43
I open the door, tension winding in my chest.
Joel stands stiffly on my porch, hands in the pocket of his jacket. “Can we talk?” he asks, his voice low.
“Oh, so now you want to talk?” The words come out sharper than I intend. I hear the pettiness behind them, but I’m still hurt by the way he treated me in front of his foster parents. Knowing what he’s battling softens some edges, but it doesn’t erase the humiliation.
His dark eyes plead for me to hear him out. “Kenzie, please.”
“Please, what? Please sit there and listen while you dish out more half-truths? While you decide how much I’m allowed to know?”
He flinches. “I want to apologize,” he says. “You surprised me, and I...” He pushes out a hard sigh. “I didn’t handle it well.”
“No, you didn’t.” My arms hug my waist. “You hurt me. It felt like you were ashamed of me.”
His jaw tightens. “It’s not that. It’s never that.”
“Then what is it?” I ask, and I hate that my voice catches. “Because I’m tired, Joel. I’m tired of the unsaid things hovering between us. I’m tired of you not trusting me.”
“Can we talk inside?” he asks. “Please. I don’t want to do this on your porch.”
Part of me wants to close the door and spare myself another hit today. The other part wants answers, and he’s the only one who can give them to me.
I step aside and he walks in.
In the entryway, we face each other. He reaches for me, but I step back, my palm up. “Please don’t touch me right now,” I whisper. “We need to talk and if you touch me, I’ll crumble.” I swallow. “Then we won’t say what needs saying.”
He nods, his arm dropping to his side. “Okay.”
We move to the living room. He pauses by Turbo’s bed, smoothing a hand over his head, then takes the chair opposite mine.
I decide to go straight for it. “You have foster parents,” I say.
“I do.”
“Foster parents you never told me about.”
He drags a hand through his hair. “You saw how awkward it was with them. That’s why. We don’t have the best relationship. But I should have introduced you properly the second you walked up. I shut down instead and made you feel small. You deserved better, and I’m sorry.”
“Why did you shut down?”
He looks at the carpet, then back at me. “Because I feel ashamed of the person I am around them.”
At last, we’re inching toward the thing that matters. I take a deep breath. “Why are they afraid of you? Why did Gaby stiffen when you touched her? Why did they warn me to keep Turbo away from you?”
Silence expands between us, full of all the things we could build if weren’t afraid of the weight.
He starts to speak, then stops, and the hesitation lands like a crack across my chest. For the past few weeks, I’ve tried to be patient.
I haven’t pushed. I’ve given him space and told myself he’ll talk when he’s ready.
I’ve reminded myself he’s worked with Kate for years and still hasn’t told her.
He’s only known me a month. I can’t expect him to set everything at my feet.
But we’re in a relationship, and I don’t see how we survive unless we start being honest with each other.
Unless he starts trusting me with the truth.
I push past my nerves and choose truth over tact. “Joel, someone I trust saw you go into a building where they hold AA meetings. Is that what you’re fighting?”
He stills, his guarded expression transforming into one of disbelief. “You think I’m an alcoholic?”
I simply nod because my throat is too tight for me to say anything else.
His eyes flash with something I can’t fully identify. It’s not anger or acceptance. It’s not indignation either. “You think I’m easing my loneliness in a bottle? Escaping my demons by drinking?”
My voice gentles. “It’s okay to admit it. You can talk to me. I can’t say I understand what you’re going through, because I don’t, but I’m prepared to walk beside you—”
“Kenzie,” he breaks in firmly, “I’m not an alcoholic. I’ve never struggled with alcohol.”
“But...you don’t drink.”
His features tighten. “I don’t drink because the man I can’t stand did and I avoid anything that reminds me of him.”
“Then why were you in the building?”
“I was there to see my therapist.”
“A therapist?”
“Yes. I only started seeing her recently.”
“How recently?” I ask in a whisper.
He holds my gaze. “Two days after you kissed me in that storeroom.”
I have to take a second to collect myself. “Why do you go to her?”
“I see her to make sense of my past and to help me handle my present.”
My eyes sting. “You don’t have to be finished with your past for me to want to be part of your future.”
Joel levels a look at me. “There’s another reason,” he says, his voice going husky.
I swallow. “What reason?”
Tenderness sweeps into his expression. “I see her because I’m done being a mess. And because I need to be the man who can look you in the eye and say, without flinching, I love you.”
I stand without thinking, and he’s on his feet a heartbeat later. Then I launch myself at him, wrapping my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist. He catches me easily, and I kiss him while tears pour down my cheeks.
“You love me?” I ask.
“I love you,” he confirms. “I love the way you rescue dogs and cry at movies. I love how you laugh with your whole body, how you talk with your hands when you’re excited, the way you hum when you draw.”
My throat tightens. In all the time I’ve known him, he’s a man who weighs his words carefully before speaking. But not in this moment.
“I love the way you tilt your head when you’re thinking, the way you care even when caring costs you sleep. I love how you can make a room feel like home the second you walk into it.”
My eyes blur. He leans his forehead to mine and keeps going, gentle and relentless.
“I love that you make me want to be the version of myself I didn’t believe I could be. When something good happens, you’re who I want to tell. When something hard hits, you’re where I want to land.”
I fall into the raw emotion in his eyes, and this time the falling doesn’t feel like a weight. It feels like floating.
A laugh breaks out of me, shaky and bright. “You’re really doing this.”
“I am.” He brushes a tear from my cheek with his knuckle. “You’re it for me. You’ve been it for me since you grabbed me in that storeroom and kissed me senseless.”
I close my eyes, memorizing the rough warmth of his hands, the quiet certainty in his voice, the way his strong, solid presence wraps around me.
“I love you so much,” I whisper, opening my eyes. “I love your strength, your steadiness, even your shadows. But, Joel...I need to know what those shadows are.”
Something passes over his face. I glimpse the battle brewing behind those dark eyes.
He sets me down, then gently pulls me to sit beside him on the couch.
And then he says, his voice rough and broken, “I think it’s time I tell you about my father.”