A Harmless Little Plan (Harmless #3)(48)

I was with her right up to that last sentence.

“Sex makes you think about dying?”

“Not sex with you.”

“Thinking about sex with other men makes you want to die?” This conversation suddenly makes me irrationally angry.

“Thinking about what happened in your apartment does.”

“Got it.” I calm down instantly.

“I can see I’m upsetting you. I’ll stop talking about it.”

“No,” I say softly. “Yes, it upsets me. But it would upset me more if you felt like you couldn’t share parts of the true you with me. I’m here. I’m here to listen. I’m here to touch and heal with. Only when you’re ready, though.”

“That’s what makes this so hard!” she says, her body vibrating with frustration. “You’re patient and understanding and calm and rational and so damn perfect!”

“And that’s...bad?” Women. I really, really do not understand her.

“It is when I’m such a mess.”

I sigh and run a hand through my hair. My fingertips are ice cold. “I’m a mess, too,” I admit.

“You are?”

I nod.

“How?”

“I think it would be easier to tell you all the ways I’m not a mess.”

Her eyes light up. “That’s how I feel, too.”

“But no one shot me. No one made me parade naked in a room full of people – and on streaming television, covered by every major cable news channel, replayed over and over, still in the newspapers even now. No one violated me publicly like that, Lindsay. Not the same way. I’m not trying to compare what I’m feeling to what you’re feeling -- ”

“That’s just it, Drew – you can!” Her breathing goes shallow, her chest rising and falling, the conversation stressing her out. I want to tell her to stop, but this feels pivotal. We have two more hours to get to Vegas and it feels like this topic is the answer to the meaning of life.

“I would never try to compare.”

“I am not some special tortured snowflake! Don’t do this to me, too. Everyone’s walking around on eggshells with me. Do you know how alone I feel? How lonely? How different and unique? Those words really, really isolate. They turn me into some freak again. Unreachable and misunderstood. I can’t have you do that, too, Drew. Not you.” She starts sobbing, her chin tucked into her chest at an awkward angle.

How did we get from the topic of sex to this?

Doesn’t matter. I can’t continue driving while she’s crying, pouring her heart out to me. I pull over, the tires rolling gently to a stop. Within seconds I’m across the gear shift, holding her any way I can without hurting her more.

“I’m such a m-m-mess that I’m in the car, telling you I can’t have sex and crying about it as we’re on our way to get married!” Lindsay says, incredulous. She looks at me with red-rimmed eyes and a wild expression. “Why in the hell would you even want to marry me?”

I kiss her. In the kiss, I pour out my heart, my soul, my anger, all the feelings that make up the impossible answer to her impossible question.

The kiss has to give her a proper response to her eternal why?, and as seconds pass, our lips sweetly slant against each other, my tongue parting her mouth open to say Yes, I love you.

To say We’ll be a mess together.

To say I’ll take you however you’ll give yourself.

To say I do, forever.

By the time the kiss ends, we’re breathless. I taste her tears in my mouth.

I also taste her surprise.

“I love you. I want you. The real you. Not just your good parts. Not just your unmessy self, Lindsay. I want it all. I need it all. I don’t need you whole, but I need the whole you. Can you trust me with that much of yourself? Because I think that’s how this goes. I don’t know, because this is all new for me, too. But don’t ever think that I love you one iota less for showing me all of your moments, dark and light,” I tell her.

“You mean that? Really?”

“I do.”

She’s breathing hard, color in her cheeks, a pink arousal in her skin and an intense look in her eyes that I swear is passion. She’s coming back into focus, the old Lindsay slowly emerging from the dark internal cave where she’s been hiding, waiting for it to be safe to emerge.

That’s my job.

To love her and make it safe.

“Four years ago, I knew I loved you, Drew. But it was an immature love. A surface love. Love was defined by our friends, by Mom and Daddy’s approval, by dinners with your parents and by all the trappings of society and the media. I knew I loved you because we held hands, we exchanged gifts, we went to parties together, we became one word – LindsayandDrew – and because we were a couple who were a sum of all those parts.”

I just listen.

That’s my job, too.

“But this – what we’ve been through, how we’ve come back together, what we’re doing now running off to Vegas, but more important – what you’re saying to me right here, right now. This is...”

“Love. Real love. Anything less wouldn’t be fair to either of us, Lindsay.”





Lindsay


No one tells you that moments like this even exist. I can’t imagine Daddy and Mom talking to each other this way. None of the movies and television shows I watch have couples doing this. Going so deep you touch the bottom of the emotional pool, hoping you can hold your breath long enough to come up for air.