strangers in the dark, by myself, to talk about the worst time of my life. I made myself hold his eyes, even though I was starting to feel guilty. “Just the first time? I know it’s asking a lot...”
“Of course,” he replied without hesitation. “Whatever you need.”
