Because I deserved more.
“I won’t be a good father,” he proclaimed, putting down his fork.
“I disagree,” I argued.
He narrowed his eyes ever so slightly. I was pissing him off, and that was turning me on.
“It’s something that I will have to come to terms with,” he said. “But I want you. There is no way I can let you go. No way I can let you live a life without me.”
I bit my lip. There was pain in his voice. It was palpable, and it was uncomfortable to hear it, to feel it. I was struggling to breathe underneath the weight of everything he was giving me. He was giving me everything that I’d craved, wished for when we were together, parts of himself he had been holding back.
The time we spent apart had stripped something from him. Not all of his shields, not all of his coldness, but there was something raw about him now.
Yes, this was what I wanted. But it was really fucking hard going from a famine to a feast.
Jay didn’t wait to drop another bombshell, it was at our next meal. Lunch, prepared in our underwear after we’d gone back to bed.
His presence itself was a crater in the fragile house of cards I’d tried to build in his absence, the life that I’d constructed without him.
Then there was the fact that he was suddenly going to ‘come to terms’ with having children with me. Which wasn’t exactly what a girl wanted to hear. I didn’t want him to have to come to terms with having a child with me, but I knew that for him, with what he’d been through, it was a lot. It wasn’t romantic by any means, but it was a huge gesture. A forever kind of promise. Not empty. Jay wouldn’t make that kind of statement just to get me back and then go back on his word. Through all my ruminations these past few months, I realized I truly knew little about the man who I’d let ruin my life with his love. But I knew that Jay wouldn’t tell me pretty lies to get me back. He’d tell me ugly truths as some kind of challenge, on purpose, as if he was hoping he’d scare me off. Even now, after crossing an ocean for me in the kind of grand gesture he’d promised me a lifetime ago he wasn’t capable of, I sensed that he was clutching on to me with both hands while simultaneously daring me to push him away.
To escape him.
I wasn’t sure when I’d made the decision to clutch on to him right back. He hadn’t exactly given me time to do that since he’d arrived in the darkness. But then again, it wasn’t throughout the night when I’d battled with the decision to fight or stay. The decision was already made, the second I felt his lips on my neck.
Whether or not it was weak of me to welcome him back into my life without a battle, I didn’t quite care. Beyond that, I also knew Jay well enough to know that this had already been a battle for him. I could see it all over his face. He was ravaged by this, by me. My absence. It satisfied me to see that our separation hadn’t just caused pain. It had hurt him deeply enough that even he couldn’t hide the emotional scars from it all.
Which is what I’d needed all along, proof that he hurt too. That loving me had caused him the same pain that loving him had caused me. I didn’t want smiles, soft words, loving promises. I wanted to see the agony of it all, wanted to make sure that I left the same marks on him that he left on me.
Now that I saw that, I was done. I wasn’t going to tell him what he’d done to me, curse him for being so cold, so cruel. I’d known he was a cold and cruel man when I’d fallen in love with him, and I’d stayed anyway, despite the strong premonition that he’d hurt me.
That didn’t mean that I wasn’t still processing the statement he’d made about children, chewing on it as I ate the eggs I’d made us.
Jay had been sitting across from me, watching, food untouched in front of him, silent.
That was, until the bombshell.
“We’re going to get married.” He spoke as if he were saying ‘we’re going to go to the store tomorrow.’ No inflection. His voice was devoid of emotion. His mossy green eyes were not. The way his Adam’s apple moved when he swallowed heavily after speaking was another signal of something below his granite façade.
I blinked at him across the table, my fork midair. “Is that a proposal?” I asked once I figured out how to collect myself. This man sitting across from me, naked, statuesque, beautifully brutal, was real. And he’d just opened his mouth, the word ‘marriage’ coming out of it.