Chapter 27 – The Thing He Believed.

He brought it up on a night when everything had been good. That's the part I keep turning over, even now. It wasn't during a fight. It wasn't in the aftermath of one of our cycles, when things were raw and we were grasping for explanations. It was a quiet evening, one of the good ones food, a movie, the easy comfort of two people who knew each other's rhythms well enough to exist in the same space without effort. We were in bed. Not doing anything. Just lying there in the dark the way we did on the best nights, his arm around me, my head on his chest, the whole world reduced to the size of that room. Then he said, carefully, like he'd been holding it for a while and had finally decided to put it down: "I've been thinking about us." I shifted slightly. "Okay." "About why it keeps being hard. Even when everything's good. Even when we're good." He paused. "I think something is working against us." I was quiet, listening. "Not us working against us," he said. "Something outside of us. Something spiritual." I didn't say anything immediately. I knew him well enough to know this wasn't casual. He was the most prayerful person I'd ever been close to not performatively, not loudly, but in a deep and structural way, like prayer was the architecture his life was built on. When he said something was spiritual he meant it the way other people meant something was factual. It wasn't metaphor for him. It was its own kind of reality. "What do you mean," I said. Carefully. "I mean that I've been praying about us for a while," he said. "And I keep coming back to the same thing. That there's something I don't know how to explain it exactly. Something that's been sitting on this. On us. Since the beginning maybe." I thought about the beginning. The friend. The way we'd arrived at each other. The things neither of us had ever fully resolved about how it started. "You think it's because of how we started," I said. "Partly maybe." He exhaled. "But it's more than that. It's I keep feeling like we're supposed to be something different to each other than what we are right now. Like the way we are with each other is getting in the way of something we're supposed to be." I sat up slightly to look at him. His face in the dark was serious in a way that made the room feel different. "What does that mean," I said. "It means” He stopped. Tried again. "You know how I feel about you." "I know." "And that's not the question. That's not what this is about. This isn't me not" He stopped again. Pressed his lips together. "I love you. That's not the question." It was the first time he'd said it exactly like that. Plain and direct and without any architecture around it. I felt it land in the centre of my chest and stay there. "Then what is the question," I said quietly. "The question is what we're supposed to be to each other." He looked at me. "And I keep arriving at the same answer and I don't want it to be the answer." I knew what the answer was before he said it. I think I'd known for a while, in that quiet place where you keep the things you're not ready to look at directly. But knowing it and hearing it were different things. "Say it," I said. He was quiet for a moment. "Helpmate," he said. "Not" He exhaled. "The person you're supposed to spend your life with is supposed to be your helpmate. Not your" He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. The room was very still. I sat with it. Turned it over. Looked at it from every angle the way I did with difficult things, trying to find the place where it stopped making sense so I could argue against it. I couldn't find it. Because the most infuriating thing about him the thing that had always been the most infuriating thing was that when he said something he believed fully, it had a weight to it that was very hard to argue against. Not because he was always right. But because the belief itself was so complete, so structural, that it changed the shape of the air around the words."So what are you saying," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I'm not saying anything tonight," he said. "I'm just telling you what I've been carrying. What I've been praying about." He reached for my hand in the dark. Found it. Held it. "I don't want to make a decision out of this. Not tonight. I just needed you to know that I've been thinking about it." I looked at our hands. "I think you're overthinking it," I said finally. "Maybe." "I think you're looking for a reason that makes sense of why things have been hard and landing on one that" I stopped. "It sounds like an excuse. If I'm being honest." He nodded slowly. "I know it might sound like that." "Does it matter what I think?" "It matters more than anything else," he said. Simply. Completely. I looked at him for a long moment. Then I lay back down. Let him pull me back into him. Stared at the dark ceiling while his breathing slowly evened out around me. I didn't sleep for a long time. Because the thing about what he'd said the thing I didn't want to admit was that it had landed. Not as truth, not fully. But as a possibility. And a possibility is sometimes all it takes to start something you can't stop. The word helpmate sat in the dark with me until morning. I didn't know what to do with it.

Forbidden Love Story

Contributor Points

Points-to-Coupons

Referral Earning