Page 39 of Redeem

“Why don’t I share?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

She shrugged, and I watched her face change, saw the little furrow between her brows, the expression almost comical as she pondered the question.

“Never had the practice,” she said.

“Want to explain that?” I asked. I wrapped my fingers around hers and then rested her hand on my chest.

“I was an orphan,” she said.

“What happened to your family?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Don’t care. But I never really had a place, you know?”

“I do,” I said.

She seemed to accept that and went on. “So I guess I never got the practice. When I grew up, it just never seemed worth it,” she said.

“But what about your husband?” I said.

My heart thudded as I spoke the word, both because of what I’d done and because I was treading on something so personal. I could feel the change in her body as she reacted to the question, could practically hear her as she thought about what to say, whether to say anything at all.

“That wasn’t…” She trailed off, seeming to consider what to say next. “Neither of us was the sharing kind,” she finally said.

I couldn’t quite interpret what she meant by that. “What do you mean?” I said, deciding that I would get her to tell me more. Probably wasn’t fair. Definitely wasn’t fair, but I wanted to know.

“It’s just… That wasn’t what we were about. We didn’t have that kind of relationship,” she said.

That didn’t really help me understand either, but I was reluctant to push harder. Apparently I didn’t have to.

“We liked each other, loved each other,” she clarified quickly. The clarification made me question the truth of what she said, but I didn’t point that out to her.

“We did,” she said, again clarifying, which was more revealing than she probably intended.

“But we were about other things. We were focused on building something together and not the, you know, emotional stuff.”

She went quiet for a moment, though the air was heavy with her consideration.

“And after…I just couldn’t,” she said.

She heaved out a sigh, one that was heavy with the weight of emotion.

I held her tighter.

“Why not?” I said.

“What would be the purpose?” she said. When she spoke this time there was a bitterness in her words, a heaviness that I hated.

“So you wouldn’t be alone,” I said.

Fucked up, especially coming from me, but it was also true. If there had been a way for her to find someone to relieve her pain, I wanted that for her.

One look at Dana, and I could see she rejected the idea completely.

“Not be alone? Is anyone ever not alone?” she said.

It was the single most depressing sentence I had ever heard, made that much worse by the fact that it came from her. By the fact that I was the reason she felt that way.

---