“Tell me.”
“No,” I said as I whirled around in a corner.
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t want to hear them all!” I shrieked. “Trust me, youdon’t. You don’t want to hear that I started school a yearlate because my grandma thought I was too stupid for fucking kindergarten. You don’t want to hear that I made out with at least three different teachers just to pass high school or that I lost my virginity at fourteen to a twenty-three-year-old man who still holds more power over me than the IRS. And you don’t want to hear that, yes, I let rich men look at my tits while I serve them drinks because if I can’t dance, it’s the next best thing my body is good for in a world that didn’t give me anything else to work with.”
Nathan remained silent. I waited for him to answer. To sayanything. And when he didn’t, I collapsed against the mirror as I wrapped my arms around my waist.
“But here’s the main reason,” I said, voice choked through my quiet, chest-wrenching sobs. “I can’t pretend anymore with you because it’s not pretend for me. I will mess this up. I will. And then Isla’s life will be ruined, and so your life will be ruined, and I won’t do it, Nathan, because I lo—because I c-care about you too much to hurt you that way.”
We stood like that for a long time, each at a different side of the studio, our reflections bouncing off into a million different versions of the same horrible impasse. The same space between us, filled only with my silent tears and the feeling like my chest was being ripped apart from the inside.
God, what I wouldn’t give for that space to close. For one more night in his arms, even if I never got anything else. These feelings were too much to bear otherwise.
Please, I begged God, the universe, anyone who was listening. I’d said what I needed to stay. Now, I just wanted this pain to stop.
And by some miracle, the universe heard me.
Nathan started to walk across the studio, one step at a time, until he was standing in front of me. Then he took me by the shoulders and wrapped his big arms around me, one hand at mywaist, the other cradling the back of my head as he pressed it into his shoulder and rocked me lightly until my sobs subsided into the occasional hiccup.
A low hum vibrated in his chest. Not music per se, but just as melodic and calming. At least to me, while I poured my heart out into that broad, sandalwood-scent chest.
Finally, when I had stopped crying enough to speak again, I pressed back to look up at him.
“You don’t need another burden,” I whispered. “And that’s all I am. That’s all I’ll ever be to anyone.”
Slowly, Nathan reached out and, with his thumb, wiped away a final tear I didn’t even know was falling down my cheek.
“You’re not a burden, Joni,” he said almost as softly but clearly. “You’re a gift.”
“A gift of what?” I couldn’t find it in me to joke. But I couldn’t for the life of me see what he meant.
He was quiet a moment more, which I was learning just meant he was gathering his thoughts. I wondered if he was like me, and they ran crazy in his head too. I wondered if I could learn to pause like that one day. If it would make me a comfort to someone else the way he was to me right now.
“All my life, I’ve known I wasn’t like others,” he said at last. “It’s the first thing people say about me. How serious I am. How unfeeling. There have been exactly two people I’ve ever met who never cared that I was different or said anything about it because they accepted me exactly as I am. One of them was a four-year-old child with autism. And the other is you.” He reached out to cup my cheek. “I think I give you the same, don’t I?”
I thought about it as I blinked back tears. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right.
There was one thing that we could both give freely to each other. Something that was nearly impossible to get in this cruelworld. Something I’d never had from my family or my friends, let alone boyfriends.
Acceptance. Simple, pure, and true.
Somehow, in this crazy process, Nathan and I had become something even more important than lovers.
We’d become friends. Deep and real friends. The kind I’d never had.
But as soon as the warmth of that realization wrapped around me, a different realization sliced it away. Something truly awful. Something that would end this friendship as soon as it had started: acceptance wasn’t enough.
“Do you say everything you mean to me?” I asked, mostly because I had to. “Really and truly, all the time?”
Nathan looked at me for a long time. “Not all the time,” he admitted. “There are some things I keep to myself.”
“Good things?”
I was sort of teasing, but he nodded, serious as ever.
“When you think them, you should say them,” I said. “Rule number three, remember? ‘If you see something you like, tell her. Every time.’”
