Chapter 50
CHRIS
It was two thirty in the morning. Woofarine was curled up at the end of the bed and Larissa was sleeping next to me.
I lay there with my head on the pillow watching her breathing softly in the dim light.
I could lean over and kiss her. Tuck the blankets around her, hold her.
Tell her how I felt, hear her say it back.
The world was exactly as it should be, and upside down at the same time.
Tonight I relinquished every last piece of who I was. My resolve, my conscience, my values. I gave it all up.
What was the right thing anymore? What kind of person was I supposed to be? Who did I owe allegiance to? If everyone was going to condemn me anyway, she was right, what was the point?
If Larissa didn’t want me like I wanted her, I would have been able to live with it.
I would have been able to move on with what was left of me after the parts she took, but I could not fucking do this another minute knowing she loved me back, knowing that in trying not to hurt Mike, I was going to hurt her.
I could never hurt her. Even if she asked me to.
And I was relieved.
I felt like I’d been fighting anesthesia, trying to stay awake and the dose just kept getting higher and higher and I’d lost the struggle. The part of me that could decide not to be this person was gone.
I would have died for that one kiss in the doorway if that was the price. I kissed her a few steps from the sofa Jesse had just been sitting on, accusing me of that very thing not ten minutes before. And I felt whole with a hole in my chest at the same time.
I wouldn’t be able to share us with the world.
We couldn’t post pictures of us on social media or hold hands in public or be a couple on a double date with our friends.
Nobody would celebrate us. Nobody I’d grown up with would come to our engagement party or RSVP to our wedding one day.
No one to stand next to me at the altar while she came down the aisle or make a best man speech with stories from when we were kids.
It would only be us from this point on. And we would be the bad guys.
If they knew, they’d cheapen it. They’d say we only waited six weeks, they’d accuse us of always having something between us.
And all of it, every last bit of it, would be true.