The Reluctant Romantics Box Set (The Fall, The Mind, The Heart)

“Dean,” she questioned in alarm as I gripped the counter, “are you okay?”

“I’ll still love you in a week, in a month, and in three years. I’ll still love you for the rest of my life.”

“Yes,” I gritted out as my chest constricted.

Fuck, was I having a heart attack?

Without thinking, I looked to her in question as if she knew my racing thoughts.

“Oh, God, Dean, you are white as a sheet. Sit down right now.” Unable to get it together, I let her lead me to one of our patient rooms.

I felt the squeeze on my arm as she took my vitals.

“Jesus, Dean, your BP is off the charts. Look at me,” she commanded. “Any pain?”

“No, I mean, not really,” I answered as cold sweat covered me.

“Yes or no? Let’s get you to Dr.—”

I shook my head before she had a chance to finish. “No, it’s not a heart attack.”

She looked at me with her jaw set. “You don’t know what it is.”

“Yes, I do. I’ll be fine. Just give me a few minutes and please just cancel the appointments.”

She looked me over as I began to come down then eyed me with concern.

We both knew it was a panic attack, but she wanted to save my dignity. I rewarded her by ordering her to leave the room.

When my heart slowed faintly and I was able to walk, I stumbled out of the building and out into the unforgiving streets of New York. My shoulder met with another then another as I tried and failed to find stable footing. The pedestrians I crashed into gave me gracious ‘fuck yous’ with their glares in lieu of concern.

Racing across a sea of concrete and crossing into Central Park, I kept walking until I was finally close to alone. I had no destination and that was the problem. I had done everything I had set out to do. I no longer had a compass.

Walking aimlessly through the park, I was flooded with memories I could not process, words, whispers, smiles, touches that rocked me with every desperate gulp of air. My whole life I had been working toward this last year of my career. It had come and gone, yet nothing had changed. The emptiness I’d felt for years had suddenly resurfaced again with aggressive vengeance, determined to take every single sense of accomplishment away from me.

I had lived the last few years of my life buried in regret. My purpose had been simple; my goals were singular in nature, and I had gotten it all wrong. Exhausted and perplexed, I sat on a park bench, watching the world shift as I sat still in my torment.

I had done nothing…nothing to deserve her loyalty and yet in my racing heart she still belonged to me. In my mind, she was still there, reminding me to breathe, and that I still breathed for her.

Could she still feel me the way I still felt her? In my bones, in my blood, in the very depths of who I was, she remained.

My father always used to tell me he did not remember his twenties. He had said that he had been so damn busy trying to prove himself to a world that did not give a shit about him that he had forgotten to live, to look around him. I had lived my twenties the same damn way. Even with his warning, I had foolishly followed his path, and now I was drowning in a similar fate. I ripped my tie away from my neck and pocketed it as I ran my hands through my hair.

You cannot go back, Dean.

“Fuck,” I muttered as I fisted the sides of my head, wishing for one more minute with my father. Just a gesture, a knowing smile, something, I needed…anything.

But it really was not my father’s words that I needed; it was her words I needed to believe.

“I’ll still love you.”

It was her, had always been her, and would always be her.

You cannot go back, Dean.

Hours passed as I sat in the freezing park, welcoming the cold into my lifeless bones to numb me. I had the world I wanted. The world I had worked so fucking hard for. It was all there. The career I had dreamt of was waiting for me just a few blocks away and yet I could not move to get back to it. I could not shake the thought that it meant absolutely nothing.

This was empty. This was nothing.