Chapter 21 #2
It occurred to her then, how true that was. He was the one who needed to be invulnerable. And it kept on hurting him. But he didn’t see it. Because it felt like protection. She could relate to that. Keeping her feelings for him to herself had felt like protection too.
She had to wonder if she had created this situation.
What if she had told him how she felt when they were younger?
What if she had made him feel safer about love all the way back then?
What if he hadn’t felt the need to go into the military?
To scar himself with all the things he’d seen.
What if he hadn’t felt the need to marry somebody else?
What if her love had simply been enough?
She would never know. She could never go back and fix it.
She could never, ever. She could only move forward.
And she had to stop trying to protect herself. No matter how hard it was.
“I’ve always loved you,” she said. “I loved you while you were away, I loved you the whole time you were married to somebody else. I loved you.”
“I don’t deserve this,” he said. “How can you have loved me all that time? I was a bad husband to Alyssa, Perry. And I don’t want to be a bad husband to you. I’ll … We’ll be us. But I don’t know how to be anything other than me.”
“You’re holding something back.”
“I have to,” he said.
“Not with me. Why don’t you trust me?”
“It’s not you, Perry. I don’t trust the world.
I can’t. How can I? Because I went overseas to try to fix things.
And all I saw was what a mess it all is.
Because I got married, and I brought that woman back here.
That good woman, who needed me to be something I couldn’t be.
Who was going to leave me, because I wasn’t right for her in the end.
She died my unhappy wife. Because I wasn’t enough.
And that is how unfair the world is. But we are already a couple—why does it have to be something more? I just …”
“You know why it has to be more, or you wouldn’t ask me to marry you.
You just keep on having sex with me and calling me your best friend.
You know why it has to be more. You’re just turning away from …
I don’t even know. Like you said, if it’s only words, why do they terrify you so much?
If it’s only words, then why can’t you just say them? ”
“Because. Because there was a point where Alyssa wanted me to say certain things, and I tried. And that was why she stayed with me and was miserable. And I … I want you to marry me, but I also … I just thought you knew me well enough to know what I could offer you. So now I’m standing here feeling like a jackass because you—”
“No. Don’t put this on me. You know me. Why would you think that I would marry you without even the slightest bit of assurance that you love me? That you could love me.”
“I do. As my best friend in the entire world. As the woman that I—”
“It’s not even the words, Carson. Not really. It’s that I don’t want you to keep part of yourself locked away. Because you know what, I think you do love me. But the problem is that you swerve every time we get close.”
The minute she said that, she realized it was true. “Because what were the letters? Those letters you wrote me from war—they were so different from everything else that you ever said to me. What did they mean? What did they mean if they weren’t leading to your saying that you love me?”
“Perry I could never … I knew that I could never—”
“You could never, but here you are. So what is it you’re running from?
Why do you keep getting so close and then throwing a bomb in the middle of it?
I don’t understand. I don’t understand. And I need you to figure that out.
Before I can marry you. Before I can tell you that I’m not going to move away.
I love you so much, and that was why I had to leave.
That’s the honest truth. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that.
I’m sorry I didn’t look you dead in the face that night at your kitchen table and say I can’t share my pizza crust with you anymore because I love you and it’s killing me.
Because every time I breathe your air, it is making me die inside.
Because I want us to be more. Because I want us to be everything.
I was too scared to say that. Because I was so scared that I felt it.
It is terrifying. This whole thing is terrifying. ”
“Then why? Why are we doing any of it? This has been good. This has been really good, and I don’t understand why you want to fuck it up, Perry. Why?”
“Because I didn’t wake up yesterday and realize this about us.
I’ve known it. I have had over twenty years of pushing it down.
Of trying to be different. Of trying to feel different.
You just showed up at the party, what … a couple of weeks ago?
When I decided to do something that you didn’t approve of.
Something that made you feel like you were losing your hold on me.
Because you’re okay not loving me as long as I’m within reach.
That’s what worries you: Can you get to me when you need me?
And that isn’t fair to me. I changed the game, and so you realized you had to do something.
But the problem is that I know you.” She felt as if she was dying, as if her chest was going to explode.
She wiped at her cheeks, and she was devastated to realize that tears weren’t falling. It felt as though they should be. It felt as though she should be dissolving from the inside.
“I know you well enough to know that what you really want is that twelve-step program toward getting your life settled. And you like to collect the markers so you can see if you’re doing all the right things, stacking them up in all the right ways.
You see proposals and marriage licenses and military service as the ways to put your life right.
I don’t want to be one of your markers. I would marry you in a field.
With no papers. With nothing but vows. In many ways, I did that years ago.
With all the love in my heart. But until you can feel that, until you can really, truly let your guard down, with me, with anyone, we can’t have it.
Everybody thought you were grieving your wife so intensely that you couldn’t be reached, but you just wanted us to think that because you didn’t want to have to explain yourself.
Because you didn’t want to have to talk about how fucked up your feelings are. ”
“They’re a mess,” he said, nearly exploding there on the public street, where anyone could see them.
Where anyone could hear them. “If I cut my chest open and showed you what my feelings look like, you would run a mile. Because everything just feels messed up. Everything I try to do. Everything I try to care about. And I never wanted to involve you. Not ever. But here we are. So I can offer you marriage. I can keep you with me. I could be the father of your children.”
“Be the love of my life,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re holding back. I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t have magic insight into your soul. I just know that you’re holding something back. You have to figure out what. You have to. For us. Because I’ll walk away.”
“You’re going to punish me because I can’t heal on command?”
That hurt. It was like a sword, driven straight through her midsection.
“That isn’t fair. I’ve been here for twenty-five years.
And I have tried. I have tried so many ways with you.
And you have tried so many ways without me.
Running off to the military. Coming home with another woman.
It’s always you trying to fix all of this without including me.
And right now, this is the first time that you have actually tried to figure out how we can fit together.
Not just me being put on ice. Not me being on hold for you.
This is the first time that you have ever tried to make you and me work.
So I’m sorry that you’re not getting your way immediately.
I’m sorry that it didn’t come together right away.
You have no idea. But I have been trying for years. ”
She sighed, took a breath. And that breath, painful and still, reminded her of why she couldn’t say yes right now.
What she believed was that she and Carson Wilder were meant to be together.
Yes, she had run from it. But he had run all the harder.
And now she had to stand her ground, because she could not let them continue to repeat these mistakes.
Because they would. They would be together, but they would find themselves unhealthy.
They would find themselves broken. They would find themselves unable to be what they needed each other to be.
And she didn’t want that. She wanted to marry the love of her life, knowing that she was the love of his.
She wanted all the dark corners of him. All the things that he had spent all these years protecting her from.
She believed that taking this stand would push him. But it was breaking her.
“My greatest sin was not being brave enough when I was eleven. To tell you that I loved you. Not being brave enough when I was sixteen to kiss you when you scowled at me like that in my see-through dress. Actually, I did tell you how I really felt in a letter, but it was returned as undeliverable. My greatest sin was not showing you that letter when you came home. It was not telling you before you got married that I didn’t want you to.
It was not risking my heart so that we could have it all.
But I’m risking it now. It’s all or it’s nothing. ”
“Perry …”
She turned and started to walk away, and he grabbed hold of her arm. “I think I might die without you.”
“Don’t do that. Figure out how to live with me.”
She inhaled, deep, jagged. And then she did the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life: She walked away from Carson Wilder and his proposal.
Because she deserved the world. She was going to wait until he gave it to her. Because the simple truth was, he deserved the world too. And someone had to be strong enough to make him claim it.
She went back to the cabin, and she packed a bag. She opened up her little wooden Carson box and took everything out of it, all the things she’d saved all those years.
She held them, turned them over.
Will u go to the woods w/me after school? Y or N circle.
Her heart crumpled. She sobbed as she dug through her underwear. She wasn’t going to bring everything, she just needed to get some space tonight. She knew he would come after her.
She was weak. She would go with him.
She needed to be strong.
And in the bottom of the drawer she was digging in, she found the letter.
To Carson Wilder, returned as undeliverable.
The letter that had missed him.
She held it and stroked the closed envelope.
She’d said it all now. And it had amounted to nothing.
She carried the letter into the kitchen and stopped when she saw Mae’s second diary sitting there on the counter.
She hadn’t read it because she’d been so caught up in her life with Carson that she just … hadn’t.
She tucked it under her arm and set the unopened envelope down on the counter. She touched the other envelopes there, the letters.
She heard an engine and startled, half hoping it was Carson, half dreading, because who else came up here?
She looked out the window and saw Cassidy’s truck.
Cassidy pulled up to the front and Perry held her breath. Then Cassidy came to the door and Perry realized she couldn’t ignore her. Not now.
She opened it right before Cassidy knocked. “Oh,” Cassidy said.
“Hi.”
“Hi. I just … I wanted to say I’m sorry for being mean to you. About leaving. And that I was weird about you kissing my brother.”
She sighed. “Come on in.”
Cassidy did, and Perry went to the counter, shuffling her envelope addressed to Carson down to the bottom of the other envelopes because she didn’t need Cass spotting it and commenting.
“He’s in love with you. I mean, Flynn thinks so. So does Dalton.”
Perry nodded slowly. “I kind of think so too. But he doesn’t want to deal with it.”
Cassidy frowned. “Oh. What the hell?”
“Emotional damage, I think,” said Perry.
“Well, that’s … that’s stupid. Did he break your heart?”
Cassidy looked so outraged on her behalf, it genuinely warmed her.
“He did, actually. But you know what? I love him. I always have. And that isn’t going to change because of this. Same as it won’t change how I feel about you and your family.”
“It changes how I feel about him,” Cassidy said. “I’m going to put a snake in his boot.”
“You don’t need to do that. But … I’m going to lay low for a couple of days. I’m trying to trust that he’ll come around because … if any couple is meant to be, I think we might be.”
“I don’t know that I believe in all that,” Cassidy said.
“But I know that what you have is special, and if I ever fall in love, I want to have that kind of thing. A friendship that becomes more. It seems like the right way to do it, the real way. I want Carson to choose to get his head out of his ass and choose you.”
“Me too, Cass. Me too.” She sighed. “He asked me to marry him, but he couldn’t say he loved me. And I refuse to settle for less. For both our sakes.”
Cassidy looked at her, and her smile shocked Perry. “You really are a badass, Perry Bramble. It takes a lot to force a man to stew in his own juices.”
Perry held that close.
Mae Tanner had gone west for a new life. She’d done the hard thing.
Perry was doing the hard thing too.
She was going to hold out for what spoke to her soul. Hold out for it all.
When you knew the whole Wild West was out there, how could you ever settle for less?