“Why not? It worked in Brooklyn.”
Her gaze falls from mine. and she rolls away. “Does that sound familiar at all?” I don’t respond, confused. “You’ve never given up your job and moved to a new state to be closer to someone you love?”
Fuck. She thinks I’m repeating history, giving up everything as a grand gesture of love when all I want is to be close to her. “It’s not like that.”
“Isn’t it, though? You act like you’ve already made up your mind, and it doesn’t matter what I say. Like you don’t care that I’ve asked you to wait.” Her tone is borderline frantic. She drops her head back with a sigh. “My goals matter to me. Yours should matter to you too. You told me not to let you repeat the mistakes you made with Natalie. And what did you do with her?”
Hearing her name makes me tense with discomfort. “I gave everything up to go be with her when she never wanted me.” I couldn’t see what was happeningwhileit was happening. Bri is the one who made me see it. “This is different.”
“You want to uproot your life to move closer to me when we aren’t in a relationship, and when I never asked you to do so. How is that different?”
Why does my chest hurt so much right now? I am terrified of losing our connection in all of its forms. If we stopped having sex, I would miss it, but I would be okay. If I stopped getting to see her, it would fucking wreck me.
I ask my biggest fear. “Are you saying you don’t want me here?”
“That’s not what I meant.” Her expression softens, and she touches my face again, driving in her words of comfort. “I don’t want you to shrink yourself to fit in my life because I can’t grow enough to be part of yours. Not wanting you to repeat the past is me caring about you.”
“I know it is. But there was so much more that confused me before I made the decision to go to New York. This is not the same situation. At all.”
“Explain, please.”
I squirm, the painful memories palpable against my skin. I can tell Bri anything—I’ve already told her too much tonight—but this . . .
This one hurts.
“Real talk?” I ask.
“Real talk.”
“The reason I thought Natalie and I were committed wasn’t because of my sex-love intimacy confusion shit. It was because . . .” The words don’t want to come out of my mouth. I have to take a deep breath to loosen the grip in my chest and let them through. “I got her pregnant.”
Bri’s eyes widen for a split second before she turns down thevolume of her face. “Oh.”
“She didn’t tell me at first. She ghosted me for a few weeks, and when I confronted her, she told me. But . . .” If the beginning of the story was painful to tell, the ending is excruciating. “She lost it right after.”
“Shit. I’m sorry. For youandher.”
“I completely understood her hesitation to tell me since we were only, like, six months into whatever our relationship was . . . but it was a hard situation to go through.”
“I’m sorry, babe. Is that something you wanted? To have a baby with her?”
There wasn’t time for me to consider that when I found out, so I didn’t. “I don’t know.”
“Are you sure?” she asks. “When you think about it, do you feel more disappointed or relieved?”
“Neither. It hurts. That’s all.” Admitting that is a relief. Bri runs her hand over my head over and over as if she wants the emotional release for me as much as I do. “That’s why I thought she wanted a future. She wanted to have a baby with me. Then I wanted what she wanted because I thought that meant she wantedme.”
Bri presses a kiss to my forehead. I close my eyes, focusing on her lips rather than my urge to cry over a past I can’t change—hating that I ever put Natalie in that position and made her go through that pain.
“You’ve grown so much since I met you,” Bri says.
“I have?”
“Yes. Do you remember the day I got your suitcase back? How desperate you were to get an explanation from her? And now here you are, able to identify how you felt and how that affected your decisions.”
She’s right. She always is. And I hate it.
“I want to see you more often too, but I don’t want you to confusethe relationship we have or force it into something it can’t be.” Bri loops her arm under mine, moving us to lie chest-to-chest. “Your friendship is everything to me. So is gaining my independence. I can’t lose either.”
