West
I watched Shani sleeping on the couch, beneath the soft throw I’d covered her with after she fell asleep in my arms. Being there for her felt so good, but I knew it was an isolated moment of weakness that made her reach for me. It wasn’t a decision to let me in, and I needed her to let me in.
She woke up and stretched her arms over her head before rolling onto her side to face me, her hands tucked under her chin. She watched me sipping my coffee for a few seconds before she mouthed, “Thank you.”
I nodded. She had nothing to thank me for, but she didn’t see it that way. I was just doing for her what she would have done for me if our situations had been reversed.
“I’m sorry I chased you away,” she said on a heavy sigh. “I really could use your help at work.”
“Then you’ve got it.” Though it wouldn’t be easy to spend every day with her, pretending to be colleagues when I’d be fighting the urge to take her home every night. “You need my help, all you ever have to do is ask, you know that.”
“I do.” She stared into my eyes while licking her lips. “I let myself trust Troy because he was my partner. I had to trust him. We had to have each other’s backs. Lives were at stake.”
She knew it was a sore spot for me, her relationship with her best friend and former partner. I’d always wanted her to lean on me the way she leaned on him. “I know.”
“Things aren’t like that with him anymore, just so you know. I’ve pulled back a little, though not intentionally. But it felt like things were getting kind of weird between us. I got the feeling he wanted to take our relationship to the next level.”
“He’s always wanted that,” I said, trying to keep my anger in check. “How many times did I try to tell you that?”
“But he’s never tried anything. If he had, I would have shut him down.”
“If you say so.”
She frowned. “Don’t you believe me?”
“Sure.” I knew Shani wasn’t a cheater, not after what her father had done to their family and the destruction she saw at work every day because of infidelity.
She sat up, still curled in the blanket, and saw the light filtering through the blinds. “God, what time is it?”
“Almost five.”
“In the morning?” she asked, her eyebrows shooting up. “You stayed here all night?”
I nodded, draining my coffee cup before I set it down.
“You didn’t get any sleep?” she asked gently.
“No.” I had been too wired to sleep. If my head had hit the pillow, my thoughts would have been spinning, keeping me awake all night. I hated lying in bed, tossing and turning.
“You didn’t have to stay.”
I shrugged. “Thought you might need me. Yesterday was a rough day for you.”
She leaned forward, reaching for my hand. “Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me.” I didn’t want her appreciation. I wanted her to understand that I was doing this because I still loved her and wanted to be her partner in every way.
“Why are you still so angry? Is it because of the things I said yesterday in my office?”
“Here’s the deal,” I said, knowing the time had come to lay my cards on the table. “You need to decide, once and for all, whether you’re brave enough to slay your demons.”
Her jaw dropped, her eyes blazing. “You’re calling me weak, a coward? That’s easy for someone like you to say! You’ve always had people who love you around you, supporting you. Not all of us are that lucky!”
“And some people aren’t smart enough to see when they could have that.”
“Oh, so now I’m stupid and weak? Thanks a lot.”
“You’re scared,” I said, trying to slow down this runaway train. I knew she had a hot temper. I did too, but I didn’t want this to escalate. I wanted us to learn how to talk about our problems and figure out how to resolve them instead of running away. “I get that. I would be too if I were you.”
She looked at me warily, obviously trying to decide if I was sincere or just trying to talk her down. “Fear paralyzes you.” She looked at the blanket covering her legs and pulled at a loose thread. “I don’t want to feel like that anymore.”
“You think you’ve been allowing fear to paralyze you?” I asked, recognizing that we were finally getting somewhere.
She nodded. “I know I have. But I don’t know what to do about it.” She pulled her legs into her chest, wrapping her arms around them as she rested her head on her knees, watching me warily. “When you grow up learning to count on people, your parents, and you believe they’ll always be there for you—”
“And suddenly they’re not… it’s hard.”
A look of understanding passed between us. Even though we’d lost our mothers in very different ways, the pain felt the same. We shared a deep sense of loss, sadness, helplessness, and confusion.
“It is.” She sighed. “I might have been able to cope with my mother’s death, if not for what my father did to drive her to it.”
I was stepping into a minefield here, but unless she could let go of what her father did, I could never convince her to let me in. “You really believe he drove her to it? Isn’t it possible she had other issues and your father’s infidelity was just the last straw?”
She didn’t respond, but I could tell she was considering the possibility, trying to search her memory for signs that her mother had been in trouble long before she learned the truth about the man she’d married.
“You work with women all the time who find out their husbands cheated on them. In many cases, I’m betting it’s been going on for a long time. They might even have other children with their mistresses, no?”
“Sometimes,” she acknowledged.
“But they don’t kill themselves, sweetheart.”
“Now you’re saying my mother was weak too?” she demanded, throwing off the blanket as she jumped up. “You can’t say that! You didn’t know her! He broke her! Before he did what he did, she was happy and confident. He took that from her!”
I knew it would be hard for her to come to terms with her mother’s issues. She’d always seen her mother as a victim of her husband’s thoughtlessness and cruelty, not a strong woman who could have made a different choice for the sake of herself and her children.
I let her pace and shout and get it all out before I said, “It takes more than another person to make happy. You said that yourself. You made yourself find your own happiness in work, your friends, a baby. Isn’t it possible she never learned how to be as strong as you are?”
She stopped pacing long enough to curl her hands around the back of my chair. I sensed she didn’t want me to look at her, so I stared straight ahead, giving her the time she needed to process.
“When we split, I sure as hell wasn’t happy. I’m guessing you weren’t either?”
“No, I wasn’t,” she said.
“But we figured out how to cope, right? Because that’s what healthy people do.”
Her hands drifted to my shoulders, and she squeezed but said nothing.
“Maybe your mother was sick, babe.” I covered one of her hands with mine. “Maybe she didn’t have the tools to cope, to rebound from something like that. Some people do a pretty good job of hiding chronic depression from the people they love, especially their children. She was trying to protect you and your sister.” I didn’t know for a fact that was the case, but I’d long suspected it. If it gave her some sense of peace to believe depression had taken her mother, instead of her father’s infidelity, I didn’t see the harm of planting that seed in her mind.
“My sister started using after my mother died,” she said softly. “I blamed him for that too.”
“Yet you didn’t start using. You went through the exact same thing she did and you didn’t turn to drugs. She made a choice, and you made a different choice.” I needed her to see that she wasn’t responsible for her family’s decisions, only her own. “You don’t know, Shani. Maybe she would have started using even if all that shit with your parents hadn’t gone down.”
“I’ve often wondered that,” she admitted. “She got drunk for the first time when she was fourteen. Started sneaking cigarettes at fifteen. Maybe she just had an addictive personality.”
“Could be. And maybe they’ll help her figure that out in rehab.”
She stepped in front of my chair and tugged on my hand, pulling me up. She rolled forward on her toes and wrapped her arms around my neck. I held her tight, knowing that was exactly what she needed in that moment.
“I love you,” she whispered.
Shit. She’d never said that to me before, not once in the two years we were together.
“I love you too, baby.” I didn’t know if that meant she was finally ready to let me in, but I intended to wait to find out.