Page 24 of Kiss Me Softly

Her eyes bounced between mine. “Do you even love me? Because I have no idea.”

My mouth opened and I tried to force the words past my lips, but I remained silent.

Tell her you idiot!My brain screamed at me.Tell her she’s the one you want to spend the rest of your life with. You’re going to lose her!

But something held me back. Aurora’s question hung in the air between us like a dark cloud until she finally released a heavy sigh.

“That’s all the answer I need then. Goodbye Frankie.”

She closed the door, and I remained right where I was, staring at the wood and trying to figure out how I’d managed to make this situation even worse. Then I went downstairs and drank whiskey until I fell asleep.

The next morning I did something I rarely did voluntarily: I headed to my parents’ house. My father opened the door.

“Hey Peanut, did we know you were coming?”

I shook my head. “No. I uh, I need some advice.”

“I’ll get your mother.”

Ten minutes later I was at my parents’ kitchen table drinking tea and telling my parents about the fight with Aurora.

“Aurora is right,” my mother said when I finished. “When you’re in a relationship, you have to do stuff you don’t like to do. Do you know how many damned Cubs games I’ve gone to with your father? I hate baseball. But I go because it’s important to him.”

My father gave her a fond smile.

“I think she’s more angry about me not wanting to talk, and avoiding her all week,” I confessed. “I knew we needed to talk, but I just, well…”

“You hoped that she’d come around and be the one taking a risk?” my mother asked. “Or that she’d just cool off and everything would magically be fine?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Did you know that your father and I almost got divorced once?”

I looked at her in shock. My parents were the most in love couple I’d ever seen.

“What? Why?”

“Because your father refused to talk to me, and I got tired of taking on all the emotional labor in our relationship.”

“How did you resolve it?” I asked.

My father spoke up for the first time. “I learned how to have hard conversations and talk about my feelings, at least a little bit. It turns out that my fear of losing your mother was much bigger than my fear of opening up.”

Mom leaned forward and met my eyes. “I know after what happened with She Who Shall Not Be Named you probably want to avoid conflict, but there’s going to be disagreements in every relationship. You just need to learn how to have them in a healthy way. Now let’s figure out how to fix things with Aurora.”

Aurora

As the weekend approached I was dreading the marketing gala.

Normally I loved getting dressed up and going to a fancy event, but I felt weird about going alone, knowing that all my coworkers were bringing dates or significant others. My work friends would be full of questions about why I hadn’t brought the girlfriend that they’d heard so much about. And what was I supposed to say? She didn’t care enough about me to put on a dress and make idle chit chat with strangers for a few hours?

I hadn’t heard a peep from Frankie since she came up to my apartment last Saturday. Sometimes when my apartment was quiet I could hear her moving around in the apartment below me, making me want to cry.

But I wasn’t going to shed tears over this. I deserved to have a good relationship. My entire adult life had been a series of unsatisfactory boyfriends and girlfriends I didn’t think it was too much to ask to have a partner who would talk to me about their feelings. At least a little. A relationship had to be more than fun and games and sex.

Determined to have the best time I could have, all things considered, I put on my new dress, curled my hair into soft blonde waves, made up my face, and shoved my feet into an adorable pair of heels that I was sure I’d be regretting by the end of the night.

I paused as I heard a knock on the door. Who could that be?

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