It had evolved and shifted. They’d let themselves add this level of intimacy to it. And that was when she had realized it had always been there.
This one man had the capacity to be everything. She hadn’t wanted that. She had wanted to spread it out, to make him less important, as if that were possible.
He had agreed to see how it went at home. So there was that.
At least there was that.
Her heart thundered, so hard it was painful.
She swallowed, her throat scratchy. She didn’t know what to say.
She let her head fall back against the seat. “We really did use to spend all of our time together with clothes on,” she said.
“Yeah, we did,” he said.
After only a week it was so hard to imagine. That she’d spent years not knowing his body like this. Not knowing his taste. Years with this barrier between them.
“I’m glad that we’re doing this,” she said.
Except, she hadn’t been brave enough to ask what they were really doing. She hadn’t been brave enough to try to find out if this meant that they were something more than the friends they had always been, or if to him it was friends that had sex. For her, it was accepting that he was the man she loved, now with sex. It was just so hard.
All of it.
But it was wonderful too. All of it was like a metaphor for the zip lining. For the polar plunge. Or maybe, they were the metaphor. She had been looking for what she really needed in her life, and she had told herself that maybe it was bravery, so she had done all these things that weren’t what she actually needed to do.
What she needed to do was stop hiding from herself. What she needed to do was realize that he was what she wanted. That she had tried to give herselfsomething easier so that she could maintain control. But she didn’t want control anymore as much as she wanted to be happy. Really happy.
She had to lose everything to figure this out. That was all.
Just the carefully crafted life she had built, just her home, just all of the crutches and excuses and hiding places that she had ever put up between herself and her feelings for Justice.
Maybe she should write her parents a thank-you note.
Well. No. She wouldn’t go that far.
“Are we going to tell anyone?”
“I don’t... I don’t see why we need to. Yet.”
The way he said that, the way he hesitated, she didn’t like it. It made her feel scratchy and uncomfortable. It made her feel precarious.
Maybe that was just something she was going to have to accept. That this wasn’t going to be entirely comfortable. That this was going to be a little bit terrifying. That this was going to be bigger than she could handle, that it was going to be a risk.
She had her fill of risk when she was a kid, and she had done her best to avoid it ever since.
Because she had lived around people who had taken risks, made big emotional leaps that she hadn’t consented to being a part of.
So this was hers, she supposed. And she couldn’t hide from it.
“Okay,” she said.
She needed to come up with a way for them to talk about the cave again, because for some reason, she felt like it mattered. Because for some reason, she felt likeit was one of the locked doors that Justice still had inside of him that she couldn’t access. Yes, he had told her about it, but there was just... There was something else. And she could feel it, when she got close to things that he didn’t want to deal with, things that he didn’t want to talk about. She could feel the resistance.
She just didn’t know what to do to get through it.
“Can I stay in your room?”
“Yeah,” he said.
