Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Our counselor’s name Dr. Melanie Price, and within fifteen minutes I hate her.
This seems promising.
"Tell me what happened," she says.
Caleb begins with Jeremy tying the blindfold.
Dr. Price lets him talk for two minutes before interrupting.
"You have told me what Jeremy did, what Sable did, what the men in the room did, and what alcohol did. Where are you in the story?"
Caleb leans back. "I am the blindfolded man being lied to."
"At first."
"That matters."
"It does," I say before Dr. Price can. "I don't blame you for the first kiss."
Caleb looks at me as though I have handed him water after weeks in the desert.
"Don't," I snap. "Do not look grateful. What Jeremy and Sable did to you was disgusting. What you did after you saw her was still yours. Both things can be true, and I am exhausted from everyone insisting I have to pick one."
"I know."
"No, you know when it helps you. The minute I get angry, you start telling me how quickly you stopped."
"Because I did stop."
"After you enjoyed it."
"Yes."
"After you grabbed her."
"Yes."
"Stop agreeing like we are discussing the weather."
Caleb shoots out of his chair. "What do you want me to do?
Deny it so you can catch me? Scream so I look guilty enough?
I liked it, Dahlia. There. She rejected me, and some pathetic part of me loved discovering she still wanted me.
I wasn't thinking about our wedding. I wasn't thinking about you.
I was thinking that Sable finally knew what she lost. Then I realized I was the one losing everything. "
The room rings with his voice.
Dr. Price does not tell him to sit down.
"That," I say, crying now. "That is what I needed you to admit. Not that your body remembered her. You did."
"Yes. I did. And I hate that I did."
"You don't get to hate it more than I do."
"I am not trying to win at hating myself."
"You turn everything into something I have to reassure you about."
"I haven't asked you to reassure me once."
"You cry outside my apartment. You look at my ring. You sell your motorcycle. You make suffering so loudly I trip over it."
Caleb stares at me. "I am sorry my pain is inconvenient."
"There you are," I whisper. "I was wondering when you would finally get angry at me."
He swears and drops back into the chair.
Dr. Price waits until neither of us is speaking.
"Dahlia, what did you lose? Not what did Caleb do. What is gone?"
"My wedding."
The answer comes too quickly.
"I cannot remember walking down the aisle without seeing all those men behind him knowing something I didn't. I lost the honeymoon. I lost the house. Clients think I am too unstable to plan their weddings because mine became entertainment."
I look at Caleb.
"And I lost being the woman who could reach every part of him. Sable reached one I thought belonged to me."
"It did belong to you," he says.
"Then why did she get it?"
"Because I gave it away."
The answer lands without decoration.
Dr. Price gives us homework. Caleb must write the bachelor party from beginning to end without using but, only, or because. I must write what reconciliation would look like if there were no families, group chats, or strangers waiting to judge the result.
He sends me the entire account two days later.
It is nine pages.
I knew Jeremy thought marriage had made me boring, and I went to the party determined to prove him wrong.
I drank too much because the men around me cheered every time I did.
I laughed when they treated Dahlia like the woman waiting at home to spoil our fun.
When Sable kissed me, I thought she was Dahlia.
When I saw her face, I knew she wasn't. I kept kissing her anyway.
Then I stopped and demanded that everyone help me hide it.
There is no but. No only. No because.
He writes about demanding secrecy. He writes about standing at the altar and convincing himself silence protected our happiness. He writes that the lie was active every day he did not tell me, even when he was loving.
At the end, he writes:
I want Dahlia home so badly that some days I cannot breathe inside the house without her. That does not mean she has to come. I am writing this because I should have told her before the wedding, not because telling her now earns me another one.
I close the document and cry in the office bathroom.
My assignment is one page.
Reconciliation looks like nobody congratulating me for surviving him.
I do not know what comes after that sentence.
Outside, rain needles the parking lot.
"That was awful," Caleb says.
"I liked her."
"Of course you did. She beat me with my own vocabulary."
"You use but too much."
"I am aware."
He drives me to the apartment. A boxed bookshelf waits in the lobby, delivered while I was away.
"I can put that together," Caleb says.
"I can put it together."
"I know."
"Stop saying that every time you offer help."
"Then let me help without turning it into a referendum on your independence."
"Fine."
We spend two hours assembling the shelf incorrectly. Caleb insists the diagram is backward. I insist he has installed the base upside down. We are both right about different pieces and too stubborn to admit it.
At nine, we sit on the floor eating noodles from cartons.
There is no speech. No discussion of Sable. The only argument is whether the crooked shelf will collapse and kill me in my sleep.
"It is in the living room," I say.
"It could travel."
"I don't think shelves hunt at night."
"You don't know what it does when you turn off the lights."
I laugh.
Caleb looks at me over his carton, and for one fragile moment we are ourselves.
Then ten o'clock arrives.
He stands. "I should go."
The old Caleb would have lingered. He would have kissed my neck while I rinsed the dishes and trusted desire to settle what words could not.
This Caleb puts on his coat.
"The shelf is still crooked," I say.
"I can fix it Saturday."
"You could stay."
Every muscle in his body stills.
I hear the danger in my own words.
"Not the night," I add. "Stay and fix it."
Hope leaves his face so quickly guilt cuts me.
"Of course."
He kneels beside the shelf again.
After he leaves, I lock the door and lean against it, remembering the night he breathed on the other side.
I take the ring from my purse.
It slides onto my finger as if it has been waiting.