Page 50 of Unravel Me

“You feel really nice,” perfect lips murmur against my skin. “Solid. Steady.” Another sigh. “Safe.”

“I’ll be anything you want me to be.”

“Just you, Adam. You’re enough exactly as you are.”

Her words tug at an invisible string, pulling everything in my chest tighter. I want to be enough for her, but I’ve spent the last year and a half not feeling enough for anyone. But with her, right here, right now? There’s no hockey, no superstar goalie, no millionaire athlete.

There’s just me, and she says I’m enough for her.

My mind races with thoughts of a life I’ve always dreamed of. My family in the stands, and me making them proud. Quiet Saturday nights, take-out containers, wrapped up in each other. Slow Sunday mornings, pancake breakfasts, and cartoons on TV.

Suddenly, it feels like I’m finally being gifted it.

But I know this life can’t truly be mine until I give Rosie all of me, and right now, I’m struggling to find the words that give her those pieces.

So I swallow them down, bury them a bit deeper, and hope when she says I’m enough for her, she means it.

“How you doing?” I murmur against her hair, honey and rose gold tresses weaved into a braid.

“Good. I think.” Her gaze lifts to mine, uncertain. “Am I doing okay?”

I chuckle. “You’re doing great. Let me know if it’s too much.”

“It’s…not. I thought it might be, but it feels okay. Though it might have something to do with the giant man I’ve attached myself to like a koala.”

“I’m honored to be your tree branch.” Questions about her past crawl up my throat, searching for answers she doesn’t owe me. Instead, I tell her I’m proud of her.

“What for?”

“It’s hard enough to conquer our fears, and there’s a certain pressure when you’re not just doing it for yourself. It’s admirable that you’re facing your deepest fear for both yourself and for your son.”

Her lower lip slides between her teeth as she thinks. “I think my deepest fear is just…losing it all. Connor. He’s my whole life. So, swimming after nearly drowning? Hard as it is, it feels like nothing more than waking up on a rainy morning in comparison to even the briefest thought of life without each other.”

“Do you think about that often? Life without each other?”

“Mostly I think about having to say good-bye, how impossible that would be, but having to do it anyway. How hard it would be knowing it was the last time I’d see his face, praying that the world would be kind to him without me to protect him.”

A tightness squeezes in my chest before it rolls up my throat. “That’s…”

“Sad,” she finishes with an anxious chuckle, shifting like she wants to pull away, hesitating because she can’t. “I know. It’s embarrassing. Most people don’t have such morbid thoughts.”

I catch one of her hands in mine, pressing a kiss to the inside of her palm before wading to the stairs with her in my arms.

“Your thoughts are painful, yes, but not morbid. I can’t put myself in your shoes, but I’d stand in them if it meant one less minute where you felt that pain alone.”

“Sometimes I think that’s what I do,” she murmurs as I set her down on a lounger in the shade, watching as she covers herself in the towel I hand her. “Put myself in my parents’ shoes.”

I sit beside her, rubbing my hair with my towel. “What do you mean?”

“Sometimes I wonder what it felt like for my parents.” She takes a deep breath, licks her lips as her eyes roam my face, searching for the courage to go on. “When they knew it was good-bye.”

Thick silence settles between us as her words settle. My mind races, remembering the look on her face the first time I called her trouble, the longing as she explained her dad’s nickname for her. The way she fell apart in my arms when I gave her that bouquet of peonies, when she told me about all the wonderful memories that came with the sight of them, explained that she couldn’t make more.

Because her parents aren’t here anymore.

“You had to say good-bye.”

“That’s the thing. I didn’t get to, because I didn’t know. But my dad…he knew, I think.” A storm brews in her eyes, angry clouds with nowhere to go. “Some days I remember everything, every single moment. Some days it’s all…blurry. Distorted. But there’s one image…it’s like it’sburnedin my brain.” The storm in her gaze dissipates, leaving behind an exhaustion I can feel in my bones, a sort of…resignation. “The way my dad tucked my hair behind my ear when he said he’d be back. The devastation in his eyes when he looked at me one last time, over his shoulder, and told me he loved me.”

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