by Rachel Lee
“Ditto. So you’re staying. Period.”
* * *
It had been a surprisingly easy decision for her to make. She wondered about it as she got coffee for Luke and peered into the refrigerator, trying to decide on dinner for later.
Why had the decision been so easy? At first she hadn’t wanted to take care of Luke at all, hadn’t wanted him back in her life. Now here he was, evidently with some potentially deadly trouble on his heels, and she told him to stay? It would have been the perfect excuse to move him out. But no. Had she just gotten stubborn? She had a tendency to do that.
But as she stared blindly into the fridge, another thought wiggled into her mind. Did she want him here? Had something in the dynamic between them changed that much?
She knew she was still fatally attracted to him, but that route had brought her nothing but pain in the past. Maybe she was a closet masochist. Muttering under her breath, she wondered what she was thinking. Somewhere in the spaghetti of her thoughts there had to be an answer. She needed to know her motivation. What she hoped for from this, if anything. Or if she was just being remarkably stupid for some reason?
At that point she would have bet on the stupidity. Nothing else made any sense. There had never been much that really mattered between them the first time around. It wasn’t as if there was anything left to resurrect except the sex.
But the sex had been good. Great. Better than great. How many nights had she lain awake in her empty bed while he was away and relived every moment of their glorious lovemaking? She’d been so busy enjoying the hazy glow of their passion that for a long time she’d never realized anything was missing.
Except him. He’d be gone for six months or more at a time, then pop back in for a few weeks. It was like brand-new love all over again, every time. New relationship energy, she’d heard someone call it once. Where everything was as fresh as springtime, colors were brighter, sensations were more vivid, and there was a constant song in the air.
But that ended. She had enough married friends to know that the fever pitch of new love didn’t last forever. It settled down. It became real life, where other things had to be dealt with, where friendship had to grow, where couples had to do the hard work of making a life together.
She and Luke had never really gotten there, at least not until the end. What wore out for most people in six months or a year had lasted much longer for them because of the way they were living.
But it had begun to wear off, and with its waning, all the flaws and lacks had started to become apparent, at least to her. Though she hadn’t quite understood her growing dissatisfaction, it had eaten at her, making her edgier and crabbier when Luke was at home. Something was missing. She knew that much.
It had been easy to blame it on Luke’s having an affair. She didn’t know if she was ready to accept that Barbara’s phone call had been a lie, but she could now see how she had become prepared to believe it.
An affair provided a ready excuse for all that she had begun to sense wasn’t there. He was devoting himself to someone else. Of course. Snap explanation.
She closed the refrigerator door, realizing she wasn’t thinking about dinner but was running up her electric bill. Slowly she sat at her kitchen table and tried to sort through her tangled feelings.
It was too late to do the two of them any good. Their life together was over, with too much bitterness under the bridge. Yet she needed to understand or she’d never hammer her way out of the amber that had locked her in an unhappy time, made her distrustful of men and reluctant to risk falling in love again. She needed to sort it out for herself.
And it all would have been so much easier if Luke weren’t in the next room. His very presence was confusing her more, even if it had begun the cascade to self-understanding.
Lovely. How was she going to deal with this?
She heard the creak and rattle of the wheelchair moving on her old wood floors. Moments later her nemesis entered the small kitchen partway. Given its size and the presence of the dinette, it would take some maneuvering to get that wheelchair in, but it could be done. “Need something?” she asked, trying not to look directly at him. It might be a risk, given the way her thoughts were running. She was beginning to feel as if she were losing her emotional control.
“More coffee, if that’s okay.” His voice was subdued, as if he weren’t any happier than she. As if all of this had been going on too long.
She tried for forced cheer. “No problem. Still feeling good to bend your leg?”
“Like heaven. I’m working it like he told me.”
“Let me know when you’re ready to crutch around. I’d like to be close by the first few times. You never know. Do you want your coffee here or in the living room?” It wouldn’t be easy, but she’d get him in there.
He eyed the table. “I don’t think I can slide under that.”
She remembered the crossbar. “Probably not. Go on back and I’ll bring it to you.”
But of course it wasn’t that simple. He hadn’t been wheeling himself around that much yet, and couldn’t turn the chair on a dime. He got stuck with the chair only partly turned in the doorway. When he cussed, she laughed.
“Let me help. You’ll get it before long.”
“Probably about the time I’m able to walk again.” But he smiled and shook his head instead of cussing.
“You could use the bell next time.”
“I hate ringing for you like that. It seems...demeaning to you.”
“Hardly. I’m a nurse. People ring for me all the time.”
She got him to wheel himself a little farther into the kitchen so she could get behind him and begin the process of turning him and heading him in the right direction. Once he was faced the right way, he took over. She followed with two mugs of coffee.
“I need to call Jack to make that ramp,” she remarked. “Then you could actually get out of here and go around the block.” As soon as she suggested it, though, she remembered their discussion with Gage. Would it even be safe for Luke to go around the block alone?
She wasn’t used to thinking this way, and a sour taste filled her mouth. She trusted her neighbors, but there was apparently one who couldn’t be trusted at all. Maybe not on this street. Maybe not even in town, but she didn’t want to start becoming suspicious of people.
She seemed, however, to have no choice.
“Well, maybe not by yourself,” she hedged.
Luke was beginning to look tired, hardly surprising after a week in bed, followed by getting his casts changed that morning. His energy had to be at a relatively low ebb, but she decided not to suggest he get back into bed. He’d probably bite her head off now that he was free to bend his leg and no longer needed to spend hours with it elevated.
“I don’t want you worrying about me,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Really? Don’t make me laugh. You’re not exactly in black-belt condition right now. It’ll come back, but it’s not here yet.”
He arched a brow. “Are you enjoying having me at your mercy?”
“Well... No, actually. I’m not enjoying it at all. I keep thinking how rough it must be for you. Nothing ever slowed you down before.”
“You did.”
She caught her breath. Her mind seemed to go entirely silent and still. Her heart accelerated.
After a moment he said, “I guess I shouldn’t have said that. But you know what? I’m getting tired of evasions, and things being off-limits. We have a past. I looked you up to discuss it. It’s still there. It’s the elephant in the room we keep dancing around.”
She managed to find air but her heart continued to hammer. She didn’t want to discuss this with him. Her mind shrieked that it would be dangerous. Nothing between them could work except sex. She ought to know that because she’d lived it. “Discuss what?” she said finally.
“All of it. The mess we made. How we could have done better. I don’t know about you, but it haunts me. I feel like I totally screwed
up, even without Barbara’s lies. Do you think I didn’t feel your dissatisfaction toward the end? Of course I did. I may appear to be deaf and blind sometimes, but I was aware of it. Damned if I knew what to do about it.”
She spoke very carefully, quietly. “Because we didn’t talk.”
“Not about the right things, apparently. I wanted to fix it, Bri. But I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. And I was too idiotic to just come out and ask.”
She cleared her throat. In fairness to him, she needed to be truthful. “If you’d asked, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. It’s just that simple. I didn’t know, either.”
He eyed her grimly. “Do you know now?”
“I’m not sure. But I’ve been thinking about it. Luke, what difference can it make now? We burned that bridge. It’s gone. We can’t go back. Does either of us even want to?”
“I want to understand. That’s what I want.”
“Me, too. I need to understand. I figure I’ve spent the last three years locking myself away from that whole part of life because I’m afraid of it. No boyfriends, no serious dating, no future.”
He sighed and passed his hand over his face. “Same here. I can’t move on without knowing how I so royally messed up something that started out so good.”
They both grew silent. It felt as if there was no way into this conversation, yet it was clear they needed to have it.
“We didn’t discuss anything,” he said finally. “Even when we melted down. Accusations were flying, but nothing added up.”
She winced inwardly since she had been the one making most of the accusations, then getting frustrated because his response had been mostly silence, except to deny he’d had an affair. But how could he have responded to her? She’d been blaming him for things that even now she could see were totally out of line. Frustration had led her to make claims that had no basis in fact.
“I got pretty wild,” she admitted.
“I couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t adding up to anything except you were unhappy with me. It didn’t tell me what to do. Didn’t give me a direction.”
“That’s because most of it was just ugliness pouring out of me because I was becoming miserable and I didn’t know why.” She paused, then lifted a hand. “There, I admitted it. I was flailing around trying to find reasons, and since I didn’t know what they were, I made up things. How were you supposed to respond to that?”
“Like that time you picked me up at the airport and wouldn’t even let me kiss you hello. I wondered what had happened, and I kept waiting to find out, but you didn’t say. And then you seemed to get over it again and for a week or so everything was fine.”
She looked down, knowing he was right. “I didn’t know what the problem was. And that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? No talk, then we’d fall into our usual romantic habits, and you’d be off again. The air never got cleared.”
“Not really, unless you want to count those fights at the very end.”
“They weren’t real. I just told you.”
“So what was the problem? Have you figured it out?”
She hesitated. “Luke, this is pointless.”
“Not if it lets us move on.”
For some reason hearing him talk about wanting to move on actually made her chest and throat tighten. Was she nuts? She’d divorced this man, had been sure she never wanted to see him again, and now the thought of him going back to his life and out of hers once more hurt?
She was over it. Or she should be. All these years...
“Bri, you’re doing it again. Just talk, please.”
For the first time she wondered if she hadn’t been the biggest problem in their marriage. Not the long separations, not the lack of future planning, but her, and her unwillingness to open herself, to talk, to be vulnerable.
She took what must have seemed like a tangent to him, but a memory welled up in her, and she knew suddenly that it was extremely important. “When I was a kid, about thirteen, I was going through a painful time. Doesn’t matter why—that age is just full of angst. I tried to tell my mother what I was feeling.”
“And?”
“She turned from the pot she was stirring and snapped, ‘Bri, quit being so dramatic.’”
“Just that once?”
Bri shook her head. “No. She was never really interested in what I felt. Almost as if the fact that I had feelings made her feel threatened.”
“So you learned to be a clam.”
“That’s what I’m getting at.”
“Anything else?”
“Actually, yes. I was taught very early, in just so many words, that my feelings didn’t matter. I can still remember my father yelling at me one day when I was angry that I was too young to hate anything, too young to even know what hate was. Stuff like that.”
It was as if some huge understanding was ripping open her insides. As if, finally, she was getting it. No feelings allowed. Didn’t know her own feelings. Her feelings were invalid, or extreme, but whatever, they weren’t real.
“So you don’t even trust your own feelings?” he asked quietly.
“Guess not. Getting better at it but...” She hesitated. “I guess that’s why I could never tell you what was wrong. Why I could never know what I felt, and why I kept dismissing those feelings. Like being mad that time when you came home, then sweeping it under the rug.”
“I wish I’d known.”
“I wish I’d figured this out years ago. Whatever, I’m glad I got that out. But when you said you couldn’t figure out why I was unhappy, it suddenly got so clear, Luke. I never told you. I never trusted my feelings. I’ve been thinking about how we never talked much about the real stuff, and then just now I realized I was the one who wasn’t talking.”
“How could you, raised like that?”
Another understanding dawned. “I just figured out something else.”
He leaned forward as if he wanted to be closer. “What?”
“That I was taught that if I asked for something I would never get it.”
“What?” The word almost erupted from him.
She shrank back. “It’s true,” she said in a small voice. “That was a rule when I was a kid. Ask and you won’t get it.”
He swore savagely. “So you weren’t allowed to share your feelings, you were taught your feelings were suspect, and then you were taught that if you wanted something you’d better not ever ask for it.”
She gave a sharp nod. She still couldn’t bring herself to meet his gaze. Right then she felt like an open, exposed wound.
“They crippled you,” he said harshly.
“I don’t think they meant...”
“I don’t care what they meant. I dealt with the results of it. They crippled you. No two ways about it.”
She had begun to feel pretty small, and now shame filled her. She was broken, and she had made this man pay for her brokenness. God, she was a mess, not fit to be anyone’s mate.
“Bri?”
His voice had grown quiet, gentler than she had heard it since the early days of their marriage. “What?” she asked dully.
“Don’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault.”
“My fault that I ruined our marriage? Maybe it was. Like you said, I’m crippled.”
“I meant that it wasn’t your fault you couldn’t talk about your feelings. I can’t imagine what it must have been like growing up and having everything you felt devalued. Everything you wanted denied if you dared ask. I just can’t imagine it, but I know it wasn’t your fault. Children are impressionable and their parents are always right.”
She made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sniffle. Her entire chest ached with pent-up feelings, feelings she couldn’t give voice to. Feelings she didn’t even know how to sort through or identify. She’d been skimming the surface of life, she realized, afraid of the depths beneath. “I guess I should get some therapy.”
“Maybe. Or maybe you could just keep telling yourself that any f
eeling you have is as valid as anyone else’s. You know, I’m no expert on kids but I have buddies who have children. I learned something from them.”
“What’s that?”
“Kids’ feelings are true, whole, unsullied and real. They may blow over like a summer storm once expressed, but they’re real, Bri. They aren’t hemmed in by a lifetime of being told to hold things in. They let it fly. And yes, a kid does know the meaning of hate. The difference is, their emotions are strong and right up front, and usually short-lived. It’s life that teaches us that expressing some feelings isn’t good under most circumstances, but that’s a matter of expression, not validity.”
“I told my father I hated him. But I didn’t. I loved him.”
“I’m sure. But when you said you hated him, you meant it. With your whole being. It might have been only a few minutes, but you felt it, it was real and he should never have told you that you weren’t old enough to know what it was. You knew. He just didn’t want to hear it. He should have just said that it’s not nice to say things like that. You’d have felt very differently, wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe.”
He sighed. “Okay, I’m not a shrink. I should probably shut up. But now I get what was going on, and I can’t tell you how much it saddens me.”
At that she stole a look at him. “Saddens you?”
“Absolutely. If I’d had any idea, I’d have driven you crazy until you started expressing yourself. I wanted to know what you were thinking and feeling, even if I wouldn’t like it. How else could I do anything about it?”
She hadn’t thought of it that way before, but she realized he had just identified the root problem clearly and concisely. She’d muttered on about how they never talked, but the truth was that not only had she been the one avoiding talking, but she’d closed off any opportunity of fixing things because of it. She had defined the problem without understanding all the ramifications.
“Wow,” she whispered. “Oh, wow.”
“What?”
“I need to think about this. I need to think about just how skewed I am. Was. How much I bottlenecked every possible path for improvement.”
