All I Ask

by Corinne Michaels

  Meghan’s eyes fill with empathy and a bit of relief. “You’re going to be a great dad and you’re already a good husband.”

  No, I’m not.

  I’m not a good man, let alone husband.

  “I’m…in my head.”

  Meghan sighs and then lifts her hands to my chest, softly. “You don’t have to do that. I’m here too and I’m just as nervous as you are. I’m having a baby in five months and it’s a lot of changes all at once. There’s so much uncertainty, but we can do this, babe. We’re Derek and Meghan.”

  I feel sick to my stomach because this is the first time she’s said that where I don’t believe it.

  Because I’m a fucking piece of shit.

  She leans up, pressing her lips to mine, and I force any thoughts of Teagan out of my head. Meghan has given me everything.

  Meghan has been the one who has loved me.

  She chose me and continues to do so.

  Whatever is going on in my head needs to stop. It’s not real. It’s fear because everything is changing. It has to be that because otherwise I’m not the person I thought I was, and I can’t accept that.

  I cup her cheeks and kiss her back. After a few seconds, I rest my head against hers and feel calmer. Meghan is my wife, and I love her. “I’m sorry.”

  She lifts her head. “Just talk to me. You don’t have to do this alone, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “I get being scared, believe me, but when I start to feel that way, I remember that I have you and as long as we’re together, we’ll be okay.”

  “You’re so much smarter than me,” I say with a smirk.

  “I’m glad you learned this early.”

  I pull her tighter to me, and she wraps her arms around my middle. This is what I need to focus on. Her. Us. Our family. Not a delusion I’ve conjured up with someone who doesn’t feel the same about me.

  * * *

  It’s been a long week. I’ve had a bunch of tests, one I know I bombed, but I couldn’t focus. Meghan and I are having dinner tonight, though. I promised her that once I got through my exams, we’d have more time together because I’m determined to make this work.

  She is my wife, and for better or worse, I’m going to be here beside her. I just have to get it together.

  “Meghan?” I call out as I open the door to our apartment.

  She doesn’t answer.

  I toss my bag full of textbooks onto the floor and drop my keys on the entry table. Her keys are there, so I know she’s home.

  “Meg?”

  Still no answer.

  Weird.

  I head into the living room and she’s sitting on the couch with her legs crisscrossed and head down.

  “Hey,” I say as I make my way to her. “Sorry I’m late.”

  When her eyes meet mine, I stop moving. They’re red and puffy, and the pain in them is clear as day.

  “What’s wrong?” I’m instantly worried about her and the baby. “Are you okay?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m not.”

  Worry fills me, pushing me toward her. I tug her to me and hold her tight. Her body starts to shake, and my own fear grows. Something is terribly wrong and whatever it is has her devastated.

  “Talk to me.”

  Meghan shoves out of my embrace. She reaches behind her and pulls out a leather-bound black journal.

  Time stops, because I know now what has her devastated. I’ve written in that journal the last two years—including last week.

  “I want to talk.” She sniffs. “I want to talk and ask you things, but I don’t know that I need to because it’s all here.”

  No longer is worry my primary emotion, now it’s mixed with anger. Those are my thoughts and feelings. I write because I have to get it out in a place that’s safe.

  “In my private journal.”

  “It was sitting on the counter, and I didn’t know what it was.”

  A part of me doesn’t believe her because I’m never careless. I keep it in the same place so that it would never be found.

  Hell, I’ve never told anyone other than Teagan I even keep a damn journal.

  But now Meghan knows, and she read it. Without my permission.

  “And then when you figured out what it was, you just kept reading?” I push.

  A tear falls from her face, and my heart continues to pound to a beat that is so loud in my ears. I stand, needing to get some distance from her.

  “I…I wasn’t…I know it was wrong!” She gets to her feet as well. “When I saw some of the…the things you said. Is this really what you feel? You want her? You wish Teagan was pregnant with your child?” She screams the words and the tears fall down her cheek.

  I thought I felt that way. I thought maybe it was really what I wanted, but it’s not. I was confused. I wrote it down so I could get it out of my head and move on. At least that has to be the truth because otherwise I’m a fucking failure of a man.

  “No! I was dealing with so much and I was fucked-up in the head. It’s not like that!”

  “You wrote it, Derek!” She throws the journal at me. “You wrote it all here. You said you love her!”

  Meghan’s pain is so deep, I can almost feel it. She’s hurt by what I wrote and rightfully so. I didn’t explain that after I wrote about it, I realized I was crazy.

  “I do, but not that way! She’s my best friend.”

  “No. No she’s not. You’re in love with her and I would bet my ass she’s in love with you, and you…you wrote about it. You want her.”

  “I don’t,” I say as I step closer to her. “I want you. I married you! I love you, Meghan.”

  She shakes her head in disbelief. “You said…”

  “I know what I said but it wasn’t like that. I was so confused and mixed-up.” If I could just explain it to her, maybe she’d understand. “I saw Teagan for our lunch last week and it was different. I was different, and talking about the baby with her, she started crying, and then it was just…I don’t know, but I had to get it out and work through it. It was just my fears and being irrational.”

  Meghan steps back. “Do you love Teagan that way?”

  I can’t tell her. I can’t lose her and as much as it pains me to lie to her, it’s the only way I can spare her feelings even a little.

  “No.”

  “Have you ever?”

  My eyes widen and as much as I want to deny it and protect her, I can’t.

  “I did or I thought I did. I don’t know.”

  A heartbreaking sound releases from her mouth. “I…I can’t…you…”

  “I thought I did but it could never work and I had you. It was never a question with us. I knew I loved you. I loved you from the beginning.”

  “But you loved her.”

  “This isn’t about her. It’s about you and me.”

  “No.” She throws her hands up. “No, it’s always about her. I’ve tried so hard to understand your friendship and accept it, but I can’t do this. I have to go.”

  “Go?”

  “Yes. Leave. I’m leaving.”

  “Meghan.” I move in front of her. “Don’t do this. I swear, it’s not like that. I love you, damn it. I love our life. Our baby. Everything we have. Please, you can’t leave.”

  She wipes the tears that paint her face. “I can’t be the third wheel in my own marriage, Derek!”

  “You’re not.”

  “No?”

  I’ve fucked this up so bad, but the idea of losing her proves that what we have is real. It’s not a fantasy I’ve made up in my head. Meghan is my life.

  “I don’t know that I can do this. I don’t know that I can be around her.”

  My heart begins to race even faster. I know where this is going. “Around Teagan?”

  “I don’t trust you now. I don’t trust her and you. I can’t be worried all the time. Those words will be in my mind forever. Seeing how you feel about her is too much.”

  “I don’t feel that way,” I try
to remind her, but she isn’t hearing that.

  “Even if you’re telling me it’s not true now, there was some part of you that thought it was. I feel like you betrayed me and our marriage.”

  Jesus Christ. I wrote about my feelings because I wasn’t strong enough to put them aside, and I hoped putting them down on paper would make them go away. I hurt Meghan when she did nothing wrong.

  “Meghan, please, I would never cheat on you.”

  She points to the journal. “You did. In your heart, you betrayed me.”

  My own tears fall because I despise myself for hurting her. I look at the pain in her eyes, wanting to take it all away, willing to do anything to make this better. “What can I do? What can I do to prove that it’s you I love?”

  Her eyes are no longer sad, they’re filled with determination. “If you want this marriage to work, you have to cut her out of your life. Completely. It’s me or her, you choose.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Teagan

  Present

  “I’m still not understanding. She read your journal and that was reason enough to stop talking to me? Was she mad because…?”

  Derek looks uncomfortable, and I’m truly confused. He’s kept a journal since he was in high school, writing his random thoughts, making plans for things he wanted. It’s not like it held the key to his soul.

  “Because I talked about you…a lot.”

  “Oh,” I say, taking a step back. “So she was jealous and you just dropped me? Not an explanation, not a…‘I’m sorry, Tea, I need some time.’ Just a vague phone call that said you thought it best if we stop speaking, and if and when you thought the time was right, you’d be in touch.”

  What Derek doesn’t know is that his call that night sent me into labor. I was so distraught, I couldn’t breathe. I cried with such force, knowing that my person was no longer mine and I was truly on my own. Not even his wedding had made me feel so alone and destroyed.

  “No, that’s not it. I mean, she was jealous, but because I had written stuff about you…about us…and she almost left me.”

  I cover my chest with my arms as a feeling of emptiness fills me. “What could you have written about us? We never dated and we were never inappropriate.”

  “I know that.”

  No, I don’t think he does. “There’s nothing that ever crossed any lines, Derek. We were just friends.”

  He closes his eyes, releasing a heavy breath. “It wasn’t like that. You and I…we were different. We were more than just anything.”

  “Clearly not. You threw me away so easily. You were the only person in this world I ever could truly count on and you abandoned me. You took what should’ve been a night that I smile over because I had a baby and it became tainted with losing you.”

  His hand grips the back of his neck and he paces. “I’m sorry I did that to you. I’m sorry the whole damn thing happened, but understand that I was faced with the choice of you or my wife. My pregnant wife who I was married to for only two months. I loved you both, and choosing almost killed me.”

  I was a friend. Of course he chose her.

  My life was such a mess and I didn’t know if what I felt at that time wasn’t desperation for someone to love me.

  Keith sure as hell didn’t. But I believed Derek did.

  I thought that even when he got married, he would still have room for me in his heart.

  “Well, when you chose, it did kill me. I had no one, Derek. I had a new baby, no friends, living in this stupid town that I hated, and was in the middle of the worst experience of my life and you chose to completely cut me off.”

  “It wasn’t that simple.”

  I’m trying to be mature, but the broken girl inside of me is screaming to lash out. “I don’t care that it wasn’t simple for you, and maybe that makes me a bitch, but there’s nothing that Meghan could’ve possibly seen in that journal. Hell, I read it how many times?” I yell. “You wrote random shit, weird notes about your plans for the future and song lyrics. So, I’m so sorry your new wife found some lame-ass excuse to finally be rid of me.”

  Because that’s what it was. She hated our friendship, even if she pretended otherwise. I mattered, maybe even more than she did at some points, and it bothered her. But she couldn’t understand the depth of our friendship.

  He was the first person to see me as more than some immature girl who wanted to be popular.

  I was selfish and stupid back then, but with Derek…I could be anything.

  He believed in me, thought I was worth more, and gave me the courage to be better.

  “I promise you, Teagan, it was not lame.”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it? In the grand scheme of it all, you did what you did and I had to learn to live without you. I struggled, was depressed beyond words, almost lost Chastity in childbirth, and you weren’t there. I did it all alone.”

  “I knew you could.”

  “Please,” I huff. “I don’t need your praise. I needed your friendship. I needed you to be the one man, other than my father, to actually be there and not turn your back on me when things got rough. Do you have any idea what I went through with Keith?”

  He shakes his head.

  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. All these years I’ve waited for this moment to call him out and I can’t even do it. I can’t tell him that it wasn’t about me doing it on my own, it was about doing it without him. I still can’t say the words: I was in love with you.

  The fact is, it doesn’t change anything.

  “I went through complete fucking hell. I watched someone I thought I knew become someone I couldn’t even recognize. All because of his new life. But what about my life, Derek? What about my needs? What about Chastity? None of that mattered because I was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.”

  The things I did in my youth were…stupid. If I could go back and talk to my nineteen-year-old self, I would bitchslap her. I would tie her hands to her books and force her eyes forward.

  As an adult, I have the beautifully cruel gift of hindsight. I see the errors, and the way I made excuses for my poor choices. I gave Keith every possible opportunity to hurt me and then wasn’t even surprised when he took them.

  I let my desire to be popular keep me from seeing that I was loved by the few people who mattered. Keith told me he loved me, that I would be on his arm like a queen in high school, but only if…

  If I did this.

  If I gave him that.

  If I allowed him what he wanted.

  Everything came with an…if.

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s not enough for you and I know I let you down, but know that I didn’t want to do it.”

  “I’m not even angry anymore,” I tell him as I start to walk because standing here, looking at him as regret fills his eyes, is too much for me.

  There’s this part of me that has spent so much time loving Derek, longing for him, that I want to pull him into my arms and forgive it all. Then there’s the other side that’s hurt and disappointed. If he loved me, he would’ve fought for me. Regardless of her reading silly things written a million years ago in a journal.

  “Then what are you?”

  I turn my head toward him. “Used to it.”

  Derek’s eyes close and the breath expels from his nose. “I thought about you, Tea. I wrestled with calling you every single day.”

  “But, what? You couldn’t? You really thought Meghan was going to leave you?”

  He takes a few steps closer, eliminating the distance between us. “Yes.”

  “I’m trying to understand here. I’m doing my best to get what the hell could make it that easy for you. You didn’t even try after that. I was…am…angry and I hate this.”

  “I hated it! I hated it and then I hated you for making me hate it.”

  “Me?” I gasp. “What did I do to deserve your anger? I woke up one day and realized that you didn’t want to ever hear my voice again. You never wanted to see me, know anything abo
ut me, and I was to act as though you were dead! Dead, Derek! You told me to go on with my life as though you had died because that was what I was to you—dead! And I didn’t do anything wrong!”

  “I know that!”

  “Then please, tell me, what was my crime?”

  Derek’s breathing is labored and he throws his hands in the air. “You made me fall in love with you!”

  Time seems to cease around me. I feel the air stop moving, and I can’t hear anything other than the words he just said replaying in my head.

  He loved me?

  He loved me the way I loved him and his way of dealing with it was to completely cut me out.

  I romanticized for years over hearing those words from his lips. I dreamed of how he would take me in his arms, kiss me, tell me he was a fool and loved me. It was supposed to be this magical declaration.

  Not out of anger. Not telling me that he hated me for making him love me.

  I’m tired of being the bad guy.

  I loved him too. I loved him so much that I was willing to suffer through his fucking wedding, stand by his side, and give him the little bit of peace I could. I didn’t use my love to hurt him. It stayed bottled up where I allowed it to eat me alive, and protect the relationship we were allowed to have.

  I look up in his blue eyes, and a tear falls. “That’s the cruelest thing you could’ve ever said to me.”

  And then, I walk away, leaving him like he left me.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Teagan

  Twenty-one years old

  “What are you saying?” I ask as tears start to stream down my face.

  “I’m saying I don’t think we should talk anymore.”

  My heart hurts. I’m confused and I don’t understand why Derek is saying these things. I haven’t done anything. We talked yesterday and everything was perfectly fine. What the hell changed?

  “Why?”

  “Because, Teagan, I don’t want to.”