Page 92 of My Sweetest Obsession
“What about what you need?”
Her question makes my heart skip a beat, because it’s been so long since I’ve asked myself that or even considered it.
But it’s an easy one to answer.
I take her face between my palms, cradling her soft cheeks. “You and this baby are all that I need. To know that you’re safe and happy, and you might not be right now, but we’ll get there. I know we can.”
That is my hope.
That one day, all this pain won’t cripple us. Open wounds will close. Scabs will heal. Scars will form. And they will still ache, probably forever. But they won’t destroy us the way they do now.
I won’t let them.
She nods, leaning into my touch. “We can.”
And then her mouth is on mine again.
I kiss her fiercely, in the way I’ve so badly wanted to over the last several months but haven’t been able to because I couldn’t tell her I loved her. I couldn’t show her I did. That wasn’t what she needed or wanted in any of those moments.
She wanted the feeling—the physical one, not all the emotional baggage we both carry with us, not reminders of all the reasons what we were doing should never have happened.
But now all of that has changed because we’ve changed.
Because we’ve finally been able to move past that point where the agony and guilt were at their highest point, when it felt like there was no way around them and no way to ever come back from it.
Yet somehow, we made it over that sharp peak.
We passed that breaking point, cutting ourselves deeply on the shards of the lives we had before, but we came out alive.
We’re on our way back down the other side.
Hopefully a little wiser and a little more ready to deal with all the things we’re going to have to face. The hard questions that we’ll both have to continue to ask ourselves, maybe for the rest of our lives, about why things turned out like this.
But we’ll do it together.
Because we’re stronger like this—tethered together by the twisted, intersecting strands of fate woven by some unknown hands rather than getting trapped by their binds as we fight against them.
Ivy gives herself over completely to the kiss, a little mewl coming from the back of her throat. I groan in response, knowing full well what that sound means, what she wants, and it’s exactly what I need, too.
Only, I want it to be different from the way it has been between us this entire time.
Even those first few nights we had together before the shit hit the fan, I was still holding back, continuing to hide things from her—about my past, about myself, about what I had done—but now that she knows everything, I can truly let her see all of me and what I really feel about her and this baby.
How much I love them and need them in my life.
She pulls away abruptly and takes my hand in hers, tugging on it to lead me down the hallway toward the bedroom that I’ve walked out of so many nights feeling like absolute shit because of what I had done for her, because of what it was doing to me.
It broke me down the more I came to make her feel good.
But now, she actually wants me there in that bed with her.
She wants to be in my arms. It’s no longer just a way to forget, but a way to make promises about the future, a way to cement how we feel about each other and where all this is going, what it all means.
It may be too early to really know that or even attempt to unravel the depth of those feelings that live inside us, but we can sort through them together as long as we try.
And I will never stop trying.
Ivy stops at the edge of the bed and releases my hand, reaching for the hem of her sweater, but I catch her wrist, shaking my head.
