Page 413 of Face Off

I open a blank message, place the lunch I packed beside the keyboard, and look at the book resting near my elbow until the first line finds me.

Ryan,

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed.”

Yes, I am beginning a letter with Mr. Darcy on Thanksgiving. You can survive the lack of originality because I cannot survive pretending those words don’t belong to me today.

I am not okay.

I need to say that without making it a crisis you are responsible for solving. I am safe. I ate breakfast, and I have lunch beside me. I ended a conversation with Lance the moment he crossed a boundary, and I didn’t call my friends to ask whether I was allowed to be angry afterward. I am functioning, making good choices, and respecting everything we agreed upon.

I am also profoundly fucking sad.

Today marks two years since I stood in that study and lost you. Nothing I have learned can change what this day means, and none of my progress makes me immune to grief. I miss you. I miss you with an ache so constant that I have stopped trying to determine where it begins and the rest of me ends.

I don’t want to hide that from you simply because admitting it might make both of us uncomfortable.

You told me when you left the castle, the moment you knew you loved me and I never got to tell you when I fell in love with you.

I didn’t answer honestly because I was terrified of what the truth revealed about me. I told myself I couldn’t identify one moment. I treated love as something that had formed gradually because that explanation felt safer than admitting I knew exactly when my entire life shifted toward you.

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, of the first appearance of love.”

A beautiful sentiment. Unfortunately, it is also bullshit in our case.

I can fix on the hour.

I can tell you the place, what I wore, what you said, and precisely how it felt to realize I had given my heart to a man who respected me enough to deny me what I thought I needed from him.

It was the night I showed up wearing lingerie beneath my coat.

I arrived prepared to use my body to repair what honesty had damaged. I believed seduction could return us to safety because sex was easier than admitting I had hurt you. I expected you to want me enough to accept the distraction.

You wanted me.

You still told me no.

You looked at something I had been trained to believe was my greatest value and refused to take it when taking it would’ve hurt me. You were furious, attracted to me, and still more concerned with protecting the truth between us than satisfying either of us.

I hated you for it that night.

I loved you for it before I reached Chicago.

I hadn’t eaten for two days. I need to say that plainly because I will not make what happened sound romantic. My mind was starving with my body, and the sharpness I felt wasn’t wisdom. Hunger had stripped the world down until everything seemed brutally simple. I stopped during the drive, bought food, and ate behind the wheel. As my body settled, the truth remained.

You were it for me.

I had met a man who would deny himself access to my body if he believed accepting it meant helping me lie. You wanted all of me or nothing you had to take in pieces. I had spent my entire life around people who rewarded the performance, and then you looked at the performance I had perfected and asked where I was hiding beneath it.

I knew I loved you.

I also knew loving you would require a courage I did not possess yet.

I wish I had told you. I wish there were fewer truths between us arriving years after they could’ve changed something, but regret cannot be the only thing I give you today.

Thanksgiving is supposed to be about gratitude, so I want to tell you what I’m thankful for.

I am thankful for your capacity to forgive.