Her Reluctant Wife: A Lesbian Age Gap Romance

She’d let go of a lot of things. She’d been so afraid of being

flawed and marked by the passing of her parents, of not being

able to recover and find herself again, but that hadn’t

happened. It had for Giana, who spent most of her teenage

years and her entire twenties being locked away in a cage of

grief. They’d recovered together, along with the many ways

they’d changed together.

“Do you ever feel like we were in the same orbit, even if we

were on totally different paths and came from totally different

places?” Giana asked. She turned, her moss green eyes

drinking in Coralyn’s face. “I always felt like there was this

pull between us.”

That pull was the only way she could explain the force

she’d felt that night she didn’t walk out the door but had

chosen to go through with the marriage instead. Yes, she’d

used the necklace as an excuse, but she knew there was

something more. Some compulsion that made her stay.

“Yes,” she responded. “Yes, I do.”

Giana slipped their hands out of her coat and studied them.

Their fingertips were red with the cold. She was holding

Coralyn’s left hand and she turned it around, knuckles up, and

studied it. “You know, next week is the anniversary of that

day.”

The day that they got married. They’d annulled the

marriage

shortly after, because it felt like the right thing to do, but

they’d never wavered in their commitment to each other.

Through their grief classes, Giana had slowly gravitated back

to her family. They’d been having dinners together.

Taking her mom out for girls’ afternoons. Giana called her