by Noelle Adams
My hand clenched spasmodically in the tight flesh of his ass. “Yes, I do. I’m into it. You can tell I’m turned on.”
“But just physically.” He reared up onto straightened arms, and then he carefully pulled himself out. “You don’t really want this.”
“Gideon,” I began, an edge of frustration in my tone. I sat up as he climbed off the bed. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m just—”
“You’re punishing yourself.” He stood next to the bed, completely naked, still aroused, dark tattoos marring the perfect contours of his body.
I was trying frantically to get my mind to work, so I could handle this situation, pull everything back to the careful balance I’d been maintaining. “I’m not—”
“You are.” His expression was heartbreaking. I could barely stand to look at it. It was horror, pain, betrayal. “I saw it in your face. You’re using me—me—to punish yourself.”
I tried to reply, but couldn’t get my throat to work. It hurt so much because he was right. I was still trying to get my throat to work when he bent down to grab his clothes and then walked out of the room.
“Gide—” I couldn’t even say his whole name. And my inability to speak was torture because he was walking away from me.
He was walking away, and I couldn’t stop him.
I knew I shouldn’t stop him.
I’d always known it would come to this.
It was only a few seconds, not time enough for me to pull myself together, when I heard the front door open and close.
He’d left. He’d left me. He would drive away and wouldn’t come back. After everything, this was the thing that had finally pushed him away.
I tried to be relieved, since I knew it was better for him this way, but it felt like darkness was closing in on my mind. I bent over in bed and strangled on sobs, but it hurt too much to even cry.
I managed to get up and pull on a t-shirt and yoga pants. Then I sat on the edge of the bed shaking and gasping.
Then I got up to find my socks and shoes. I had to do something. There was no way to fix this, but I had to do something.
So I climbed onto my elliptical trainer and prayed I could get to the agonizing pain and exhaustion quickly, that it would drown out everything else.
I’d been going only five minutes when I started to see myself, that strange sensation of being above, at a distance, and watching myself from afar.
And I didn’t like what I saw. I didn’t want to be that person. I didn’t want to be doing this, and I suddenly realized I didn’t have to.
Dr. Jones was right. I wasn’t in the same place I’d been six months ago.
I could stop. I could just stop.
I slowed my pace until I’d halted my motion completely. I panted on the machine for a minute, until I finally climbed off.
There might still be a lot of lies in my head, but I didn’t have to listen to them.
I would call Gideon. I would tell him the truth, no matter what the consequences were. I would make this right.
With a raspy sigh, I turned and jerked in surprise when I saw him standing in the bedroom doorway. He must have been watching me for the last few minutes, since he’d obviously not just walked in.
We stared at each other in silence for a long moment. Then I saw him something break on his face, and he took a step toward me. He stopped himself, though, looking torn and hurt and bewildered.
All the tears that hadn’t been able to fall for the last hour rose up and crashed inside me. My face twisted helplessly and my whole body shook in a few sobs. Then I ran toward him, stumbling a little in my urgency, and he reached out for me, caught me, drew me in.
I sobbed in his arms, and he didn’t let me go until I’d finally grown quiet in his embrace.
When he finally released me, I was afraid my legs wouldn’t hold me up so I went to sit on the side of the bed. He followed and sat down beside me.
Neither one of us spoke, and the air in the room felt on the cusp of something, like the inhale before the release.
I knew I was the one who needed to start, so I managed to work up the courage. “I’m really sorry, Gideon. I’m sorry for everything. I didn’t...I didn’t treat you right.”
He didn’t answer. He just sat watching me, waiting.
I swallowed hard. “I...I feel like I’m backsliding, and I’ve been really scared about it.”
“For how long?” he asked, very softly.
“Since...” I stared down at my hands in my lap. “Since we started having sex.”
I felt some sort of reaction from him but didn’t dare to look up at his face. “Was I...was I pushing you too much?”
“No. No. It wasn’t you. It was always me.”
“So, all this time, every time we were together, it’s been bringing back your demons?” I heard an edge of despair in his tone that I couldn’t stand.
“No! It wasn’t even really the demons. Not the old ones, anyway. It’s been different. I’m just...I just feel anxious and unsettled all the time, and like I’m always waiting for the bad thing to happen, something I’ll never be able to stop.”
“What bad thing?” He sounded thoughtful and quiet again.
I dropped my head even farther.
He made a move like he would touch me, but he didn’t. “Diana, what bad thing do you keep waiting for?”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“Tell me anyway.” He was voice was soft, rough, firm.
“It will...hurt you.”
“Then it hurts me. Tell me anyway. You’ve hurt me more already by keeping me in the dark.”
He wasn’t lashing out, but there was an implicit reproach in his words. And he was right. Of course, he was right.
“Tell me what bad thing you keep waiting for.”
My throat closed up around the words—the truth I didn’t want to give voice to—but I forced them out anyway. “For you to walk away from me.”
He didn’t answer for a really long time.
I closed my eyes and tried to keep the shuddering inside me from rippling out into my body.
“After all this time,” he said at last, “you really think I’m going to walk away?”
I made a choked sound and jerked my head to the side, even farther away from him. “Yes. Not logically. But...but...yeah.”
“Why would you ever think that? After everything we’ve been through together, why would you ever think that?”
“It’s not that I think it. It’s that I feel it.”
“Why would you feel that?” It was like I could hear his heart breaking in his voice.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
“Yes, you do. You just don’t want to say it.” He reached over to turn my head back toward him, so I couldn’t hide my expression. “Tell me.”
My features twisted, but I made myself meet his eyes. “Because one day you’re going to see that I’m a failure.”
“What?” he breathed.
I gulped. “Because one day it will be clear to you that, despite all your time and effort, I’m just a failure.”
“What?” He’d frozen completely still.
“You’ll find out that I’m not really fixed. That I can’t be fixed. That all you’ve poured into me has been wasted.”
“Where is this coming from?” He sounded absolutely bewildered.
Now that I’d gotten the heart of it said, the words kept spilling out, something finally unleashing inside me. “I know you think I’m better. I know you’ve been happy after so long because you think I’m better now, that I can be a regular girl, that we can be a regular couple. But I’m not. I’m still all messed up. I’ve been trying to keep you from seeing it because I want you to be happy, but I’m just not better. And I know...I knew that one day you’d find out, and then you’d be...crushed. Because it would mean you’d failed. And then you’d leave.”
Gideon jerked to his feet and then turned around to glare down at me. “Damn it, Diana. You still think that you’re just my proje
ct.”
“No, it’s not really that—”
“Yes, it is. You’ve been mentally sabotaging us—our relationship—because you still think that I only see you as a project. As something to fix.” He stared at my face and must have seen something else there. “No, now you’ve been thinking I see you as something I have fixed. That’s why you’re expecting me to leave. You think I’ll realize that the project was a bust and so I’ll want nothing more to do with it.”
It sounded horrible. Absolutely horrible. But it was a perfect, blunt encapsulation of all my conflicted feelings over the last weeks.
When I didn’t answer, he turned his back on me and walked over to the window, standing there, looking out, and breathing heavily. I could see he was trying to get control of his emotions so he could return to the conversation, and it was just proof of how deeply I’d wounded him.
“I’m really sorry, Gideon.” I stayed where I was on the edge of the bed and hugged my arms to my stomach. “I’m really sorry. I know it’s not fair. But don’t you understand? I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to be anything but happy. And I know you’ve been really happy for the last few weeks, and I couldn’t stand to tell you the truth and have you lose it.”
He made an impatient, guttural noise and turned around. “Damn it, Diana. How can you not know this? My happiness is built on absolutely nothing if you’re not happy too.”
“I know! That’s why I’ve known this can’t last. You need to be with something who can really make you happy. Who you don’t have to constantly cater to, for fear of triggering bad memories. Who can throw herself into a passionate relationship without any fears or hesitations. Who can come when you make love to her. Who can—”
“What? Wait—what?”
I blinked at his dumbfounded expression, and I realized what I’d said. Something he hadn’t known. “Nothing.”
“You’ve been faking it? The whole time? You haven’t really been coming?”
He sounded so dismayed that I raised a hand, like I could stop the rising of his feelings. “I have come for real. Whenever you’ve gone down on me, it’s been real. I’ve only faked it during intercourse.”
I felt miserably guilty and looked down at my hands again. I could easily defend myself by saying that faking orgasms was a long-standing tradition with women and so I hadn’t been doing anything unusual or out of bounds.
But defending myself just wasn’t right, since I’d been so completely wrong.
He turned around again and stared out the window more, his shoulders moving with his heavy breathing.
“Do you see what I mean now? You need someone who can give you what you deserve, and I just can’t do it.”
He didn’t answer immediately, and the silence in the room closed in around us.
Then something changed about his posture. I could see it in his back and his shoulders. He turned around, and his face was strangely still. His voice, when he spoke, had shifted into quiet control. “Tell me why you believe you can’t give me what you think I deserve?”
I swallowed hard, trying to process the shift I sensed in him. I had no idea what it meant. “I...I just told you. You deserve the kind of relationship that I can’t give you.”
“Right now, maybe. But you’ve been assuming that’s never going to change, when you’ve already seen over and over again how much you can heal, how much things can change. So tell me why you believe you can’t give me what you think I deserve?”
“Because...” I trailed off, not able to speak the only answer that came to my lips.
“Because why?”
A couple of tears slipped out of my eyes, and I swiped them away.
He’d come a couple of steps closer to the bed. “Diana, if this feeling you have is going to take away my entire future, then you need to say it to my face.”
I opened my mouth but no words came out.
“If you feel it, you should be able to say it.”
I strangled on a sob and had to work through it before I forced out the final truth. “You deserve better than me.”
The words hung in the quiet room, lingering like a death knell, and I fought against more rising tears. I could feel Gideon slipping away, leaving a gaping hole that might never be filled.
“Do you hear it?” he rasped, rubbing his face with both hands. “Do you hear how wrong that sounds?”
“It’s not wrong! It’s true. I’m not good enough for you.”
“You’re really saying that? That you’re not good enough because you were raped?”
I shook my head and wiped more tears away. “Because I’m broken. And you deserve someone who’s whole. You deserve everything.”
He looked away for a moment before he turned back to face me. “If I deserve everything—which isn’t true, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that it is—if I deserve everything, then I should be able to have what I want. And what I want, the only thing I want, is you.”
He really meant it. Despite everything, he really meant it. And I just couldn’t take it in because it went against everything I knew about the world. “But you’re not seeing me right. You only want me because you’re not seeing me right.”
He rubbed his face with his hands again and muttered, “Oh, my God, Diana. Oh, my God.” For a moment, I wasn’t sure if he was praying or reproaching me.
Then he dropped his hands and strode over to the bed. He lowered himself to his knees in front of me and captured my eyes in an intense gaze I couldn’t break. “How can you still not know that it’s the other way around?”
“Wh—what?”
“It’s the other way around.” He reached out and took both of my hands in his. “You’re the one who’s not seeing you right. When I look at you, I’m not seeing someone who’s broken and who needs to be fixed. I see someone who is so good and so beautiful and so much stronger than she’s ever believed. She’s been through hell and still found her way back.”
My lips parted slightly as I listened, as the hoarse, urgent words forced themselves into my consciousness.
“And she has the sweetest heart and the most generous spirit and a body that takes my breath away every time. I can only dream of being as brave as she is. I’m not the blind one here. What I see is real. It’s the person you really are.”
I was trembling helplessly as I heard it. I heard it. I heard him tell me the truth. He wrapped his hands around mine, holding them steady.
He went on, “And I want you to heal. Baby, I want you to heal a little more every day. But it’s not because I think you need to be better or different. It’s because I want you to keep remembering who you already are. Not the distorted version of yourself in your mind. I want you to see what I see. Because that’s really you.”
The tears were falling now. There was no way I could stop them. Emotion and sensation and something almost transcendent crashed over me like a flood.
I knew it was true. I couldn’t deny it. I believed it because he knew it with such conviction. Sometimes truth breaks through the lies we tell ourselves so radiantly, so beautifully, that it transforms anything it touches.
Dr. Jones had been right after all. This time—this one time—it really was that simple.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Gideon asked, his voice hopelessly thick and his eyes impossible to look away from or deny. “I should have told you all of this before, but I was so afraid of moving too fast and scaring you away. But, baby, this is the truth. You’re my heart and my partner and my lover and my helper and the best friend I’ve ever had in the world.”
A couple of sobs broke free, but I smothered them so I could keep listening.
His expression twisted slightly as he continued, as if he had to control deep emotion too. “You’re my hope for the future and my call to be a better man and I do hope one day you’ll be my wife.”
I could barely control the emotion, sitting on the bed with Gideon on his knees in front of me. I pulled my hands away for a minute
so I could cry into my palms, and then I let him take them again.
“You are all of that, Diana. You’re...” He looked down at our clasped hands as if he couldn’t find the words, but then he raised his eyes to meet mine as he concluded. “You’re the light that shines on the dark places of my soul, but you are not, you are not my project.”
At that, I completely lost it. I threw myself at him, almost toppling both of us to the floor, and then I sobbed helplessly into his shoulder.
After a minute, he pulled back and took my face in his hands. “Please tell me you believe me, baby.”
“I do,” I choked, nodding helplessly like an idiot. “I do.”
He let out a broken groan and pulled me against him, holding me so tightly my ribs felt like they’d crack.
When his arms loosened, I grabbed at his shirt. “You’re my heart and my partner and my lover and my best friend too.”
So, after that, it was a little embarrassing. We were both in a pretty emotional state, and we were trying to kiss but it was honestly a little messy.
So we’ll just skip over a minute or two until we’d both managed to make it up onto the bed and I’d mostly stopped crying.
I was draped over him, and he was holding me tightly, sometimes brushing kisses against my hair.
Eventually, he cleared his throat. “We can take the sex as slowly as you need. You just have to be honest with me about it.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” My voice was scratchy, and my eyes felt swollen. “It’s not that I don’t want to be with you. I just don’t want to be...”
“What?” He stroked my hair, maybe to soften the blunt demand.
“I don’t want to be a disappointment.”
“You’re only a disappointment when you lie to me or hide things from me.”
I pressed a kiss against his shirt, which was rather damp from all of my crying. “I won’t, then.”
“Good.”
“Good.” I raised my head so I could see his face, and I smiled when I saw he was smiling. “You’ll have to try not to be a disappointment to me too.”
He chuckled, since it was obvious I was teasing. “And how exactly am I in danger of being a disappointment to you?”
“Well, after tonight, I’m going to have very high expectations in terms of poetic expressions of your feelings.”