by Roan Parrish
“No?” I said, my voice shaking.
He breathed in and out slowly through his nose.
“No.”
He was staring at me in that way that meant he wouldn’t stop until I agreed.
“Okay,” I said.
He finally stepped toward me and grabbed shaky handfuls of my sweatshirt.
“You don’t really believe me, do you?” His voice was soft and heartbroken, and I looked down. “Do you? Please just tell me the truth. Please. I don’t think we can afford any more lies.”
“I don’t…I don’t know. I’m not sure.” And fuck, it was hard to say that to him. Hard to watch him hurt and know it was because of me.
“Okay,” he said, sighing. “That’s…that’s good. Keep telling me the truth.”
I nodded, suddenly exhausted. “You’re not gonna like it,” I whispered.
“You let me worry about that.” His voice was flat and resigned.
I felt my stomach lurch again.
“Let’s go to bed,” he said. “We can talk later.”
My eyes flew to his face, then the bed. “T-together?”
Another flash of pain, then he nodded.
I tugged off my sweatshirt and left it and my jeans in a heap on the floor. I stood as he took his own clothes off, not quite able to get into bed first, still certain he’d change his mind.
When Rhys got under the covers and held them up for me, a surge of adrenaline flooded my body so fast I almost collapsed onto the bed. If he was letting me sleep with him, then maybe it really would be okay.
Rhys cupped my face and looked at me. “Matty, listen to me because this is really important. Are you listening?” I nodded. God, his eyes really were the most beautiful color I’d ever seen. “I’m mad at you, really mad. And I’m hurt that you lied to me,” he said, voice thick.
He squeezed his eyes shut when mine flooded with tears. After a few seconds, he opened them again and he was crying too. “And I love you.”
I blinked wildly, took one shaky breath and then another, and still he watched me. I closed my eyes to try and untangle the words. “Okay,” I whispered shakily. “I love you so much. I know you’re mad at me. You should be. I didn’t mean to be so—”
He stopped me with a finger to my lips and winced like he couldn’t hear any more. Tears leaked from my eyes down to tickle my ears, then onto the sheets. Rhys brushed them away.
“Okay. Thanks,” he murmured. “That’s enough for now.”
He settled on his back on his side of the bed. Usually he would gather me to him with my head on his chest, or scoot behind me, arm slung over my waist so that even in sleep we could feel the weight of each other.
Tonight, he felt so far away, and I hugged my damp pillow to my chest to stop myself from reaching for him.
Chapter 11
I went back, the night Rhys and I first slept together. After I got his text telling me why he wanted me, even though I was getting off the train in my neighborhood, I turned around and went straight back. Because I didn’t know what to say in return and I couldn’t bear to say nothing.
He answered the door looking hopeful and nervous, and I felt flayed open.
“You came back.”
“No one’s ever said shit like that to me before. I don’t…I don’t know what to do.”
Rhys reached out, took me by the wrist, and tugged me inside. He pulled me back to bed and took my clothes off.
“Let’s pretend you didn’t leave and I got to say it to you in person.”
Behind my ribs, my heart was beating desperately, blood rushing to my head and in my ears. I was drunk on my own body’s reaction to the promise of care. It’s my only explanation for how I was able to say it.
“Would you? Will you say it to me?” I asked. I pressed a hand to Rhys’s broad chest, and I felt his heart working just like mine. That’s what we were—two hearts, straining ever toward each other.
His eyelashes fluttered and when he looked at me, nose nearly touching mine, his eyes were the crystalline blue of glacial ice, faceted and glowing.
“Yeah, but you can’t laugh.” He slid his hand over mine where it lay on his chest. “And you can’t leave again. Even if you get scared.”
It sounded like a demand out of a fairy tale.
“I promise,” I said, voice just breath.
Then Rhys looked in my eyes and told me that he wanted me. Why he wanted me. His words found their home inside me, like gems nestled expertly into the settings of my bones, where they could twinkle unexpectedly for as long as they were undisturbed.
“I like how you tease me like you’re grumpy with me,” was delivered with a private smile, and I smiled too. “I like how you touch me like you’re daring yourself to do it,” made me slide a hand to his neck and stroke the soft skin there.
“I’ve never really touched someone when it wasn’t sex before,” I confessed. “I like it with you. Sometimes…some of the people I’ve gone home with have wanted to touch me when we’re not having sex but I…I don’t like it. It feels…like sandpaper.”
“It’s intimate,” Rhys murmured. “Letting someone touch you; touching someone with no objective in mind.”
I nodded and Rhys inched closer.
“There’s something I didn’t say in my text.” He traced the bridge of my nose with his fingertip. “You’re so beautiful, Matt. You look like some kind of painting come to life.” He traced over my cheekbone and my brow, smoothing the wrinkle between them away.
I felt myself blush so I concentrated on him.
“You look like some kind of Viking king. Like you should be wearing a cloak into battle and bathing in a waterfall or something.”
Rhys’s laughter rang out.
“I, um. I meant that as a compliment,” I tried to explain. “You look like Thor.”
Rhys’s laughter turned to a chuckle, and he pulled me close to him, my hair catching on his stubble.
When he held me, my world settled into place. Everything stilled, and I felt a sense of calm I’d never known. So I stayed. I stayed in his arms, and I kept touching him, and when he got to the part about how my life had been hard so I was trying to make other people’s lives easier, I tried to tell him.
Haltingly, and in pieces, I told him about how it felt to lie in a strange bed at night and not know the shape of anything around me. How much I’d believed, for a time, that my mother would come back for me. How my realization that she was never coming wasn’t dramatic or sudden. It sank in so slowly that weeks of not expecting her had passed before I registered the change. How I felt like I’d betrayed her once I realized it.
I told him things I’d never told another soul. Things I’d never even shaped into words for myself. Once I started talking, I’d talked for hours, and Rhys had kept touching me the whole time, like his body was a reminder of where I was. Of how he wasn’t going anywhere.
What I’d told him had been mostly feelings, memories, how things smelled or what people had said. It had jumped around and been as moth-eaten as my memory sometimes was. But it had been the truth. It had been the truest thing I’d ever said.
Later, I’d realized that I’d given him feelings without the armature of facts. That I’d let him draw certain conclusions because there were some things that were simply too hard to say. Some words that burned like acid coming up. But I had given him the pieces that I thought were important in the moment, and Rhys had received them like a sacrament.
When I’d talked myself hoarse, Rhys had told me things too. How much it had hurt him when he’d tried to get close to people and they hadn’t wanted relationships with him. The way he’d watched couples sometimes and felt a pang of envy that while he had so much in his life he didn’t have that. Hopelessly caught between his desire for his music and the kind of life that seemed incompatible.
I ran a hand through his thick hair, feeling the architecture of his skull, and I wanted it for him. I wanted him to have everything he’d ever hoped for.
I want you however I can have you.
* * *
—
When I woke the morning after our fight, Rhys was already up. The warm autumn sun fell over his face and I saw something new in his expression. Longing. The desire for something that he thought he might never have. And I’d put it there. It slammed into me so quickly I jerked with it.
“Hi,” Rhys said with a wan quirk of his mouth. It was a long distance from the blinding grins or sleepy smiles he usually gave me when we woke up.
“Hey.” I reached out a hand and ran it through his hair like I so often did. It happened before I realized that maybe he wouldn’t want me to. Rhys had never wanted me to second-guess touching him before, but now I faltered, and let my hand fall away.
I indulged a fantasy that our fight had never happened. That it was just a normal Sunday morning in bed with my husband, and we could chat lazily, or make out, or fuck each other until hunger drove us from the bed. I wanted so badly for it to be a normal Sunday morning.
But one look in his eyes told me that there was no avoiding this. Rhys liked to solve problems the second he knew there was one.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“How are you feeling?” He stroked my cheek and I closed my eyes.
“I feel awkward and weird, like when we first started dating and I didn’t know how to act around you sometimes.”
“Well, I guess I’ll just have to get you to talk the same way I did then,” he said. The memory filled me with warmth. Rhys guessing more and more ridiculous explanations for things, asking more and more absurdly specific questions. It had made me roll my eyes, and then it had made me laugh, and finally it had made me want to correct him with the truth. Which had been his goal all along.
I made a move to bury my face in his chest but stopped myself. I still wasn’t sure I was allowed to touch him.
“You could try,” I said.
“Okay. Did you keep your past a secret from me because you’re in the witness relocation program?”
I shook my head.
“Did you keep your past a secret from me in exchange for a million dollars, which you can’t receive until you’ve reached the age of thirty with your secrecy unbroken?”
I shook my head again.
“Did you keep your past a secret from me because one day when you were a child you met an older version of yourself who’d used a time machine to come back to that exact moment to tell you that someday you would meet a man named Rhys and that whatever else happened, and no matter how much you loved him, you should never, ever tell him the truth?”
That one stung.
“No,” I whispered. “But I wish that was why.”
“Did you keep your past a secret from me because you thought that if I knew I wouldn’t love you?”
I considered that. “Kinda.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t love you because I’d blame you?”
“No.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t love you because I’m the kind of judgmental prick who thinks that if people have bad experiences then they deserve them and are doomed to wander the globe miserable and alone?”
“No!”
“Did you think I wouldn’t love you because you don’t think you’re lovable?”
I blinked, then nodded. “Kinda. Sometimes.”
“Can you tell me more?”
“I didn’t mean to lie to you. I told you things that I—” I swallowed hard. It didn’t seem fair to cry. “That I’d never told anyone. And everything I said was true. The feelings and the…memories. But you know sometimes I’m bad at…like…sometimes I’d say a hard, true thing, and you’d kind of fill in the blanks, and I didn’t correct you. Because it was like you had guessed the worst thing you could think of but it still wasn’t— It’s…fuck.”
The words were climbing over each other in my head like helpless animals that couldn’t find a way out.
“Take a breath, Matty. Just try and talk to me. We have time.”
I closed my eyes and breathed in through my nose. I could smell Rhys, our bed, the fresh scent of the tree outside our bedroom window.
“I’m afraid it’s gonna sound like I’m blaming you for something,” I said with my eyes still closed.
“Okay,” Rhys said.
I squeezed my eyes so tight light burst behind my eyelids.
“I don’t blame you. It’s me. I’m…not brave.”
A rough hand brushed my cheek and then it was gone.
“Just do your best.”
I nodded.
“When we first met. When we talked at the diner? You were so, um…light. The way you looked at me, the way you smiled. You were, like, delighted. With life. And then it turned out that you really were that way. And I loved that about you. Love it. It makes me so happy that you get to be that way. But it also…sometimes it m-m-makes it really hard to…”
I squeezed my hands into fists. My whole body was shaking.
“Fuck. Can you— Ugh.” Rhys tipped my chin up, eyes searching mine. “Can you maybe…can you hold my hand? I—”
Rhys pulled me against him and took my hands in his. Peace. Peace even in fear. Fuck, I couldn’t lose this.
My voice wavered and sounded high and scared.
“When you look at me and you love me so much, it…I can’t…I can’t tell you ugly things sometimes because I don’t want to ruin it for you. I don’t want to, like, infect your beautiful world with all my shitty stuff. Or—no, it’s…When you look at me, I see how much you love me and how much you want me to be happy and there’s this moment when if I say something bad then your face crumples and it makes me too sad and I just…I can’t.”
Rhys didn’t say anything but I could feel his attention. He was practically vibrating.
“You think that you need to protect me?” he said finally. “Like I’m a child? Like I can’t handle the real world?”
His hurt knifed through me and I cringed. It was that, that feeling. I couldn’t stand it.
“No, I— Well, not the child part, but I…I guess I do want to protect you.”
I could feel Rhys wrestling with that. Feel him turning it over and over in his mind. He thought of himself as the protector. He always had, and it was how others had always treated him. Big, strong, capable Rhys always took care of people.
“I don’t mean it as an insult,” I said. “You…you try to protect me too, don’t you?”
I leaned back so I could see his face and watched confusion transmute into fierceness.
“Yeah, of course. You’re my husband and I want to take care of you. I want to protect you from everything.”
“Me too. I want to protect you, and I…I can’t stand the feeling of you being hurt. I can’t stand it for me. It’s selfish. I told you, I’m not brave.”
Rhys ran a hand through his hair and frowned at me.
“This is not what I was expecting you to say.”
And even though we’d fought, and even though we were having a serious conversation, I laughed. Because it was so very like Rhys to be open to hearing my darkest secrets and also think he should know what they would be.
“That’s my whole point,” I said, la
ughing.
“What?” There was a smile in his eyes. He wanted to laugh. Rhys would always choose laughter when he could.
“You expect these things. That the world’s a certain way. And I don’t ever want to…disillusion you.”
Rhys gaped. “Well…well…well, stop it,” he said finally. I dropped my head back onto his shoulder. If only it were that easy.
“Okay, will you promise me something?” Rhys said after a while. “I need to think more about what you just said. But I want you to promise me no more lies. I know that some things are private, and I’ve never wanted to push you to tell me things that you don’t want to share. But now I think maybe in not pushing you, I made you think I couldn’t handle hearing about things. And that’s not true.”
My heart pounded. No more lies meant stripping myself bare before him and hoping he could live with what he saw. I flinched at the thought of the moment his eyes would dim and his face would fall. In those moments, instead of making him happy, I made him sad. And I couldn’t stand making him sad.
I realized I still hadn’t promised when Rhys sat up and studied my face. He reached out a hand and brushed his fingers through my hair. “Don’t be scared. Please.”
His voice was so soft it almost broke me. I closed my eyes and shook my head.
“I’m trying.”
“I would never hurt you. It doesn’t matter what you tell me.”
“That’s not what I’m scared of,” I reassured him.
I’m scared because you have the power to rip this all away. Not just by leaving, but by becoming a different person once you know how shitty the world can be.
I looked at Rhys and remembered his anger from the night before. I wasn’t being fair. I knew I wasn’t. It wasn’t fair that I was so scared to hurt him that I lied by omission. I just didn’t quite know how to stop.
“Okay,” I said. “All right, no more lies.”
Rhys kissed my cheek and ran a hand through my hair.
“Thank you. You want to make coffee, get some breakfast?”
“Together?”
