Page 135 of Nine Months to Bear
“Then what am I, Stefan?” she asks, the first sign of a crack in her perfect mask. “Because I can’t keep doing this. This push and pull. This… whatever this is where you fuck me like you can’t get enough and then treat me like I’m nothing.”
I want to tell her she’s everything.
Instead, I move my queen forward. “You’re Olivia.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I have.”
She stares at the board, and I watch her throat work as she swallows. “Camille came by this morning. She asked me if we were together. Really together.”
My chest tightens. “What did you tell her?”
“Nothing. But I wanted to say yes.” She moves her rook. “How fucked up is that? I wanted to tell her that we’re together when I don’t even know what we are myself.”
“We’re—”
“Don’t say it’s complicated.” She looks exhausted suddenly. “Everything with you is complicated. Your business is complicated. Your family history is complicated. Your feelings are complicated. I’m beyond tired of complicated.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“The truth.”
“The truth is complicated.”
She laughs again, that same hollow sound. “I should’ve guessed you’d say that.”
I study the board, but the pieces blur together. “My father used to say that caring about someone was like handing them a loaded gun and hoping they don’t pull the trigger.”
“And?”
“He was right. My mother pulled the trigger.”
Olivia’s quiet for a moment. Then: “I’m not your mother.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because sometimes, I think you’re just waiting for me to prove you right. To betray you or leave you or whatever it is you think I’m going to do.”
She’s not wrong. I move my queen again. “Check,” I say quietly.
“And you can deny it all you want,” she continues, “you can pretend you’re too big to be hurt, but I’m not buying it.”
“That sounds like a ‘you’ problem.”
She wets her lips. “No, it’s definitely ayouproblem,” she retorts, jabbing a finger in my direction. “More specifically, it’s a self-preservation thing. Which I get.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“Of course I do,” she murmurs. “No one wants to be hurt.”
“Have you seen the scars on my body?” I laugh. “I’m not afraid of getting hurt.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“The only people who can be hurt are those who look to others for help, for reassurance.” I put my fingers on my queen as all the lines of the board gleam in the sun slanting through the windows. “I don’t, so I cannot be hurt. I expect nothing from no one, because the world is cruel and the motherfuckers who live in it are even crueler. I don’t ask for anything from anyone—I take what I want and say fuck it to everything and everyone else.”
Her eyes dim and darken. She sinks into the armchair like it will swallow her whole.
