Page 366 of Face Off

Briggs makes an injured sound beside me. “She puts olives on pizza?”

“You’ve dated women who throw bottles at your face.”

“That was trauma. Olives are a decision.”

“Go home.”

“I’m emotionally supporting you.”

“You’re insulting the woman I love.”

“Those things can happen together.”

The words settle between us.

The woman I love.

I haven’t spoken them aloud since the castle.

Briggs hears the change in my breathing but grants me enough dignity not to mention it.

I keep reading.

Pregnancy would require planning, preparation, therapy, and support before we ever attempted it. The changes to my body could become dangerous inside my mind. Every major decision involving my health would need to place that health at the forefront.

I am not being selfish by telling you this.

I am being smart and honest. I refuse to promise you an easy life because easy is another promise I cannot guarantee.

I also refuse to make you responsible for managing my illness. I would need patience, honesty, and a partner willing to tell me when he is frightened without assuming fear gives him ownership of my choices. I would need you to trust me to use the support I have built instead of quietly becoming my entire support system again.

I will always want to give you everything because I love you, and loving you makes me irrational enough to believe I can carry more than I should. You would have to be patient when I reach too far, but you would also have to let me fail without taking every burden from my hands.

I am learning that giving you everything doesn’t mean turning you into the man responsible for holding me together.

I will always have this fight.

It might be a lot.

It will also be a lot with pizza.

I regret more than I can fit inside an envelope. I regret Thanksgiving, the study, every promise I made while knowing fear could become stronger than my courage, and every time I accepted your love as medicine for wounds I refused to show you.

I regret looking at your scars as though they were stories in a book.

The horrors of your life were easier to stomach when I treated them as chapters that ended before I met you. I loved the man who survived without allowing myself to understand survival doesn’t erase what happened to him.

I see it now.

I see the little boy who lost his mother. I see the child moving through houses where nobody taught him permanence. I see the young man who learned to protect himself because every adult with that responsibility failed. I see the man standing in Lance’s study while I remained silent. I see you in the cabin after I left, in the hospital with your hand broken, inside an apartment in a city where you knew nobody, and on the floor at The Furnace while Briggs held you.

I see every place I added suffering to a life that had already asked too much from you.

Knowing that will always hurt me.

I won’t use the hurt to demand you forgive me.

I was raised beneath control, but I was also protected by money, whiteness, and a name that opened doors before I reached them. I was damaged and privileged. I was manipulated and selfish. I loved you and used your love to survive myself.