I pause here and take a deep breath.
I study his blank but tight features, his inscrutable but pretty eyes as he watches me. As he stands there so handsome and so strong in his unbuttoned dark shirt and dark pants.
“The point is, Alaric,” I say to the man I love, “is that you are too.”
His muscles flex.
As if I’ve dealt him a blow.
And maybe I have.
I’m sorry about that; I promise him silently that I’m going to make it better. I’m going to soothe the wound I’m causing right now.
“You never talk about your childhood. You never talk about how it was for you growing up in this mansion. I’m sure this place is full of memories for you. All kinds of memories. Good and bad, sad and joyful, right?” I swallow, hugging my knees tightly. “Although I suspect, from what Mo has told me, that the bad outweighs the good, and the sad outweighs the joy. You didn’t have a good life here, Alaric. You didn’t have a happy childhood. You didn’t have good parents, a good father. You didn’t have anyone to love you. Instead what you had was hate and loneliness and darkness and despair. And I understand it, I think.
“Not completely, you see. I can never understand completely. No one can. That’s the thing about trauma. No one really gets what you went through, what you felt in that very moment. They can relate, sure, and make their own conclusions about it, but no one really knows what you experience in that particular moment. So I want you to know that I’m not trying to belittle it or to say that, oh yeah, I know how you feel. That’s not my goal here. My goal here is to tell you that you’re unloved and I know something about being unloved.”
Licking my lips, I take a deep breath again.
Only because I don’t think he’s breathing. I haven’t seen his chest move in the past however many minutes since I began.
So I breathe for him too.
“I know that it makes you do things. It makes you crave things. It made me crave love. It made me crave attention. It made me so desperate, Alaric, that I chased after love with a single-minded focus. I chased after love like my life depended on it. Like if I didn’t have it, I’d die. That’s why I hid myself, my talent, my passion from my mother. That’s why I did all those stupid things to get her attention that only managed to push her away more. That’s why I ran after Jimmy, and ignored all the red flags. Ignored the very fact that I didn’t even love him.”
I detect a movement then.
A slight rising of his chest, and something loosens inside of me.
To see that he’s here, he’s breathing, he’s listening.
“Yeah, I know, right? It’s a shocker.” I give out a scoffing chuckle. “I chased after that guy for three years. I lied for him. I hid things for him. I broke all the rules for him and I was going to do some really horrible things for him. And turns out, I never even loved him. I guess I was so obsessed with the idea of being loved that I didn’t care about anything else. I didn’t care if I loved him or not, or if he was the guy for me or not, I just wanted to chase after him and be loved. But again, that’s not the point. What I did and how it affected me. The point is, Alaric, that being unloved changed you as well.
“It made you do things too. It made you angry. It made you bitter. It gave you this extreme sense of responsibility, this extreme obsession with your duty, with family legacy. This need to always be working and working and never stopping. Not even for a single second, not even to breathe or to think about if this is really what you want, if this is really what you should be doing. If this is something that makes you happy. You came back to the town that almost killed you. You do the things you don’t like. It’s like you’re punishing yourself for something, you know. You’re torturing yourself for something. And I wish, I really wish, that you’d tell me. You’d tell me what you’re punishing yourself for, Alaric, so I can tell you that you don’t have to. You don’t have to punish yourself anymore. You don’t have to torture yourself. Whatever it is, just let it go. Just let it… free. But you won’t tell me and I’m not going to force you to reveal your secrets. I will, however, reveal one of mine.”
That’s when I unwrap my arms from around myself and get up on my knees. That’s when I climb off the bed and approach him. I stand before him, my toes almost touching his, looking up at him with all the love in my eyes.