“Ididn’tsay broken!”
“If I’m not enough as I am, then what the hell are we doing?”
“Don’t twist what I’m saying. You are enough — you are more than enough, you are the best thing that has happened to me. Ever. This isn’t about who you are to me. It’s about who you are toyourself,Julian. You carry everyone and let nobody carry you. Why are you fighting me this hard on the idea that you deserve the same thing you give everybody else?”
“You stand there and tell me what I need to work on. Like you came out the other side of yours clean.” My words were coming faster than I could weigh them down. “You don’t let a soul close without running the whole thing from behind a curtain. That’s not healed either, Alyssa. That runs all over me and you don’t even feel it leave you. So don’t hand me a list.”
Her eyes were wet now and her voice was holding by a thread. “It’s a process. That’s the point. That’s why you talk to somebody trained, somebody who can give you the tools to —”
“I had the tools.” I cut her off. “I had the tools for eighteen years. I WAS the tool, Alyssa. And it worked. It worked until —”
I stopped.
She finished it for me, quietly. “Until me?” She was crying morenow, but steady through it. “That’s what you want to say? It worked until me.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“It’s what you’re thinking.”
I didn’t disagree. I couldn’t, and not disagreeing was its own answer.
“I changed everything for you. I didn’t do this. Any of this. I didn’t do relationships. But then we met, and I just decided,fuck it, I’m going all in. I took every wall I had down to the studs for you.” I looked at her. “And it still isn’t enough. You still need mefixed.”
She wiped her face, looking as wrecked as I felt. “This is not me trying to make you into something else, Julian. It’s me watching the best man I know give everybody in his life the exact thing he won’t let himself have. You deserve to put it down. You deserve somebody whose whole job isjustyou, for one hour a week. That’s all this is about.”
She crossed the last of the space between us and put her arms around me. “Please,” she cried into my chest. “Understand where I’m coming from. Just talk to me.”
For three seconds I let her hold me, and for three seconds I wanted to set the whole thing down into her and let her have the weight of it more than I had wanted anything in eighteen years.
But another thing came up under it. She had managed to do this.To me. I am not a man who gets played. I see the angle in a room before I’m through the door. I have built a life on seeing it. And this woman walked me by the hand into a room I swore I’d never enter. Anybody else on earth and I’d have seen it coming a mile away. Smelled it. But I had gone so far down with her that I’d left my own good sense at the surface. Standing there with her arms around me I understood that I could not trust myself near her, because near her I didn’t think straight. A man who can’t think straight can’t hold anything up.
I set her back from me, both hands on her shoulders. “I can’t do this right now.”
“Julian,please.”
“I need some space. I can’t be around you right now. I’m too… I’ll say things I can’t take back. I’m already past where I should have stopped.”
She nodded. Her tears didn’t stop the entire time; she just let them come but kept her chin up. “Okay, I’ll go.”
She gathered herself and turned to walk out. At the door she stopped and looked back at me.
“I’m not sorry I did it,” she sniffled. “I’m sorry it didn’t work.”
Then she was gone, and the door closed, and the sound of it went all the way through my house and kept going.
I sat down on a barstool. The folded list was still on the counter where she’d left it.
It all came up at once and out of order. Anger that she lied. Embarrassment that I’d fallen for it. And a feeling I couldn’t figure out. I loved her. I had loved her for a long time and never said it out loud to her. It was the clearest thing in me and it arrived as the shape of what had just walked out the door.
But that wasn’t the feeling I couldn’t identify.
My chest started to hurt. An actual physical pain, piercing enough that I looked down at myself for an injury I could see. There was nothing. Just me, in my kitchen, with no procedure for what a person does next. Then it hit me.
It was heartbreak.
part three
FOREVER
