Page 76 of Don't Remind Me
My head didn’t believe it. I didn’t think my heart did, either, but neither of those were in charge right now.
I cleared my throat, emotion pinching it shut as I stared at my shoes. “I’m feeling a lot,” I managed to get out. “In the way that makes me want to push away. I don’t—” My throat closed again, and my chest felt like a pressure cooker, the lid about to blow off, all of it too much for me to hold on to much longer. “I don’t want to do that. Push you away.” God, it was the last fucking thing I wanted. “But I think maybe it’s what I need. Some space to just…process this.”
I kept my gaze down, stare fixed on the burgundy swirls in the carpet, too much of a coward to look at her.
“Okay,” she finally said, still gentle. “I get it.”
The slight quiver in her voice was what finally brought my eyes up. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
I wanted to dry them, to hold her.
To cry with her. To scream.
Most of all, I wanted to believe that the emotion in her eyes was the same I felt for her—not just desire but recognition. The certainty of being seen, and the freedom of being set alight by that knowing and of sharing in it with the one other person who’s ever understood you in this way.
But I didn’t trust myself this second to know what was real and what was my fear. Not while so much of it was blasting through me like gunfire, tearing into wounds I’d been living with since I was a kid. The very ones Alec had ripped open by showing up here tonight. It wasn’t even his fault.
It was mine.
For avoiding this for so long, thinking it would be easier to handle if I didn’t look at it head-on. The same way I’d tried not to look at her. Only now, I couldn’t look away.
I was weak.
Pathetic.
Too afraid to act on what I wanted but not strong enough to walk away from it either. The opposite of the kind of person Dani deserved. The opposite of Alec.
What if he’s the one she really wants?
I squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my jaw. Took one step back. Then another as I turned away.
“Jase.”
I stopped.
I couldn’t not stop for her.
But I didn’t have the strength to look at her again either, my gaze instead clinging to the nearest light fixture lining the wall. My heart was a hammer against my ribs.
“Thank you for tonight,” she said. “For yesterday. For all of it. The success of this is as much yours as it is mine. I never could have done it without you. Not like this.” Her voice was strong as she said it. Definitive. “You should be proud.”
Her words wrapped around me, and I wished I could reach out and catch them. Pull them to me and absorb them into my skin. Believe them as entirely as she did.
The problem was I still didn’t know how.
“And are you proud?”Dr. Ohara asked.
I shrugged even though he couldn’t see me. I sat beside my coffee table with my back against the couch while my fingers picked at a loose strand Baxter had snagged from the rug, my phone to my ear.
Don’t ask me why I wasn’t sittingonthe couch. Normally, I’d get down here to pet Baxter, maybe sit next to him while he played with a paper bag or something, but he was still curled up in the patch of morning sun on my bed where I’d left him twenty minutes ago when Dr. Ohara had called.
“I guess,” I said eventually. “Not necessarily of myself, though.”
“Why not?”
I bent my knees and rested an elbow on one. Then I dropped my elbow and straightened one leg.
Finally, I stood and paced between my couch and the kitchen island as I waited for this process to get easier. For the moment to hit when it no longer felt like opening the door to a creepy basement every time my therapist asked me a question and having to wade into the cold, damp dark to find the answer. Knocking into stuff I didn’t realize was there, being forced to dig through it, to rummage around other shit I only had a vague sense of, never knowing which would be the thing to jump out and get me.
