Forget Us Not

by Melissa Shirley

  As quick as I can, I bust out and head for home. I’m not proud of myself for what I do at the stop sign. I don’t pull over because I want to search through her phone. I search through her phone because I’m pulled over for a funeral procession to pass. Her passcode is my birthday and has been since we got together. She’s never hidden it from me, so I assume she has nothing to hide. The text messages between her and her best friend Leila say differently.

  LEILA: Have you told him yet?

  I assume the him is me.

  KENZIE: No. It’ll kill him. I can’t.

  LEILA: It isn’t your fault. He’ll understand. Life just happens this way sometimes.

  KENZIE: I’ll call you later. I’m at home now.

  LEILA: You have to tell him.

  KENZIE: IK. But not today.

  The text is more than two months old. She never mentioned a problem or a secret, although I can’t say I’m surprised. In the months before her accident, we didn’t talk much about anything that couldn’t be yelled at the top of our lungs.

  What if there’s something wrong? Something her doctor believes I already know that I don’t because she didn’t tell me? Didn’t feel she could tell me?

  No wonder she wanted to go. No wonder at all.

  CHAPTER 17

  KENZIE

  He’s been gone for a while, and the house feels empty without him. Instead of moping and whining, I find a pen and paper and doodle a rough sketch of how I want to redecorate the living room. I want something homey and fitting to the outside, but comfortable enough that a presence the size of Sam’s won’t seem out of place.

  As I look around the room, I pick things to keep and others to replace. The ugly leather furniture has to go, along with the hideously ugly art deco rug and the metal and glass entertainment stand. I want wood, and ceramics, and floral curtains, and…my romantic mind generates a list that will clash with Sam’s Beers of the World mug collection. Maybe I can turn the closet into a man cave kind of place for him once it’s cleared out of all those ridiculous clothes and shoes. God knows it’s big enough. He can display his memorabilia and assorted man stuff there along with his recliner and that antique stereo system.

  As I continue to sketch and plan, time passes quickly. With each stroke of the pen, excitement pounds in my chest. When Sam opens the door, I am grinning and talking so fast, I can’t even tell if I make sense as I fill him in. He doesn’t so much as smile when I’m finished.

  “Sounds great, Kenz.” But there’s no enthusiasm. Shit. I’ve just shown him again that the house isn’t what I want. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I’m about to tell him, but he turns. “I’m gonna take a shower.”

  That’s it. Nothing else.

  It takes a solid gulp to find my voice among the shame choking me. “Sam, wait.”

  He turns back, reaches into his pocket and hands me my phone. “Sorry. I forgot.”

  I set the phone on the table next to me and reach out to lay a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. We don’t have to change the house. I love it the way it is. I just thought…”

  “Can we talk about it later? I wanna wash all this dirt off.”

  There’s more than he’s telling me. His hunched stance, the grim face and clenched fingers say more than he has. All I want is to see him smile again…for me. “I could wash your back.” There isn’t so much as a glimmer of humor in his eyes. “Or…your front.” One corner of his mouth twitches, and for a second, I think I have him.

  Instead, he leans down and kisses the top of my head. “You should rest. I’ll just be a few minutes. Then I can make us something to eat.”

  I have no words to convince him, no way to unbreak whatever is broken between us. I can’t do more than sit on this godawful couch and watch him walk away.

  While he showers, I reject a hundred different things I could say to him. I want to be honest and tell him all I know about us, about myself, the memories that have come to me since the accident, but I don’t know how the pieces fit together yet. I don’t know what made our relationship so toxic before my accident. I only know for certain that he means more to me now than I can imagine living without.

  It isn’t until he is standing in front of me that I realize he’s finished cleaning up and is staring at me, apparently waiting for an answer to a question I didn’t hear. “I’m sorry. What?”

  “What would you like to eat? I can order in, or cook, or we can go out.”

  I think about it for a minute. As much as I want to keep him to myself, I wouldn’t mind parading him around town. I look down at the brace on my leg. I can barely walk. Parading anywhere will have to wait. Maybe staying in is better. “Order a pizza?”

  He doesn’t offer an opinion or so much as a grunt in reply but strides into the kitchen. When he comes back, there still isn’t a smile in sight. “I’m going outside to water the lawn until the pizza gets here.” And that’s how the rest of the night goes. He doesn’t speak any more than he has to, doesn’t stay in a room with me longer than a few minutes. By bedtime, I’m shaking with fear.

  Sam carries me to our room and drops me off before heading back downstairs. He doesn’t return. After an hour of fuming and worrying, I decide to handle matters myself. If he won’t talk to me, he can just listen. I call out, and he rushes into the room as though the house is on fire and I’m trapped under a beam. “What? What’s wrong?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

  “Jesus, Kenz, you scared the crap out of me.”

  “I know the feeling.” He starts to turn away, and I swallow hard. “Sam, don’t go. Please.”

  He scrubs both hands over his face, looking up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry, Kenz. I’m just having a hard day.”

  “Let me help.” I don’t know how much I can, but I know I hate the way things are between us.

  “Let’s just go to bed, okay? Tomorrow will be better.”

  He slides between the blankets and turns away from me. I can’t let it go on like this. I just can’t.

  CHAPTER 18

  SAM

  I hate what I’ve done. I invaded her privacy, and karma made sure I’m paying for it. If the sadness etched onto her face isn’t punishment enough, knowing the doubts are back—mine in her, hers in me—would be. Though she’s different now, it doesn’t erase the fact that I know she was keeping something from me.

  A thousand thoughts have gone through my mind since I read the text, each one worse than the last. Is it another man? It has to be that. All the signs were there. The unhappiness in what had once been nothing but. The hours she spent shopping and out with friends.

  “Sam?” Her voice is trembling, and it’s my fault. I’m an asshole.

  I don’t turn to her even when she puts her hand on my shoulder. “Kenz, I’m really tired.”

  “Okay.” The word is followed by a couple shallow breaths and a sniffle as she takes her hand away. My skin grows cold.

  That’s it. Even if I wanted to stay angry over whatever she did, if I wanted to ignore her crying, if I wanted to pretend I don’t care, I can’t. “Come here, baby.”

  “If I did something…”

  “Shh.” Her hair smells like sunshine and flowers, and I breathe her in. When we were at our best, she never snuggled as close as she is now. She shudders again, and I tighten my hold. I really am an asshole. “Kenzie, it’s okay.”

  “I don’t know what I did…to make you unhappy.” Every couple of syllables is punctuated by a sniffle. “I know we had problems before, and I don’t want us to end up back that way.”

  “We won’t.” I’m more confident in the sentiment than in the actual words. I should just tell her, prepare her for the idea…of what? That some random guy is going to show up on the doorstep and claim her as his? That she’s going to remember being happy with someone who isn’t me? I don’t even know if I’m strong enough to say the words. “I went through your phone, Kenz. I know it was wrong, but”—what excuse makes it right?—“I’m so
rry.”

  She chuckles just a little. “So, you know the password? Because I haven’t got a clue.”

  “It’s my birthday.” She nods. “You don’t know that either?”

  “Not currently.” She blows out a cool breath against my chest. “But doesn’t it mean something that of all the combinations I could have chosen, I chose your birthday?”

  I smile and kiss the top of her head because she’s right. It means something. “Yeah.”

  “What did you find when you looked through my phone?”

  Her spine stiffens as though she’s preparing herself for what she’s about to hear.

  “There’s something you weren’t telling me. Something you said you needed to, but I guess you never got around to.”

  “Do you know what it was?”

  “No.” The better question is do I really want to know. I don’t. Not if it’s going to change how we feel about each other. “Do you?”

  “That’s why you’re distant? You’re getting ready for me to remember? Waiting for all the secrets I’ve been keeping to come out?” Her words strangle on a new sob.

  The idea of someone else holding her, touching her, loving her, is enough to cause a rattle in my stomach. “Kenzie, we were in a dark place, and you were getting ready to leave me. I don’t expect that’s going to be much different when you do finally remember. And it’s killing me.” In the dark shadows of our bedroom, it’s easy to be honest with her…with myself. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to survive it this time.” That’s the truth of it. I can handle whatever the future brings as long as she’s fighting it beside me. If not… “But, if your memories come back and you decide you can’t be happy here…with me”—that causes a physical pain in my gut—“then I won’t try to keep you.”

  “I wish we could stay here in this bed forever. Just you and me.”

  I don’t know if she knows what’s going on or what the text means—I don’t even think she’s seen it yet—but I hold her as though it can be just the two of us, that we can make it through whatever secrets she has, whatever made her want to leave. At this point, I don’t have any choice but to believe that.

  “Me, too.”

  ***

  By the time she’s awake, I’ve stared at her in the moonlight, in the darkness, in the twilight hours before dawn and in the early morning sun. I’m in love with my wife. It’s not a fact that will ever let me sleep again, at least not until I know the past isn’t going to separate us; not until I’m sure that whatever threatened us before is nothing more than history, something we conquered together; not until the details she doesn’t know don’t matter anymore.

  In those dark hours of night, I try to imagine what I’ll do without her if she chooses to leave. Each thought shreds a part of me I knew existed but have always ignored. Even at our worst, I never dreamed I would lose her. I just thought we’d been going through a rough patch. But now, I want to wrap her up and hold her against me until everything else slips away. I would, too, if it wouldn’t get me locked me away with the key tossed into a snake pit.

  She’s smiling at me with her hand on my cheek. I’m the bastard who thanks God she hasn’t remembered yet how much she hates me.

  Our faces are a breath apart, and I’m too entranced to do more than stare.

  “Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “About last night…I thought about it a lot.” She grins the trademark heartbreaker smile, the one that snagged my heart the first minute I saw her. “I think we should figure out whatever my secret was.” She swallows hard and giggles at the sound of the gulp. My stomach, though, has fallen somewhere near my big toe. “Get it out in the open so we can…well, I don’t know what we’ll do, but I don’t like it being between us.”

  I don’t answer because I can’t. The fear has a grip on my throat that has closed off the air in my lungs.

  “Show me what was in the phone?”

  I’d rather cut off my left leg and kick my own ass with it, but I’m powerless to deny her anything, so I nod. She hands me the phone from beside her on the table, and I open it as though it’s my own. Scrolling through the screens, I find the texts and hand it to her.

  She nods twice, looks up at me and slides a finger up the screen. I hadn’t gone further back, so I don’t know what’s she’s found, but she turns to me and smiles. “I have a friend.”

  I can’t help but grin back at her. “Quite a few actually.” And none of them like me.

  “Maybe she knows.”

  “Kenz”—I don’t know what I’m about to say, but it probably borders on begging her not to go down this road.

  “Let’s see what else is in this technological gem.” She sits up, looking through pictures she’s snapped. “You are a fine photographic specimen.” I shift and press my chest against her back as she flips screen after screen with my face on each one. “I seem to be quite infatuated.”

  “Good.”

  “Are you sure we don’t get along? Because look at all these…you…us…us…us…you, again…more you.” Her finger glides along the glass, and under the guise of what can be captured in a photo, we look damned happy. For me, each image is a memory. For her, each one is a revelation. She spends a few seconds staring and tracing the line of my jaw with her finger or tilting her head as if she’s right on the cusp of remembering. In her phone, our happiness is frozen on the screen.

  “We had our moments.” It’s the best I can do. I don’t share that those moments were few and lasted bare seconds at a time. I also don’t admit that though some of the pictures are as recent as the days before her accident, they are nothing more than an illusion of us trying to be something we weren’t.

  But she looks at me, and I know she knows what I’m not saying. “Sam, I’m going to fight for us. For whatever we lost before and whatever we can be in the future. I chose you for a reason, and I’m not giving up.” I nod and kiss the bend where her shoulder meets her neck. “So now, here, tell me all of it. Everything you think or even suspect. If we both know how bad it was, we can figure out how to not let it get there again.”

  I don’t want to dredge that up, not now, while she loves me again and is letting me hold her and touch her. But again, if she asked me to cliff dive without a parachute, I’d drive us out to a canyon and take the big jump.

  I don’t tell her everything because I can’t bring myself to say the words. I can’t tell her I think there might be someone else. Instead, I sugarcoat everything else as much as I can, but there is only so much I can do with our history to make it less damaged.

  When I’ve gone as far as I can, I blow out a breath. “Until the night you told me you didn’t love me anymore, I thought we were going to be okay. We talked about having a baby and moving into town, closer to the school. Then…” The memory of her words—I don’t love you anymore—chokes me and I keep it to myself.

  “I hurt you.” She leans forward, putting a few inches of distance between us. Because I can’t stand to not touch her, I twirl a long strand of her hair around my finger.

  “Kenzie, maybe I did something to upset you or…I just don’t know. But we have this chance to go back and get it right. I don’t think we should waste it concentrating on all the things that went wrong.”

  “I know, but if we don’t talk about what went wrong, how are we going to keep it from happening again?”

  CHAPTER 19

  KENZIE

  Apparently, the answer to my question is a long soapy bubble bath that may or may not have been suggested by me. I mean, who can really blame me? My husband is of the Greek god variety, and when he stretches those glorious muscles in front of me, I’m reduced to a puddle of lust. How I’d ever resisted him is a mystery I hope I never solve.

  When he sits me on the bed, my sense of déjà vu is so strong, I can’t tell if it’s a memory trying to break through or if this moment is so blissful I etch it into my brain for future recollection.

  “What’s that smile for?” He’s rooti
ng through a drawer but grinning at me in the mirror.

  “For you.”

  He leaves the drawer open and swivels to face me. “For me?”

  A simple nod would have done the job, but I throw in a lick of my lips and a bat of my eyelashes as emphasis. “Well, that half-naked towel thing you have going on is pretty tempting, and pardon me, but it makes me smile.”

  “Are you flirting with me?” He glides across the room as though he is on wheels and ends up with the knot in his towel at my eye level.

  “If you don’t know, I’d better step up my game a bit.” I give a yank and an eyebrow wiggle before pulling him down on top of me.

  “Sam?” With my head on his chest and his arms wrapped around me, I feel safe enough to bring this up. “Maybe I should call Leila.”

  My ear is pressed against his heart, and the pace of it kicks up. “Yeah.”

  I know what he’s thinking because I’m thinking it, too. “What if what she says is bad? Like kick in the stomach bad?” Considering what I know about my former self—leaving him—I can almost guarantee it’s worse than anything he’s imagining. I blow out a long breath and sit up, taking enough of the blanket so he’s bare from just below his waist up. “What’s the worst thing you can think of that I could be hiding from you?”

  “Kenzie, let’s not do that.”

  “No, let’s get this out there so we can figure out how to deal with it. What’s the worst thing?”

  He doesn’t even take a breath. “Another man.”

  I knew what he’d say before I asked the question. “And what would you do if she tells me I’ve been with someone else?”

  He shakes his head and stares out the window. “I don’t know, Kenz. I don’t want to think about that.”

  We can’t ignore this. “We have to think about it, Sam. It doesn’t make me any happier than it does you, but we can’t pretend now. If we’re going to make it…once I’m me again, we have to do it together. And we need to be prepared.” I’m almost proud of my argument until he turns back to me with eyes glittering with tears.