The Plus One (A Brush With Love, #3)

by Mazey Eddings

“Never pegged you as a poet, little love gremlin.” He let out a forlorn sigh. “Really think it’s time for you to give up on the pet names.” “You didn’t like that one, my pantie pirate?” “How do they keep getting worse?” he whined, pressing his lips to her hair.

“I think about the taste of you on my tongue all day. Dream about it,” Jude said, shifting until he was lying next to her.

“Look at me when you come, Indira. I want to see every feeling in those eyes.”

“Living—fully, unabashedly, fearlessly living—isn’t the easy way out, Jude,” she said. “It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever fucking do. Numbing yourself is the easy part. Hiding in self-loathing is the escape. You want to make those losses worth it? Then fucking choose yourself, Jude. Choose us. Choose your health. It’s okay to let go of something that’s hurting you. That won’t ever change the love you had for it. If anything, it will let you preserve that love. But you can move away from something that doesn’t serve you. That doesn’t make you weak, that makes you brave.”

“You aren’t my patient. You aren’t a diagnosis. You aren’t a case file. You’re the person I love. You’re the person I would do anything for. I’m not here to fix you, Jude. I’m not. And I never was. No one can single-handedly fix another person. We all hurtle through life, getting bumped and cracked and broken along the way, but we are solely responsible for our own healing.”

I’m not here to change you or heal you.” She took a shaky breath, ducking her head to press a kiss to his knuckles. “I’m here to support you. To love you. Every step of the way. Let me help you. Let’s figure a way out of this.”

“Get the air you need. But when you come back, we go forward together.”

He’d forgotten that happiness wasn’t a banging, violent emotion like all the others that bombarded him every moment. Happiness was soft. Uneventful. It was holding Indira’s hand. Sitting next to her on the couch and listening to her talk. It was a quiet cup of coffee with her next to him reading a magazine. It was teasing her, being goofy and pretending to pass out after sniffing her feet, making her shriek in outrage and giggle. Happiness was them.

If heaven existed on earth, it was in a blanket fort with Indira Papadakis.

He loved her so much it was impossible to think about her without his heart getting so overwhelmed it wanted to burst from his chest.

“We honor the human body. Respect it. But we take the mind for granted. We ignore the invisible illnesses that plague countless people every single day.”