Chapter 15
S he could sense his withdrawal almost immediately and realized that, once again, she had caused him pain. She reached out a hand and grabbed his. “I just realized that so many of the things that I did last time caused you hurt and caused me hurt, and I don’t want to go there again.”
“Meaning that you don’t want to go down that relationship pathway?” He nodded. “Okay, if that’s what you want.”
She shook her head. “I’m not explaining it very well,” she muttered. “Or you’re being deliberately obtuse.” At that, he stared at her in astonishment. Then she burst out laughing. “I know. Most people never say anything negative to you, do they?”
“That’s not true,” he said, with a small smile. “I’ve had some very irate interactions here. People have told me to back off. People have told me to keep my New Age dogma to myself, mostly from patients who were having a rough time. However, sometimes even the staff doesn’t appreciate something I’ve said,” he admitted. “The fact that you shared a bunch of nice stuff doesn’t mean that you can’t say some stuff that’s not so nice. It’s life. I just try to go through every day as if it’s one that has meaning for me.”
“And it should have meaning for you,” she agreed, with a nod. “And I don’t think it’s fair of anybody to get mad at you.”
He burst out laughing. “Everybody has the right to disagree with what I say. And I’m okay with that. I get that sometimes I come across as preachy or whatever else other people might say, but I don’t mean to.” He shrugged. “Mostly I’m having a good day, and it would be nice to see everybody else have good days.”
“Even if they’re not trying to?”
“Even if they’re not trying to, yes,” he agreed. “And sometimes they aren’t trying to because they don’t know that there is another way. So, if I stay positive and cheerful, maybe it’ll make some of them want to be positive and cheerful and to try a little harder.”
“And again I have to point out that you really are a nice guy,” she murmured. “You don’t take offense. You don’t do anything that other people can really get offended by, except that sometimes you’re too happy.”
“Is there such a thing?” he teased, with a lopsided grin.
“Yeah, sometimes I’m sure people out there want to just prick that balloon of happiness of yours because they’re having a bad day.”
“And because they’re having a bad day, I understand,” he replied, “because, yeah, I’ve had bad days too. The day you left was probably the worst day of my life. And I’m not afraid to admit that,” he confirmed. “I’m not sad or upset that you know it. It would be wrong to hide it, although I didn’t need to bring it to the surface tonight. Still, I’m not sure that I want to go through that hurt again.”
“No.” She took a deep breath. “So—”
“So?” Dennis repeated, urging her on.
“I—” And she fell silent again.
“So something’s bothering you.” He reached out a hand for hers. “We’re friends. If you need to say something, say something. If I obviously won’t like it, I promise I will take it under consideration, and I won’t hurt you back for it.” He nodded. “I don’t want to be the kind of person who hits out if somebody shares something with me that needs to be shared.”
She smiled. “I can’t imagine. A part of me already wants to go have a hard talk with anybody who says anything mean and nasty to you.”
*
Dennis stared at Yvonne and then burst out laughing. “You always stuck up for everybody else. I was just thinking about that,” he murmured. “And when you left, it was because you felt a need to stick up for yourself, and that is and was very important for you.” He nodded. “I certainly wouldn’t ever hold that against you.”
She stared at him. “I forgot about that aspect,” she murmured. “I was bad at it, wasn’t I?”
“No, you were good at it,” he argued. “And you were always there to cheer everybody else on, but somehow you seemed to feel as if, when it came to you, you didn’t deserve anybody cheering you on.”
“I don’t even know if deserving was part of it,” she murmured thoughtfully. “I think it was more a case of telling myself how I’m capable of doing this, so I should get off my butt and do it. And, even if it was something that knocked me down again and again, I always heard that voice inside me, telling me to stop being a wuss and to get up.”
He shrugged. “That critical, pushy voice of yours needs to calm down.”
“Yeah, she does. And honestly, it has. In more ways than it hasn’t. I’ve improved a lot,” she declared. “I realized that that was still a lot of the military training I’d gone through, telling me to Get up, soldier , that kind of a thing.… Once I realized where that was coming from, it was easy to park it and to tell it to butt out and to let me be me.”
“And being you is the most important thing,” he declared, with a nod.
“It is, and yet being me also means doing a few other things that maybe are a little more unorthodox than I would have expected.” He looked at her, one eyebrow raised. She smiled. “See? Last time I hurt you, and it’s not something I ever wanted to do. I knew I was doing it, but I,… I felt compelled to leave.”
“And so you needed to do that,” he agreed, with a nod. “And I’m a big boy.… Rejection’s a part of life.”
“It is a part of life,” she confirmed, looking at him steadily. “The thing is, I was wrong.”
He stopped and stared. “In what way?”
“In the way that matters,” she muttered, “because you were the most important thing to me back then, and I am so sorry for what I did.”
“You didn’t do anything,” he said gently. “You did what you needed to do at the time to go forward in your life,” he explained.
“But I didn’t have to hurt you in the process.”
“Sure. How else would you do it?” he joked.
“I don’t know, but I’m sure there would have been another way.”
He shrugged. “As I mentioned, that’s all water under the bridge.”
“It is. I know that.”
“And we don’t have to worry about what happened last time, remember? It’s over. You don’t have to look backward. Let’s look forward.”
“And I would like to look forward,” she stated. “Matter of fact, I would like to look forward in a big way. I just have to know that we can put… our past behind us.”
“Of course we can,” he stated. “It would help if I knew what you wanted, but it’s way too early for that.”
“No, I don’t think it’s way too early at all.” When she saw the stumped look on his face, she added, “It seems like I’m acting hot-cold, hot-cold, but I’m not trying to be that way.”
“Good. Nice to know this comes naturally,” he teased, with a wry look.
She stared at him in shock, and then her laughter once again bubbled up. “I do love that sense of humor of yours. It made a lot of my time here so much easier.”
“Good. Glad that helped.”
“And will continue to help,” she added, “because obviously I want to spend more time with you.”
“I’m glad to hear that, but there is no obvious about it.”
She stopped and winced, considering his statement. “You know something? You’re right.” A thought occurred to her, and she studied him for a long moment, realizing that she was at a cusp of something that needed to happen—if she was brave enough. “There is something I do want to ask you,” she began slowly, working away through it in her mind.
“Okay. You’ve always known me to be fully open and honest. So, if you need to ask something, fly at it.”
She gave him a lopsided grin. “It’s not so easy, and now that I’m on this side of it, I think I finally realized just how hard it was for you and how tough rejection might be.”
He stared at her, his gaze steady. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, so…” And he just left his words hanging.
She nodded and stared off in the distance. “It’s a stupid thing, but, by putting myself in your shoes, I can see it so much clearer. And the pain. I’m so sorry.”
“Hey, stop. I do not want to rehash all that.”
“No, I don’t either, and yet I keep doing it.” She shook her head. “I really want to go forward, so I need to ask you a very important question.”
“Fly at it,” he repeated. “Maybe it’ll help us get past or through whatever this is.”
“I hope so,” she murmured, “because, of all the things that I hope you realized back then, the most important of all was that I loved you.”
“Absolutely. I never doubted that.”
She gave him a misty smile. “And I don’t know about you, but, for me, love is not something that I say or feel lightly.”
He shook his head. “Neither for me. I’m pretty sure we were clear about where we were at back then, too.”
“We did talk about it a lot, didn’t we?”
He nodded. “We absolutely did, which—” Then he shook his head. “No, there’s no which .”
“Which is why, when I said no to your proposal, it was such a shock,” she shared, with a nod.
“You don’t have to explain. I should have waited,” he said. “I should have let you figure yourself out first.”
“Maybe it would’ve made it easier. I don’t know,” she muttered. “I was just so bound and determined to get on with life as an independent woman.”
“And you did. Don’t ever regret that.”
“No, I don’t regret it. I regret that I went alone,” she murmured. “But, for what I had to do, I think at the time it was… the only thing I could do.”
He nodded in understanding.
“So the question I have to ask,” she began again.
He looked at her expectantly.
“It’s stupid because it’s literally putting myself in your shoes, and I find I’m absolutely paralyzed right now.”
He frowned. “You can ask me anything. I mean, as much as I don’t really want to rehash our past, if it will make our future that much easier to be friends or whatever capacity we’re talking about here, then you know I’m okay with it. I would prefer to rehash it once and then put it aside and not do it again.”
She nodded. “Of course you would,” she murmured.
He frowned again.
She smiled and added, “I’m just… I’m not surprised that that’s how you would look at it,” she noted in a soft tone.
“Okay, now you’re worrying me. What’s going on here?”
“I’m not even sure what to say about that either,” she admitted. “I guess the,… the trick here is just an awful lot is going on in my mind, and one thing just won’t leave me alone.”
“Okay. And what’s that got to do with right now ?”
“It’s that question I want to ask,” she replied, “and it hurts.”
“You mean, if I’ve had any relationships while you’ve been gone?”
She frowned at him. “Of all the things that I could have asked, that one never even occurred to me.”
“Oh, okay. So, what is it then?”
“No, now you have to tell me,” she said, followed by a nervous laugh.
“The answer is no. There was never anybody else in my life.”
Yvonne noted there was almost that but you hanging in the air, yet he didn’t say it.