Relief rushes over me like water across parched earth, until I’m overflowing with it. There’s a lump in my throat again. My eyes prick with fresh tears.
As he holds me, I soak up the comfort of resting in his arms, the trace of spicy woodsmoke mingled with something warm and familiar, the simple scent of his skin. It feels strange and wonderful and right. It feels like home.
Christopher’s stomach growls, and the sound reverberates up to my ear, pressed against his torso. “Someone’s hungry. Have you had dinner?” I ask.
“I haven’t. Have you?” he asks quietly.
I burrow deeper against his chest, not wanting this to end, not knowing what comes next. “Sort of.”
He circles his hand over my back again. “In case you’re wondering,” he adds, “dill pickle chips do not qualify as dinner. Not even when combined with a doughnut.”
I smile in spite of myself. “Tragically, we don’t have any doughnuts right now. If dill pickle chips don’t count, no, I haven’t had dinner. And we’re low on groceries. As in, we have none. But I order a mean take-out meal.”
A soft laugh gusts out of him. His fingers glide through my hair at the nape of my neck, massaging. The pleasure of my sensory needs being met finally settles the waves of disbelief that have been cresting inside me, how not us this is—his patience and calm, my quiet stillness, my arms squeezing him tight, his hands rubbing steady circles over my back, his fingers combing softly through my hair.
“I could make some pasta,” he says, “if you’re hungry for that.”
“Pasta sounds good. I don’t know if we have any, though. I was supposed to go to the store and grab groceries, but when I came home, I got sidetracked with cuddling Cornelius the hedgehog, then he shit on me, and I had to change my clothes, which is when I realized I had a lot of dirty laundry, but I hadn’t put away my clean laundry, either, which meant I couldn’t tell what was clean from what was dirty, and then I got really overwhelmed by the mess and debated throwing out all my clothes and joining a nudist colony, except I’m not at all into the concept of communal nakedness, so that was out.” I suck in a breath, then exhale unsteadily. “And then I sat down with a bag of chips to eat my feelings and fell down the horrible news rabbit hole. So, yeah. Not sure about the pasta.”
Christopher makes a small, dismissive noise in the back of his throat. “What use would I have for store-bought pasta? I said, ‘make pasta’ and I meant ‘make pasta.’？”
I pull away, peering up at him. A dense five-o’clock shadow darkens his jaw and makes him look a little different, which feels fitting. I know it’s Christopher I’m looking at, Christopher who’s holding me. But this isn’t the man I’ve known for so long, not exactly.
I have the stomach-dropping feeling of the first time I zip-lined, knowing rationally I could rely on the harness, the line, a straightforward path, and a clear final destination, but so keenly aware of how foreign the idea was, flying through the forest, wild and unpredictable, not knowing what would come my way.
It took courage to step off that ledge, and it takes courage now. Finding it, I meet Christopher’s warm amber eyes, counting their tiny goldleaf flecks. He looks at me like maybe I’ve given him that first-zip-line feeling, too.
“You’ll make pasta from scratch, for me?” I ask.
His mouth tips up at the corner, something I’ve never seen before, small and soft, none of that grinning Casanova charm, nothing like his familiar antagonistic smirk. Just Christopher fussing with my hair, tucking a lock behind my ear that feels like a strand pulled, slowly unraveling me.
“Well,” he says, “you bet your ass I’m making pasta for me, too. But yes.”
I poke his hip, where he’s freakishly ticklish. He catches my hand and laces our fingers together. His thumb gently circles my palm.
It’s the tiniest thing, his thumb circling my palm, his fingers tangled with mine, but it feels like it contains a whole world inside it. He and I stand, silent, touching. The intensity of his eyes holding mine, the steady sweep of his thumb against my skin, it’s like he’s seeing everything I’m too exhausted to fight or hide anymore.
I spend so much time keeping myself busy, distracting myself from slowing down long enough to feel everything I carry inside me, until I collapse into a rare episode of chest-aching cries and lying in the fetal position. I know that my empathy, the depth with which I experience emotions, makes me impassioned, makes me care and fight and speak out, that my capacity to feel is a strength, but it doesn’t always feel like a strength.