Page 44 of XOXO, Yours

What I don’t know is if I can love her while she continues to not let me in.

That's not a happy ending. That's a different story entirely.

I pick up my phone. Put it down. Pick it up again.

Loving her isn’t complicated; it's the least complicated part of any of this. I love the way she says exactly what she means. I love the way she falls apart in my arms. I love the sound of her laugh and how it erases all the sharp edges she normally hides behind. I love how she’s a complete smart ass with the kids and that they miss it entirely, but still love her and think she’s the funniest teacher ever.

I love her down to the marrow of my very bones.

But if she never lets me love her, in the verb sense of the word, then all of that is just like water poured into the ocean.

And therein lies the crack in my foundation. The first real doubt I've had in a life full of evidence that love works out, that the people who are supposed to find each other eventually do. I've watched my whole family prove it. I have always believed, without examining the belief too closely, that I was next.

What if I'm not?

What if she's my person and I'm hers and she refuses to acknowledge it?

I sit with that for a long minute.

Then I type back.

Me: I can't tonight.

Three words. No explanation, because I don't have one I'm willing to give right now. The real explanation is that I need one night to hold myself together. One night to sit with the doubt instead of walking back into her house and into her bed. Tonight I’m not sure I could hold back the words. My love is fierce and real, and right now it has nowhere to go.

chapter

seventeen

Jules

I stare at his text for an embarrassing amount of time.

It’s a completely normal, completely unremarkable text that people send to each other dozens of times a day for dozens of entirely legitimate reasons. But I’m standing in my kitchen holding my phone like it's a grenade with the pin already pulled, trying to understand why it suddenly feels so much harder to breathe.

He can't tonight.

That’s fine. Completely fine and normal.

He has a big family. They’re probably doing something together. I could text Cora and ask, but I don’t want her to be suspicious.

Also, I don’t need to know the reason because this is fine. I’ve spent the last several nights without having sex with him, I can do it again tonight.

I put the phone face-down on the counter, and then I pour myself a glass of wine I wasn't planning to have. Then I stand there drinking it and staring at nothing in particular. But I do conduct a thorough forensic examination of my own reactions until I've identified the exact thing I don't want to find.

Here's the problem.

I'm not disappointed the way a person is disappointed when their Tuesday plans fall through. I'm not mildly inconvenienced. I'm not rearranging my evening around the absence of something that was just supposed to be a recurring arrangement between two adults who know what they're doing.

I'm disappointed the way you're disappointed when the specific person you wanted to talk to isn't available. When the voice you were expecting to hear in your house tonight, saying whatever dumb thing it says that makes you laugh before you can stop yourself, isn't going to be there. When the weight of someone in your space that you've been telling yourself you don't need turns out to be something you'd been counting on without realizing you were counting.

I miss him.

Not in the abstract. Not in the way that's about the arrangement or the convenience of it. I miss him. His stupid notes that I find literally everywhere these days. Under my coffee cup at work. In my lunchbox. Taped to my front door. Under my pillow.

And I have kept all of them. Hoarded them like a territorial dragon guarding her treasure.

I could pull out all of those notes right now. The drawer is literally behind me, no longer a drawer for screwdrivers and batteries and takeout menus. Because it has been taken over by a collection of sticky notes, scraps of paper, two actual cards and a weird drawing on a restaurant napkin. And the taco receipt. The one that started it all.