59. Adrian #2
“Hey, you,” she says, and there’s a tentative smile on her face. She’s dressed in a pair of running shorts and a simple white T-shirt. Her blond hair is gathered on top of her head in a neat bun, and she looks… calm. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I guess not this kind of welcome.
“Hey.”
“Come on in.” She opens the door wider, and I walk inside after her. My eyes move over the walls as we go, and then the furniture in the living room. It’s not the same, but I’m glad it’s not. If I had actually died, I would never have wanted her to turn this place into some kind of memorial for me.
We both take a seat on the couch, facing each other.
Freya puts her feet up like she always used to.
I take in everything. The room. Her. Mostly her.
“Is it weird?” she asks.
My eyes fly to her. “Being here again?”
She nods.
“It’s difficult to explain. It’s… it’s like it’s home, but also not?”
“Too many changes?”
“Too much lost time.”
She nods again, and we both fall silent, both looking at each other.
Eventually she lets out a short laugh. “I don’t know how to do this.”
I shake my head. “Neither do I.”
She glances out the window for a moment before she squares her shoulders.
“How about… how about we stop behaving like two strangers, for a start.”
She doesn’t wait for my reply. Instead, she moves closer and slides her feet underneath my thigh.
We’ve sat like this thousands of times over the years.
The memories of countless nights spent on this very same couch hit me dead in the face.
Watching movies. Reading. Studying for exams. Eating takeout. Talking. Laughing.
This couch has seen a few arguments too.
But infinitely more laughter.
“I talked to my therapist,” Freya says.
“You have a therapist?”
“Well, you went missing, so…”
“Sorry.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t be. Therapy’s been good for me.”
“I’m glad.”
She sends me a tentative smile.
“Can I hug you?” she asks in a small voice.
I blow out a big breath and nod. “You really, really can.”
She throws herself against me, and for a while, we just hold each other, and I breathe in the scent of her hair.
She moves closer until she’s in my lap, and I keep my arms tightly wrapped around her while her body melts into mine and we both figure out how to do this.
How to say what needs to be said. How to figure out what to do now. How to figure out what happens to us.
“I always knew you’d come back to me,” she finally whispers.
“When they told us your plane had gone missing… At first I didn’t believe it.
But then when everybody else stopped waiting and started mourning, I didn’t understand because you weren’t dead.
Not for me. I just thought that a love like ours…
I would feel it if you were gone. That it’s not possible to lose the other half of my heart and not feel it.
So I kept waiting for it to hit me. For that moment when I’d accept that you were really gone. But it just never came.”
“You always had the unfortunate flaw of believing in me too much,” I say, and she gives a soft chuckle. Her hand slides over my abdomen and up my chest, where it rests over my heart.
“I need to know how it happened,” she says. “Everything. The whole story.”
I draw in a big breath and lick my lips. She deserves to know. All the hard truths. The brutally honest version. She deserves answers to every question she might have, no matter how difficult to accept those might end up being.
I start from the beginning when the plane went down and work my way through the years.
I do my best to be as honest as I can, but there are things I keep to myself.
The most private moments. Things that will stay between Dylan and me and only Dylan and me, because showing them to somebody else doesn’t feel right, even if that somebody else is Freya.
She’s silently listening the whole time, not saying a single word. I don’t know what she’s thinking. I used to know. I don’t anymore. I so wish I did.
“In a way I’m glad you had Dylan,” she says.
No, I did not expect that—the kind of understanding that shines in her eyes.
“I am,” she repeats. Her eyes were on me the whole time I was speaking, but now her gaze moves over the walls and finally stops on the window.
“Lauren—my therapist—she said… she said that people who go through a traumatic experience together can form a bond. I don’t know how it applies in this case, since you and Dylan already had a pretty damn strong bond to begin with, but my point is shared trauma brings people together.
What you two went through, that’s like the gold medal of traumatic experiences, so everything you’re feeling…
I’m not saying your feelings aren’t real.
I’m saying every emotion you feel regarding Dylan right now is heightened and more intense because of what you went through. ”
I want to argue, because it doesn’t feel like that for me. It feels very real. Almost tangible. Like I’m this close to grabbing it with both hands and never letting it go.
I squeeze my eyes shut. “I love him.”
She winces.
I wince.
“I’m sorry. You don’t know how sorry I am,” I say, miserable to my gut. “But the only way I can do right by any of us is by being honest.”
She nods, and I watch her gather herself. Freya’s always been brave about feelings. Having them. Showing them. Approaching them head-on.
“What does he feel?” she asks.
I let out a mirthless laugh. “Terrified as fuck if I had to guess based on what he’s not saying.”
“Huh. I’ve never once felt loving you was scary.” She doesn’t say it judgmentally. More like she’s discussing something with me.
“I think, for him, you and I are a bunch of unresolved feelings.”
“He’s not wrong, is he?” Freya says.
“Frey—” I shake my head. “—I can’t do this to you.”
“By ‘do this to me,’ you mean give us a chance?”
“That’s not what it would feel like. I don’t…” I drag my fingers through my hair, pulling at the strands to somehow let the sting ground me. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here other than being an asshole to both of you.”
“You’re not an asshole.” She studies me quietly for a bit. “What did Dylan say?” she asks then.
“To get my shit together. More or less. Be with you. See what I feel. What’s still there.”
“So Dylan and I are essentially asking the same thing from you,” she says.
“I don’t think either of you understands what you’re asking. This will be a shitshow. No matter which way I turn it in my head, I know I will break somebody’s heart.”
She studies me for a long moment before she slides her hand into mine and links our fingers.
“I don’t think you understand. I love you.
I have missed you for all these years and waited and hoped with everything I have in me for you to come back to me.
And I got my miracle. I got you back.” She squeezes my hand.
“I’m not giving up on us. All these years, what kept me going was the thought of us.
I want our life back, and I’m not going to stand aside and quietly disappear when I know what we have is real.
You’re the love of my life. It never changed for me, and if circumstances made you forget, I can remind you what our life together was like.
” She slides her palm over my cheek and cups it. “Perfect.”
I feel like I’m a maze, and every path that should lead me out of it is a riddle given to me in a language I don’t speak, so by now I’m standing in the middle, and I can’t take a single step because I just don’t know where I’m supposed to go. and all the while, the walls are closing in on me.
And the thing is, with her sitting in my lap like this, with her hand on my cheek, and I let myself sink into memories, I can feel us . The way it used to be. The comfort and ease of loving and being loved by someone fully, with no complications.
“I’m not giving up on us,” Freya says. “I know I’m taking a risk with my heart, but it’s my heart to risk.”
She presses her lips to mine, and I let myself breathe her in and feel her kiss. Her hand on the side of my face, and her fingers in my hair.
She kisses me like she used to. It’s familiar. It’s soft. It’s so fucking familiar.
But somehow it’s not at all.
I move my hands over her back and pull her into a hug.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m sorry I’m putting you through this. I wish more than anything that it wasn’t like this. You don’t deserve any of it.”
“I don’t. But neither do you.”
I wipe away her tears, and she gives me a small smile.
I love her. I know I love her.
I know I love her.
But all I feel is Dylan’s absence.