“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes,” I say to Penelope, the reporter at Gotcha! magazine. She’s sitting across from me in the small cubicle, and this woman knows far more about my life than I know about hers. She’s the woman who’s written every article about Allie and Micah and about Darius and me.
She’s a pretty, stylish woman wearing a cute summer dress, around my age with a round face and thick strawberry-blond curls. And the surprise in her big hazel eyes tells me she is completely dumbfounded that I’m here.
Truth be told, I’m a little shocked, too. Even more surprised that I don’t hate her. I should hate her, but it’s impossible for me to hate someone I’ve never even met before.
I glance sideways to the end of the cubicle, spotting Allie holding her phone up in my direction.
I’m about to ask her what she’s doing when Penelope asks, “Do you mind if I record our talk?”
“Not at all,” I reply, frowning at Allie before glancing at Penelope.
She clicks the side of the recorder and places it closer to me on her desk. “I’m sorry if I seem so surprised, but can you tell me why you want to do this? I mean…” She smiles, and it’s surprisingly warm and trusting. “It’s not every day that the people I write articles about come in to willingly give me information.”
I don’t get too caught up in that smile. I imagine she’s perfected it to get what she wants. “Well,” I say, completely understanding her surprise. I’m not even sure this isn’t going to backfire and burn me. “I’m done worrying about what you’re going to write. So, let’s get to it. You have free rein here, ask whatever you want to know about me.”
Her smile turns a little more devilish now, eyes holding a wicked twinkle. “Tell me everything.”
“From the beginning?” I ask.
She nods. “Precisely.”
“Okay, let’s see….” I take a quick look at Allie, seeing her phone is gone now, likely stuffed back into her purse, before addressing Penelope again. “Darius and I met through his half-sister, Allie, who you know is also my best friend.”
From there, Penelope remains enthralled with each word that spills from my lips as I recite every little detail of my past with Darius. But that’s not all I tell her. I explain all the things I’d recently learned that he did for me, without ever knowing he did so much. There’re so many things that I don’t know how to deal with, but this, I know. And I’m determined to tell the world all the good that Darius does. He might want the public to see me as a hero, but Darius has been the hero all along. And it’s about damn time the world views him as that.
My world has been altered now, and I can never go back to what we had before. Because I know now, and I guess maybe I should’ve always known, he’s loving me in the only way he knows how. And I never saw how deep that love ran until I saw how he’d frozen time for me. Which, in turn, also told me how much I hurt him when I ended things. I realize now he never said a word. He let me end it because that’s what I wanted. He’s never pushed me one way or another. And my hurt feelings never let me see his eerie silence, or the way he walked out, leaving me in a way he’d never left me before, without an explanation.
Blind, that’s what I’ve been. But I’m not blind anymore. No matter how hard it was, Darius always told it to me straight. I’ve been so caught up in fear that he might hurt me, I never saw how much he was hurting.
I never saw how much he needed me. I never saw that all those things that scare me about him, scare him, too. Because with Darius, it’s what you don’t see that matters. It’s that no matter what he was going through, he came to see me because I needed him. It’s that no matter that we broke up, he bought all the things I love to ensure they stayed the same when I came home.
It’s all the things I didn’t see. It’s all the things I somehow missed.
But it’s all I see now.
“And,” I say, ending the story of me and Darius. “That brings us to today.”
“Wow,” Penelope breathes, turning off her recorder and leaning back in her seat. “Okay. Wow. This is not the Darius Bennett the world knows.”
“No, it’s not,” I say with a hard smile, because that’s what makes this woman’s job so terrible. She focuses on all the things that don’t truly matter. “But it’s the Darius Bennett the world should know because it’s the real him.”
Penelope lifts a brow. “Are you sure he wants the world to know this?”
“Of course not,” I acknowledge, knowing there will be hell to pay later. “But I’m done hiding. I’m done being afraid of the truth. This is our life, and I happen to love this life and love him.”
She smiles, and honestly, it seems so genuine. Which is confusing to say the least. Shouldn’t she be the spawn of Satan? “Do you believe there is a reason why he publicly portrays someone so different from who he really is?” she asks.
I snort a laugh. “Because he’s private and not very good at showing his emotions, especially to people he doesn’t know.”
“So then, you’re saying that he made the donation to make you look good?”
“That’s right.”
“And why would he do that?”
I stare at her, right in the eye. “Because you’re doing your best to make me look bad.”