Rend (Riven 2)

When I’d talked myself hoarse, Rhys had told me things too. How much it had hurt him when he’d tried to get close to people and they hadn’t wanted relationships with him. The way he’d watched couples sometimes and felt a pang of envy that while he had so much in his life he didn’t have that. Hopelessly caught between his desire for his music and the kind of life that seemed incompatible.

The way he bit off words like old-fashioned and prudish revealed the scars of having his open heart met with cynicism. There was a moment when he ducked his head, self-conscious, and pressed his forehead to my shoulder, and I’d pictured his childhood instead of my own. A sweet blond boy watching his parents holding hands in the backyard and knowing, with a bone-deep sense of certainty, that someday he would have that. And that boy growing into a man who hadn’t found it yet.

I ran a hand through his thick hair, feeling the architecture of his skull, and I wanted it for him. I wanted him to have everything he’d ever hoped for.

I want you however I can have you.

* * *

—

When I woke the morning after our fight, Rhys was already up. The warm autumn sun fell over his face and I saw something new in his expression. Longing. The desire for something that he thought he might never have. And I’d put it there. It slammed into me so quickly I jerked with it.

“Hi,” Rhys said with a wan quirk of his mouth. It was a long distance from the blinding grins or sleepy smiles he usually gave me when we woke up.

“Hey.” I reached out a hand and ran it through his hair like I so often did. It happened before I realized that maybe he wouldn’t want me to. Rhys had never wanted me to second-guess touching him before, but now I faltered, and let my hand fall away.

I indulged a fantasy that our fight had never happened. That it was just a normal Sunday morning in bed with my husband, and we could chat lazily, or make out, or fuck each other until hunger drove us from the bed. I wanted so badly for it to be a normal Sunday morning.

But one look in his eyes told me that there was no avoiding this. Rhys liked to solve problems the second he knew there was one.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said.

“How are you feeling?” He stroked my cheek and I closed my eyes.

“I feel awkward and weird, like when we first started dating and I didn’t know how to act around you sometimes.”

“Well, I guess I’ll just have to get you to talk the same way I did then,” he said. The memory filled me with warmth. Rhys guessing more and more ridiculous explanations for things, asking more and more absurdly specific questions. It had made me roll my eyes, and then it had made me laugh, and finally it had made me want to correct him with the truth. Which had been his goal all along.

I made a move to bury my face in his chest but stopped myself. I still wasn’t sure I was allowed to touch him.

“You could try,” I said.

“Okay. Did you keep your past a secret from me because you’re in the witness relocation program?”

I shook my head.

“Did you keep your past a secret from me in exchange for a million dollars, which you can’t receive until you’ve reached the age of thirty with your secrecy unbroken?”

I shook my head again.

“Did you keep your past a secret from me because one day when you were a child you met an older version of yourself who’d used a time machine to come back to that exact moment to tell you that someday you would meet a man named Rhys and that whatever else happened, and no matter how much you loved him, you should never, ever tell him the truth?”

That one stung.

“No,” I whispered. “But I wish that was why.”

“Did you keep your past a secret from me because you thought that if I knew I wouldn’t love you?”

I considered that. “Kinda.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t love you because I’d blame you?”

“No.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t love you because I’m the kind of judgmental prick who thinks that if people have bad experiences then they deserve them and are doomed to wander the globe miserable and alone?”

“No!”

“Did you think I wouldn’t love you because you don’t think you’re lovable?”

I blinked, then nodded. “Kinda. Sometimes.”

“Can you tell me more?”

“I didn’t mean to lie to you. I told you things that I—” I swallowed hard. It didn’t seem fair to cry. “That I’d never told anyone. And everything I said was true. The feelings and the . . . memories. But you know sometimes I’m bad at . . . like . . . sometimes I’d say a hard, true thing, and you’d kind of fill in the blanks, and I didn’t correct you. Because it was like you had guessed the worst thing you could think of but it still wasn’t— It’s . . . fuck.”