“Do you need to stop, Maggie?”
She realized Alec had asked her a question. “No. What did you ask?”
“I asked what Nash would say about Ryan?”
Her chest tightened painfully. Her head shook. “He wouldn’t like that.”
“You don’t think he’d want to see you happy?”
“Happy, yes. But he was always very territorial. He’d hate the idea of me dating another man.” He couldn’t even bear the thought of her hiding in a closet with Danny Darushak for seven minutes in fifth grade.
“Let’s take Nash out of it, for a moment. How do you feel about being with another man?”
Her head shook with more conviction. “I’m not there yet. We’re barely… We’re not dating. I doubt we’ll ever get to a normal adult standard.”
“Normal is a relative term in regard to adult relationships.”
“We don’t do anything. We aren’t … intimate.”
“Intimacy takes many forms. Intercourse is only one version. There are thousands.”
“Well, we aren’t doing any of them either.”
“I’d like you to shut your eyes and imagine a time in the past few weeks when you were alone with Ryan. Can you do that?”
She closed her eyes and pictured them standing in his kitchen, hovering by the counter over an open box of pizza as they joked about random things and stuffed their faces. They’d done this enough that each memory started to look the same in her head.
“Okay.”
“In that moment, can you recall any sense of longing? Perhaps a time when you wished he would touch you or look at you? Have there been moments like that recently?”
She recalled a moment yesterday. He’d said something funny and made her crack up. His eyes watched her closely and he smiled, slipping in a whispered compliment about her laugh. He said it was prettier than choir bells—a perfect mix of chaos and beauty.
Of course, at that comment her laughter drifted away and there had been a moment of silence when the energy between them stretched like glue, holding them tight to that moment of time and also filling her with the nervous sensation of being trapped in something sticky.
“Yes, but…” Ryan never crossed those lines. “He knows I’m not ready.”
“Do you think it’s his belief that you’re not ready, keeping him at bay, or is it possibly a need to respect your decision? Who is actually controlling those moments, you or him?”
“Both of us.”
“You mentioned him promising to be patient several times, but patience doesn’t negate desire. If you asked him to touch you, do you fear he might reject you?”
“No. I know he wants more. But he wants me to be ready.”
“And what do you want?”
More guilt scraped at her belly, clawing the insides raw. “I don’t know.”
“There’s no judgment here, Maggie. You’re in a safe space. It’s just us. No Ryan. No Nash. What do you want? We can’t live our true life until we’re prepared to be honest with ourselves.”
Chills raced up her spine. She couldn’t look him in the eye. “I … miss closeness. But what if the thing I’m missing is closeness with Nash. I don’t want to hurt Ryan.”
“Ryan is a grown man, who is capable of expressing and protecting himself. This is about you.”
She swallowed. “What if I regret it? What if we do something that can’t be undone, and I can’t bear the reality?”
“You mean what if you create a permanent regret?”
“Yes.”
“So, is it safe to say you’re afraid of change but also afraid that nothing will change the status quo?”
That didn’t make sense. She couldn’t be afraid of both, could she? “No, only with certain things.”
“Such as?”
“Guilt. It’s unending. Loss. Absence. I’m afraid of things changing for the worse, but I accept nothing’s permanent.”
“Except regret. Is it fair to say you’re afraid of regretting actions that can’t be undone?”
“I just … don’t want to be sad anymore.”
He nodded with understanding. “Uncertainty can be paralyzing when we focus on all the possible negative outcomes. But if we stay still, we don’t evolve. Happiness is a byproduct of change. Yes, it’s temporary, but that’s why it’s human nature to keep moving. Life experience is meant to be an evolution of self. We can’t experience success without the chance of failure. You might discover new regrets, but you might also discover new levels of happiness.”
He was right. She knew he was right, so there was no point in debating him.
After several minutes of silence, he asked, “Has stillness relieved your sadness in any way? Do you find avoidance a beneficial coping skill?”
“No.”
He opened his palms, as if to say there you have it. “Perhaps grief is a wound timepiece that needs to unwind at its own pace. There are varying levels of heartache, and each person processes loss differently. For some, it might even be a permanent ache. None of us know how much time it will actually take to heal, and there’s no written law that says grieving alone will hurry things up. On the contrary, the only thing that seems to speed up time is happiness, living life to its fullest potential.”