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“I know the Liam Neeson angle sort of undercuts this, but you can trust us. I love you. We all do. You’re our brother.”
“A romance novel,” I say incredulously. He gives me a look. “You heard me. A romance novel. Not that you’d know one if it fell from a bookshelf and smacked your dick.”
“I’d remember anything that smacked my dick.” “In that case,” Viggo says, lunging toward me. “Hey!” Ren shoves him back into his seat. “This is a nonviolent home.”
I want a baby, too. I want a little person to love and do right by. Even if they’re only half as cute as Freya’s baby pictures—squishy cheeks and wide pale eyes with a shock of white-blonde chickadee hair—I know I’m going to be ruined for them. Just ruined.
“You’re keeping all your shit to yourself, stonewalling her. You know that’s a relationship death sentence, right?”
“In the words of the inimitable Lisa Kleypas, ‘Marriage isn’t the end of the story, it’s the beginning. And it demands the effort of both partners to make a success of it.’”
She’s a romance author, Aiden. And her books are dripping with wisdom that you’d benefit from absorbing.
“This idea that you’re all on your own, that your financial success or failure equates to your success or failure as a man. It’s seriously damaging, and it’s the lie that an oppressive capitalist patriarchal society wants us to live enslaved to.”
Struggling will never make you less of a man or less of a husband to Freya. Struggling means you’ve been brave. It means you’re showing up to life and trying. And that’s enough, man. More than enough.”
“You have a partner who wants to give you all of herself, who wants all of you, your struggles, included. Don’t squander that. Because if you keep that door shut and locked long enough, one day you’re going to open it, and then what?”
A book hits me in the solar plexus. “And read a damn romance novel,” Viggo snaps, before he stomps inside and slams the glass door shut behind him.
As much as I want to shove that book down Viggo’s throat, he or Lisa Whoever-he-quoted is right. Marriage is so often the end of the story in those feel-good movies, in the books Freya reads and then closes with a dreamy sigh, but in real life, marriage is the beginning.
I want hours more in every day to watch sunrise paint her profile, to kiss her awake how I used to, then crawl down her body and wake her up with a patient, teasing come.
I want to listen to Freya hum while I make pancakes and she pours coffee. I want to rub her feet, then tickle her until she tackles me off the couch.
I tug down my shirt, wishing I was wearing a bra because right now Aiden doesn’t deserve to see my nipples, even through a T-shirt.
He peers up at me and falters with his tie. It’s like staring at a stranger. A really hot stranger. Shut up, brain.
My list of feelings and thoughts I’ve been carrying around. My grievances, itemized. Ink splotched with tears. I stare at the paper, then crumple it until it’s balled so tight, I know that when I open it back up, it’ll simply disintegrate in my hands.
I made the list because whereas I’m a feeler, Aiden is a thinker, and I’ve always internalized this pressure in our relationship to handle my emotions more like him. To be “reasonable” when I’m upset. To be “rational” when we argue.
The real me cries and speaks when her feelings aren’t tidy but instead a messy mix of emotions. I work out my thoughts as I talk. I’m an emotional, verbal processor who’s been biting back that need for a decade, who’s only given in sparingly, to the point that I feel so compressed, I’m poised to detonate. No, implode.
The fact that I needed to make the damn list pissed me off. Where’s his list? Where’s his discontent? Where’s Aiden?
I wonder if…I wonder if things have been hard—harder than usual—and he hasn’t told me. And if so, why?
I clear my throat, then tell him, “I’ll go, Bear.” Shit. The word’s out before I realize I’ve even said it. Aiden’s head snaps up, and our eyes meet.
I haven’t called him Bear in so long, haven’t felt that nickname easy and warm on the tip of my tongue.
His nickname that came about when we first started dating, when his black bear hair would tickle me in the morning as he burrowed in close, wrapping me in his arms. When he’d growl into my neck and pin me to the mattress, waking me up with slow, intense sex.
That nickname is a vestige of the silly romantic shit we did at first, like couples do when they’re newly in love and so sure they’ll never break each other’s hearts, never...
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“Why’d you call me that?” he says softly. A tear slides down my cheek. I palm it away angrily. “I don’t know. It was an accident.”
His hand slips around my waist and pulls me against him. Bold move. Ballsy as hell. Aiden MacCormack in two phrases.
A lesser man could never have won your hea...
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Aiden buries his nose in my hair, his other hand wrapping around me, too, pinning me to his body, warm and hard behind me. My head falls traitorously back on his shoulder.
“Talk to me, Freya,” he whispers. One hot kiss right behind my ear—that spot I love, and he knows it. “Tell me what’s hurting you. Please.”
“Y-you act differently. You look different. You got fitter and hotter… Wait. I mean. Shit.” I cover my face, humiliated by my slip, angry that I can be this hurt by his behavior but I can’t deny my body’s burning from his touch.
“You think I could ever want anyone but you?” A tear slips down my cheek. I used to be able to answer that unequivocally. “I don’t know.”
“Freya, I love you. I want you. Only you. You’re the only woman I notice or desire, and if you think it’s escaped me that I haven’t had you beneath me, that I haven’t been inside you, making you come, in months, you’re sorely mistaken.”
“Everything I do is for you, Freya. For us. And you think because I’m working a little more than I used...
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How do I know nothing else has changed?” “Because you trust me,” Aiden says, disbelief lacing his voice.
How am I supposed to ‘know’ this love, Aiden? Where’s love when there’s no intimacy? No words, no affection. No hands searching for me in the dark.”
Aiden is an accomplished, admirable man. He’s just become a shitty husband.
I will order a large fry and a strawberry milkshake and eat my feelings in the parking lot while cry-singing along to my aptly titled Allllll The Emotionzz playlist. It’s going to be cathartic as fuck.
Those offhand comments and reminders that people just can’t wrap their heads around the fact that I can be full-figured and actually not want to cover myself up. The concept that “someone like me” could wear a two-piece is apparently revolutionary.
If I wear something that no one would think twice about a skinny person wearing, it automatically makes me a body-positivity warrior, instead of just a woman wearing what she damn well pleases.
No one makes my beautiful Freya feel like she’s anything less.”
I still haven’t told her I shit myself and then her brothers abducted me. Sorry for wanting to maintain a sliver of dignity.
I don’t know how to confess all of this to Freya, how to tell her all my fears and inadequacies and trust that won’t send her packing or giving up before we’ve even started.
I feel so fucking broken. And I’m terrified to be broken before my wife.
The disorder of it makes me wince. Freya, however, is going to feel right at home in this cheerful chaos.
I shift on the sofa, wanting to do what I’ve always done with Freya, which is wrap an arm around her and tug her close. Bury my nose in her hair and breathe her familiar lemony summertime scent. But I can’t. Every atom of her body screams don’t touch me.
“He’s such a neat freak.” “If by ‘neat freak,’ you mean I keep our house organized so you can actually find stuff.” “I find stuff,” Freya says defensively. I cock an eyebrow. “Most of the time,” she amends, glancing away and tilting up her chin a little defiantly.
In the past, when she did that, I’d clasp her jaw and kiss her. First, a hard press of lips. Then my tongue, coaxing her mouth to open. Her hands would fist my shirt, and she’d nudge her pelvis against mine. Then I’d push her against the hallway wall, and we’d kiss our way to the bedroom.
Even the familiar, loving touch that said so much when I struggled to, not even that knits us together anymore.
“So you two are quite different personalities?” “Ohhh yes,” Freya says quickly. “Practically opposites.” I frown at her. “Why’d you say it like that?”
