“She said I would never be that person again. Not exactly the woman I was before. I was fundamentally changed by what happened. It took time and therapy and the right meds before I could learn to be happy as the person who remained after I lost so much.”
Her eyes blaze with sincerity and passion and everything I used to fantasize I would see there again.
“I’d like for you to trust that the person standing in front of you has done the work to get better and to understand how I lost myself. I’ve developed the tools to cope when I inevitably lose more, because losing things you love is a guarantee in this life.”
She takes my hand and presses it over her heart, her lashes spiked with tears. “Ask me again if I love you, Si. Ask me now.”
The words wait on my tongue, but there’s a gate set over my mouth, like if I let them loose, despite all my fears and reservations, I won’t be able to resist her.
There is a part of me that knows this is where I belong. There’s another part, though: the self-preserving part that remembers she gave up on us and it ruined me. The woman standing in front of me is the fighter I needed then.
How could Inotlove her?
She curls her fingers into a fist over my heart, and if she asked, I would carve it out of my chest and give it to her. Maybe that’s the problem when you love a woman and want to give her everything, only to lose it all.
I still haven’t asked the question when she closes the last few inches between us and leans up to my ear. Reflexively, my hand goes to her hip, possessive, anchoring her to me in case she decides to run.
“Yes, Josiah,” she says in a watery whisper to the question I couldn’t make myself ask. “I love you.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Josiah
There’s a crack in Dr. Musa’s professional inscrutability when I arrive at his office. I was so disoriented after leaving Yasmen that I got on the interstate instead of driving the short distance to my house. Before I realized it, I was en route to his office. When I called him from the car and asked if we could talk, he’d had a cancellation and could squeeze me in. He sounded unbothered, but when I enter his office, he watches me with a strange expression.
“Are you…” I tense, narrowing my eyes. “Are you laughing at me?”
It’s definitely humor in his eyes, however mild, and in the faint curve of his lips.
“Not really,” he says. “Just pleased you’re using therapy to help process life. Considering you showed up to our first session like it was detention, we should at least acknowledge how far we’ve come.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” My smile fades as I remember what I need to discuss. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice…again.”
He nods toward the two leather seats. I take one and he takes the other.
“So what’s going on?”
“Yasmen thought she was pregnant.” I rush to clarify. “She’s not, but it made her realize she wants more than the current arrangement we have offers.”
“The one where you have sex without commitment or any pressure,” he says. “Those were the terms, right?”
It sounds so sterile when he says it like that. I guess that’s essentially what I told him when we discussed my relationship, but I don’t recognize it as what Yasmen and I have had.
“Right,” I say. “It made her realize she wants more kids at some point and she says she wants them with me. She says she wants to build a life with me, even if we aren’t married. She doesn’t want to continue our current arrangement not knowing where it’s going, or if it will ever go anywhere. She wants me to come home.”
“Sounds like a woman who knows exactly what she wants.”
“Now,” I snap. “She wasn’t this sure when she asked me for the divorce.”
“Did you ask her about that? What’s changed?”
“She says she’s changed, and that through therapy she’s come to understand why she responded the way she did when Byrd and Henry died, and she’s developed tools to cope better.”
“But you don’t believe her?”
“I’m scared to.”
A few months ago, I couldn’t have imagined sitting across from this dude and confessing my fears so easily.