Page 110 of All I Ask
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“Last date?” Derek asks.
“You really want to ask that as one of your five questions?” I ask as we lie here, wrapped up in the sheets. My hand is on his chest, chin resting there as I look up at him.
We haven’t said much about what just happened.I feel like we’re both still in a little bit of denial, but comfortable denial at least.
His fingers slide up and down my bare back and his other arm is behind his head—while in my freaking bed. This is surreal.
“I get five and you have to answer them.”
“Okay, it’s your waste of a question,” I say with a grin. “I don’t really remember. It’s not like I had a lot of time to date so I just sort of stopped.”
“No men?”
I smile up at him. “That’s another question.”
“That’s a follow-up to the real one.”
He’s still a cheater. “Fine, we each get one follow-up. If you’re asking about sex, I wasn’t a nun, but it’s been a really long time.”
His hand stops but then a small smile creeps across his face. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Is that your question?”
“Is that yours?”
We both chuckle a little. “I said okay because there’s a part of me that likes knowing there were no other men. I don’t know why, but it’s almost as though we were both waiting for the other.”
“I feel that way too. Okay.” I sigh. “My turn. When did you realize you were really and truly in love with me?”
He starts to play with a strand of my hair and his body tenses a little. There’s no more anger and disappointment that I feel toward what happened—it’s curiosity driving me now.
“When you told me you were pregnant was the first indication. Then, it was really clear after I married Meghan. I looked at her, loved her in some way, but it was nothing like what I felt for you. And I felt so guilty, because Meghan and I had fought before we got engaged about my feelings for you.”
“You did?”
He smiles and nods. “She knew. I think she always knew even when we didn’t. Which is why when she found the confirmation in my journal it set her off. I’d never seen someone so hurt.”
I try to imagine being a new wife and finding my husband’s journal where he wrote about loving someone else. I would’ve been broken. “She loved you the way…”
“The way I loved you.”
“God, that’s…sad.”
“I couldn’t leave her. I felt this intense sense of moral responsibility to fix things. I tried. God, I fucking tried. Cutting you out was hard, but watching her grow to hate me ate at me. I worked as much as I could because she seemed happier when I wasn’t around.”
What a horrible way to live. “I wanted you to be happy, it makes me incredibly sad that you weren’t.”
“I wasn’t always unhappy. There were good times before the journal appeared. And afterward, she tried to get over it. But she couldn’t. And eventually she and I settled into a routine where we became a version of friends, mostly for Everly’s sake, but she also loved me.”
“Do you miss her?” I ask the question and instantly wish I could take it back. There’s no right answer to that and I don’t want him to be uncomfortable. “You don’t have to answer that.”
“No, I do, I promised myself when we started this that no matter what, I will tell you the truth and we’ll work through it.”
My finger moves making patterns on his chest as I wait.
