Strong Enough

“Because I don’t want you to.”

It wasn’t that his words didn’t make me happy, but my gut said something was slightly off. “You don’t want me to?”

“No.” Both his arms came around me. “I like you here.”

“Does that mean you’re ready to—”

“It means I like you here. It means I loved being with you this weekend. I want to hold on to it.”

I so wanted this to mean he was arriving at a place of acceptance. But I wasn’t sure. I sat up and faced him, wishing I could see better in the dark. “So you want to…be together?”

“Like we have been. Yes.”

Like we have been. In secret. “You still want to hide?”

“Yes.” He said it like it was obvious. “And if you move out, we’ll never see each other.”

“So you want me to live here so that we can see each other in private, in the middle of the night?”

“You don’t enjoy our time together in the middle of the night?”

“Derek, it’s not that.” Fuck, arguing in my second language was hard. “It’s…it’s that it feels like a step backward. This weekend was so nice, being out in the open.”

“We can do that sometimes. Take trips.” He sat up too, and I could see the tension in his body by the way he fidgeted. “It just has to be somewhere people won’t know us.”

I shook my head. “How long do you think we could go on like that? Me living here, us taking trips…it will be obvious what’s going on within a short amount of time. Ellen isn’t stupid.”

Derek struggled to reply, and something occurred to me.

“You’re not planning on it lasting that long.”

“I didn’t say that.”

I scooted back, needing a little distance. “You’re still intent on a wife and kids. I’m just for fun?”

He didn’t answer fast enough, and I stood up.

“No, Derek. I don’t want that. You might think I’m just a kid, or a poor-ass immigrant, or someone just looking for a good time, but I’m not. And I don’t want to be your temporary toy while you keep looking for a woman.”

“What do you want?” He stood too. “A fucking ring?”

“No!” I took a deep breath. Getting angry at him wouldn’t help. “Look. I wasn’t looking for a relationship when I moved here. It was the furthest thing from my mind. I was prepared work really hard, as many hours as I had to every single day to make it in this country. And that’s what I’m doing. I don’t want to go backward.”

“I’m not asking you to,” he snapped.

“But you are.” I struggled with how to explain what I wanted to say. “I moved here for me. Because I have a dream for myself. Then I met you, and that dream changed.”

He moved toward me, but stopped, hands fisted at his sides. “How?”

“Now I find myself thinking about you and us as part of my dream. I came here to make a new life, and I want you to be part of it. Not in secret, like we’re ashamed of each other. Out in the open.”

He flinched. “I can’t.”

“Then I can’t, either. I don’t want to live two lives, Derek. One in public and one in private, neither of them one hundred percent me. And I don’t want to hide.” I lowered my voice even more. “I’ve lived that way already. It doesn’t feel good.”

He was silent.

“If you want to be somebody else for the rest of your life, go ahead. I don’t.”