Chapter Thursday, November 24th #3
He glances at me only briefly, but it’s enough to let me know I hit a nerve. He doesn’t want to talk about his grandmother. Figures.
“It’s not,” he says, looking intently at the road ahead of him.
I keep my eyes locked on him. “Are you doing okay? I really w—”
His jaw flexes. “Baby, please. I don’t want to do this right now.”
“When then, Ran? You never want to talk to me. It… Why won’t you talk to me? Why don’t you trust me?”
“I do trust you.” He still doesn’t look at me, but I can clearly see his puckered brow and the tension in his jaw with the streetlights illuminating the car’s interior.
“Not with the thoughts in your head. God, Ran, I was there yesterday. I heard what your grandmother said. I felt how tense you were. I’m in this with you, don’t you understand that? Or am I just a pretty body to you?”
“Of course not,” he says, but an infuriating smile tugs at his lips. “I mean, it is a really nice body. One I plan on taking good care of in about half an hour.”
I groan loudly, throwing my hands in the air. “You’re always so god damn evasive.”
“What do you want me to say, Cat? Because I’m not going to have a fucking therapy session right now.”
His sharp words cut into me like razor blades. He never talks to me like this. It hurts. And not only that, it also bolsters my belief that his grandmother’s visit affected him deeply.
I ignore the piercing pain in my heart and take a shaky breath. “I don’t know, just anything. Anything other than just ‘fine.’ Tell me something that matters. Something that’s real.”
“I love you,” he says with an earnestness that causes my anger at him to teeter. But no, I won’t let him keep placating me.
“I know that,” I say quietly. The defeat, the frustration at his stubborn refusal to open up to me causes the back of my eyes to sting with tears like it has so many times these past few months.
I understand that the trauma Ronan endured requires time—lots and lots of time—to heal from.
But his unwillingness to share that pain with me feels, to a very real extent, personal.
Everyone I talk to about this tells me that trust isn’t the issue, but I can’t agree with that.
Of course it’s trust. Trust that I’ll be there no matter what he divulges, trust that I won’t cut and run.
It’s the foundation of any relationship—the ability to share the deep, the dark, the painful, the good, the bad, the unforgivable.
And clearly he doesn’t trust me with that.
There’s a huge, gaping ravine of things I don’t know about Ronan.
And it’s been like that from the moment we met.
At first he hid the abuse, then he hid the aftermath of his trauma until it was almost too late, until we almost lost him, and now he’s hiding… something.
“Tell me something I don’t know. Please.”
He looks over at me, holding my gaze for a beat longer than is probably safe while driving. He exhales deeply. “I was talking to Doctor Seivert. At dinner. That was Doctor Seivert on the phone.”
“Oh.” Relief surges through me. I may have gone the ninety, but he still came the ten. Something is better than nothing. For now. I study his gorgeous profile as he navigates the road. “About what your grandma said yesterday?”
“Yeah, that and…” His jaw ticks. “And the nightmare I had last night,” he says, avoiding eye contact.
I knit my eyebrows at his hesitation. I know about his nightmares; I’ve witnessed them a few times.
He’ll toss and turn, talk in his sleep, then startle awake, his chest and forehead clammy, heart pounding until he’s able to focus on his surroundings and realize it was just a dream.
I remember the first time I had to wake him from one and finally realized just how bad they were.
It was disconcerting to see him in so much distress until he was able to come out of it. But he hasn’t had one in a few weeks.
“I tried to get in touch with her earlier today, but she only called me back during dinner,” he says.
The fact that Ronan reached out to his therapist on Thanksgiving when he hadn’t seen her in a month gives me pause.
My mom’s a psychiatrist who works with victims of severe trauma.
That means, aside from her regular office hours, she’s always on-call and available to her patients when they find themselves in crisis.
It must have been a bad nightmare if Ronan’s call to his therapist couldn’t wait until Monday, or maybe his grandmother’s visit yesterday affected him more than he’s letting on.
I’m contemplating how best to continue the conversation without inadvertently saying something that will cause him to shut down. “Were you able to get some relief by talking to Doctor Seivert?”
Ronan turns his head to look at me, eyes searching mine with something like gratitude for not forcing him to talk. “A little,” he says. “I’m actually going to see her on Monday.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I think I need to.”
I wish I was the woman he was comfortable opening up to, but at least he’s talking to someone.