I remember it all.
I remember my husband falling in love with someone else, a tiny human that we’d created and that made me fall in love with him even more, with wide-open arms.
I also remember the day when I had an inkling that my baby girl had fallen in love with someone else too.
A silent, lonely boy named Dean.
I think it was her third birthday when she jokingly proposed to him.
I tried to deny it for a while. In fact, I denied it for years and years but I guess I always knew. I always knew that they had something special.
And so I knew this day was coming, the day when Simon and Dean, the boy whom Simon and I had welcomed into our family, would butt heads
Not because he doesn’t like Dean or anything like that.
But because Simon will have trouble letting go of the second love of his life, his daughter.
That’s exactly what’s happening, and I should probably tell him that.
Or my husband will agonize over it for days on end; it still takes time for him to understand things that involve emotions, especially his.
My Ice King.
It’s almost midnight. Brendan is fast asleep but I know Fallon is up even though the light in her room is switched out.
It was a tense dinner after Dean abruptly left. I wanted to talk to Simon then and there, but I knew he needed some time to put whatever happened in his study with Dean behind him. And Fallon needed to calm down as well.
So I waited for him to come upstairs to our bedroom but he never did.
That’s his thing too. Sometimes he shuts down and disappears into his work if he can’t process what’s happening around him, and I have to pull him out.
Tonight is one of those nights, I think, and I knock at his office door.
“Come in.”
His deep masculine voice reaches through the thick brown door and strangely, tonight it reminds me of our days at Heartstone, the time in my life when everything was so bleak and hard.
When I was eighteen, I tried to kill myself by jumping off a roof. Then I tried to lie about it because this thing inside of me, my illness—depression—made me feel weak. And I didn’t want to feel weak. So I lied and made up stories about the fall until everyone around me thought I should be sent to a psychiatric hospital.
And then, I found him.
The man with gray eyes and a stoic but stunning face, who looked like a king and reminded me of my favorite thing: rain.
He made me realize that I’m a warrior. My illness isn’t my weakness. My illness is what makes me strong. The fact that I get out of bed every morning even when I don’t want to. The fact that I’m living even when some days I don’t feel like it.
He made me realize that my fall from that roof isn’t something to be ashamed of. And in turn, he made me fall for him.
It wasn’t an easy road for us. He was my psychiatrist and I was his patient. There was a stigma, people’s judgement, Simon’s own moral conflict and issues. But we made it and here we are now twenty years later with a family and a castle-like home.
I open the door and step in.
He’s sitting behind his desk in his big monstrosity of a leather chair that I told him I hated the day he bought it some eight years ago.
This is insane, Simon. It looks like it came from the eighties.
You see the room in it, he said and pointed to the broad seat, his voice low and rough, his eyes hooded. You’ll be the one thanking me for it when you ride my cock on it later.
Well, I hate to say it but I did thank him for it. I’ve thanked him countless times since. So maybe I don’t hate this chair so much but it still is a throwback to the eighties.
“Hey,” I greet him as I close and lock the door behind me.
He gazes at me for a few silent seconds, his eyes so beautiful behind his thick glasses.
“Hey,” he says finally, and it’s evident in his splintered and thready voice that he’s struggling.
Not that anyone will be able to tell.
Nope, with him no one can tell anything except me.
He has a good poker face. He always did. Broad jaw, high cheekbones, a smooth forehead that might be slightly marred with lines of age but nothing too crazy.
And he’s sitting in his chair with his muscular shoulders straight and his fingers steepled like the king he is.
Only I know that besides being a cold and icy king, he’s also a man. A man with vulnerabilities and cracks in his polished façade like the rest of us.