Chapter 45 I Love You. It’s Ruining My Life #2
He chortles. Studies me for a moment. “I don’t think it’s a shit idea.”
I smile. “How exactly is this not a shit idea?”
“Because you bring me an exorbitant amount of joy.”
I have to press my lips together to stop them from quivering.
“Are you happy?”
My smile stretches. “One could say I am full of joy.”
“Does it have anything to do with me?”
“Yes.”
He shifts to face me, grinning. “I think we owe it to ourselves to be happy when we’re happy. That’s the goal, right? Happiness? It’s counterintuitive to shut out the source of the happiness in the name of protecting ourselves from potential pain.”
My lips fold into a smirk. “Are you about to spew some shit about how it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?”
He smirks back. “It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. I thought you read my book!”
I snort and fall back against the seat as the first part of that statement settles over me like a weighted blanket. “So you don’t regret your eighteen-year-old fiancée?”
He blinks at me. “How can I regret the thing that led to the most exciting moment of my professional life so far? That experience gave me the insight to write a novel that was featured in The New York Minute that I was really, really proud of. I sold the film rights back then too. That was so exciting. For a second I had big fat dreams of playing the lead in my own book. I learned a shitload about myself. I got into therapy. I became a better person because of it. I know I’m going to be a better partner now than I could have ever been back then, just because of everything you become aware of through the therapy process. I could never regret that.”
“I always wonder if my mom regrets marrying my dad. If she regrets staying with him as long as she did.” I fiddle with my shirt. “I think I’d regret it . . . I think I’d regret me. I chained her to him. I was an extra weight tying her to a life full of pain and anxiety.”
“Rikki—”
“For so long I blamed her for staying with him.” I stare at a bush out in the darkness as my eyes lose focus. “She’d never yell or scream or fight back. I didn’t understand it.
“And all the while I was so confident I could fix it. I could talk sense into him. Because my dad and I were buddies. We had a book club. Surely if anyone could get through to him, it would be me.”
I let go of a self-deprecating snort.
“My mom let me lecture him. For five years I looped in circles with that man while my mother lived with the consequences. And eventually it started to feel like it was my fault. I wasn’t getting through to him.
And because I couldn’t teach basic decency, my mom had a broken finger.
Or a bruised face, or a missing patch of hair, or couldn’t breathe without pain.
“She didn’t realize how much it was affecting her ability to be the mom she wanted to be.
How much she was disassociating. How bad it was getting.
And despite everything I’ve studied and know about abuse, a part of me is still in there, blaming her for everything he did. And everything he continues to do now.
“She still talks to him. They do phone calls. And coffee. And I always eventually end up accepting his empty apologies for whatever the latest fucked up thing he did was. I let it go. I continue to humor his cursory attempts to prove himself a good father, because she refuses to give up on him.” My voice dips to a shameful whisper.
“And it makes her happy when I forgive him, and I love her.”
Reed pushes back the driver’s seat, tugs my hand, and scoops me into his lap.
My face is wet. I’m crying. He runs his fingers through my hair, combing it back in a soothing motion as I nuzzle into his shirt.
We sit there like that for a while before I push up, off his chest. “Sorry”—I suck in a breath—“I shouldn’t have said that out loud. You probably think I’m a horrible—”
Reed rests his hand against the side of my face. “Rikki. When I found out about my mom cheating on my dad, I hated her. It was like an instantaneous switch. And I hated how much I hated her. And I hated myself. When my dad died it just got so much worse. For like three years. I hated her. Deeply.
“And I’ve come so far from that moment, from that headspace.
I’ve forgiven myself for existing. But somewhere in the depths of my mind there’s still this little bit of anger that I haven’t been able to let go of.
Because I don’t know why she did it. She still won’t tell me.
And it kills me, not knowing. And I know she’s just another person who must have been going through a hard time. I get it.”
His irises flare, catching the light in the darkness. “Having emotions doesn’t make us horrible people. It just makes us people. It’s what we do with them that informs who we are.”
A laugh huffs out of me at this therapeutic staple statement. “Preaching to the choir with that wisdom.”
“Sometimes when you’re in the choir, singing the same thing every day, you lose track of what you’re preaching.”
I frown, trying to stop crying. “I really enjoy your brain.”
He laughs. “Rikki, you dole out grace to everyone you interact with, everyone you know, but you don’t give it to yourself. I can tell you right now, there’s no fucking way your mom regrets loving your dad. Because loving your dad gave her you.”
I shake my head. “You don’t know.”
“I know,” he says confidently.
We peer at each other for a long, potent moment as the thread between us reinforces into something stronger. As this weekend solidifies into something ironclad. “If you reached out to your bio dad,” I whisper, “maybe he could tell you why what happened, happened.”
Reed leans his forehead against mine. “If you talked to your mom about this, she would tell you word for word what I just said. And if she knew how you felt, I bet she’d reexamine her relationship with your dad.”
We gaze at each other for a few more seconds, before we both laugh, discharging emotional huffs of air.
“Maybe,” I say quietly. “Or maybe she’d tell me I’m being dramatic and dismiss it.”
He sighs. “Maybe bio dad would tell me the story, or maybe I’d work up the courage to reach out, and he’d ignore me altogether. And knowing he still doesn’t want anything to do with me as an adult who doesn’t need something from him would be worse than not knowing at all.”
“Hey,” I tell him.
“Hey,” he says back.
“If we’re going to do this official thing, it’d be cool to be one of those couples that challenges each other to grow and evolve and face their shit.”
“I think we’re already doing that, Romona.”
I smile through my lingering tears. “I love that.”
He swipes the wetness from my cheeks, staring into my eyes. “How did I find you?”
“I have it on good authority that the cosmos are shipping us.”
He tilts forward to catch my lips in a kiss.
Kisses that grow longer and deeper and more intense.
Until we’ve relocated to the back seat. And when we’re fitted together, approaching a crescendo, and I’m reveling in his scent and his lips are fit against mine, I breathe the words I haven’t quite been able to articulate yet.
“See you at the airport, Derek.”
His nails dig into my shoulder blades as I match his intensity. He waits till I’m on the edge before he brings his smiling mouth to my ear. “Fuck you, Renee.”
I arch back, head lolling, as an entire universe shifts inside me.