Dishing Up Love

“Because she really didn’t do much to help me heal from it. She doesn’t use the same techniques and practices as I do, and after I laid it all out for her only to have no results in the end, I didn’t bother finding another therapist. Didn’t want to go through the pain of having to recap it all, so I decided—like an idiot, mind you—that I could be my own therapist, get over it on my own. As we know from earlier, I’m not the greatest at taking care of myself, and I save up all my energy for helping other people. Really, I’ve just been using other people’s problems to ignore my own,” she confesses, taking a long sip of her drink.

I nod, giving it a minute for her words to settle between us. And then what she told me before really sinks in. “You said your fiancé left you… but before then, you had a miscarriage? He left you after you lost your baby?” I rumble, my last sentence coming out testier than I meant for it to.

At her nod, things start clicking into place—the reason she seemed so sad during the tour when children were mentioned, when she snorted when Ronnie explained women were sent here because the residents needed wives to birth the next generation, and why she thinks she can’t give anyone what they want out of life, including herself.

Not caring any longer about the furniture, I scoot back from the table and wrap my arms around the woman next to me, pulling her into my lap and cradling her against my much larger frame. She feels almost childlike herself when she curls into me, allowing me to comfort her broken heart. I feel her breathe me in, hear her sigh, and it makes me think of the many times I’ve seen my yaya bury her face in her husband’s chest or neck to inhale his scent. She always pulls away from him with a look of blissful love on her face, seeming more relaxed and calmer than before.

I rub up and down Erin’s back with an open palm, my hand seeming big against her small body. And when she melts into me, I know all her walls are finally crumbling down around us. In this moment, I feel a closeness with her I’ve never felt with anyone before, and I wonder if it’s our souls finally greeting each other, after she finally let hers come out from the tower she had it locked away in.

She tilts her head, unburying her face from my shirt, so she can speak quietly in my ear. “It’s not only that though, Curtis. Yes, it was super shitty that he left after one of the most heartbreaking experiences of my life. But I can’t really blame him after what the doctor told us.”

I pull away just enough so I can look her in the eyes while she talks. “What could he have possibly said that would make what your ex did forgivable?” My nostrils flare. I’m not a violent man. I’ve never really had to be. Any bad situation I’ve ever been in, the opponent would just look at the sheer size of me and back down. I’ve been grateful for my Nordic genes for keeping me out of too much trouble until now, but for the first time in my life, I feel the old Viking blood in my veins sizzle, wanting to go after this motherfucker for leaving this wonderful creature in my arms after she suffered such a painful loss.

“I have been blessed with a hostile uterus with an unhealthy dose of random-ass leiomyomas for good measure, ensuring that the chances of conceiving and carrying my own child would be—for lack of a better word—a fucking miracle,” she explains, and I narrow my eyes.

“I’m sorry, sugar. What is that lie-word you said again?” I ask, trying to take in all the information I can.

“Leiomyomas. It’s the technical term for uterine fibroids.”

I hold her closer, even as I reach out to take hold of her drink, pulling it up in front of her to take a big gulp before replacing it on the table. “Is that cancerous? My yaya had to have some pre-cancer cells frozen years ago, but that word never came up.”

“No, not cancerous. At least there’s that. They just… like, take up all the room in my uterus. Some can block the way for swimmers to make their way in and create the baby, but like I said, hostile uterus, so even when that miracle happened and I conceived, my body treated her like she was a foreign entity and rejected her,” she murmurs, her lip trembling once again and her eyes filling with tears, and she tries to laugh away the emotion, shaking her head. “It was a long time ago. I’m fine, really.”