Dreams of 18

God, he wants to live in my world.

The world I created because I didn’t want to live in the world I was given. And he wants to live there, in my imaginary world.

He wants to live there with me.

Oh God, my heart is so full and I need him to stop talking so I can kiss him right now.

“Graham, I –"

“I fucked up, okay?” He cuts me off, instead. “I know that. And I probably succeeded too. You probably hate me.” His fingers flex and jerk on my cheek at the thought. “But you don’t have to love me, all right. It’s okay if you don’t.”

“But I –"

He cuts me off again, flicking his eyes back and forth between mine. “If you could put all your dreams in the palm of my hand like you did with your journals, if you could be that brave, then I could be too. I could be brave for you. Because you inspire me to be brave, baby.”

More tears fall down my cheeks and saturate the pad of his thumbs. “I inspire you to be brave?”

He nods. “Yeah. You do. You inspire me to live, Violet. You inspire me to live in a world where a brave girl saves a dangerous, old beast and shows him to be brave like her.”

A broken laugh escapes me.

But he doesn’t smile, no. He doesn’t break his focus or his intensity. He keeps looking at me, wanting me to understand.

“So you don’t have to love me, Violet,” he continues with a low tone. “Because I love you enough for the both of us. And I’m gonna learn to show that, all right? I promise you that. I’m going to learn to show my love to you. It might not happen overnight, but I’ll keep at it. All I want is for you to trust me. Just trust me.”

I dig my knuckles into his hard stomach and I can hear his heartbeats there, deep in his gut, banging against my fists.

Feeling those beats on my hands, I whisper, “I didn’t before. I didn’t trust you.”

Pain slashes through his features. “I know. But I’d never… I’d never think that –”

“I know.” I nod. “I know. I guess I always knew. I always knew that I could trust you. I think it was… my doomsday brain. It wouldn’t let me tell you. It kept saying that I’m not good enough and… yeah.”

He presses his hands on my cheeks. “You’re magnificent, Violet, you got that? You’re fucking perfect.”

More tears well up and river down. “I’m not fine, Graham. Everything is not fine. I have this thing inside of me and I’m so scared. I know I’m brave; I know that. But it scares me that I have to live with it for the rest of my life and –”

He puts his forehead over mine. “Hey, hey, look at me. Look at me. We’ll do this. We’ll do this together, okay? We’ll take it one day at a time. One step at a time. I’ve got you. I asked around, all right? There’s a bunch of doctors in Denver we can go to. I bought books and stuff. I’m –”

“Is that why you were in Denver?”

He studies me a beat and then nods.

“Is that why it took you so long to come? And you sent Brian, instead.”

“I wanted to make sure I knew everything. I wanted you to trust me.”

I laugh, then.

It’s not a loud laugh or anything. In fact, it’s laced with tears. But somehow, it’s the purest, most joyful laughter I’ve ever produced.

It’s acceptance.

It’s what I felt the day I accepted that I loved him since the beginning.

This is what I’m feeling right now. Accepted and loved.

I laugh and I cry and my head drops down to his chest.

God, I love him. He’s an idiot but I love him.

He buries his hand in my hair and presses my forehead into his chest even more. I take a second to rub my nose in his shirt, smell his thick, outdoorsy smell. It reminds me of the cabin so much – our rose garden, the bed, the woods surrounding our home.

I have to pull myself away and tell him. I’m getting so impatient now. I need him to take me away.

“I’ve been so mad at you, you know. You hurt me in the worst possible way. You made me cry and everyone kept saying that you wouldn’t come. That you didn’t care.”

“Baby, I –"

I put a finger on his mouth. “But I knew. I knew you’d come. Do you know how I knew?”

He swallows another lump of emotion and breathes against that finger of mine, shaking his head once.

“You kissed me,” I whisper. “That day. When you sent me away. You stepped up to me and you wiped my tears off and you kissed me on the forehead, and you said what you did on my eighteenth birthday. You said, go home. Even though you wanted to kiss me that night, you kept pushing me away. You kept denying yourself. You kept doing the right thing. And I knew. I knew you were doing the right thing on my nineteenth birthday too. You just needed to realize that what you thought was the right thing wasn’t really the right thing. And I knew you’d realize it. I knew that because I trusted you. I did and I do. I trust you, Graham.”