“I spent months railing against anyone who told me that I had suffered a trauma and that I was having a psychological reaction to it,” I explained. “In my narrow-minded view, I wrote that off as being weak and convinced myself my problems had to be physical in nature. They’re not. And I’m not. Suffering from anxiety, depression, and panic attacks isn’t weak, and it isn’t any different than suffering from heart disease or diabetes. These things just exist, and they have to be dealt with.”
She smiled at me and it was everything. I had to look away for a second to stay focused.
“So Dr. Franks and I are figuring out my issues with my panic and how it manifests in my body with a racing heart and my leg going numb. Turns out Dr. Henry was right, there isn’t anything wrong with me physically, but my brain just doesn’t want to believe it.”
“Nick, that’s wonderful,” she said.
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “I have a lot of work to do. I’m on an antidepressant, and I’ve committed to counseling. I’m going to have to reprogram myself, and I might not always be easy to be around.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment, and I was certain she was going to give me the old heave-ho. Why wouldn’t she? She was bright, beautiful, and full of life. Why would she want to be with a broken guy like me?
“Is your body giving out on you your way of dealing with loss?” she asked. “As in, it gives you a reason to push people away and protect yourself from more loss?”
I stared at her. Shocked. “How did you figure out in a matter of weeks what I’ve been trying to figure out for months?”
“I understand loss,” she said. “It makes you do crazy things when you’re trying to cope, you know, like marry anyone who asks.”
I smiled at her self-deprecation. “Yeah, well, my crazy thing was to have my body give out so I could hide in my house for months.” My voice was bitter with self-disgust.
She shook her head. “You weren’t hiding. You were regrouping. In a way, you could look at it as your anxiety protecting you by giving you the solitude you needed to heal.”
I blinked. I had never considered it from that angle before.
“Besides, who am I to judge?” she asked. “You’ve made me do some thinking, too.”
“I have?” My heart thumped in my chest. Oh god, please don’t let it be that she was better off without me.
“You were right about me, too,” she said. “I was trying to manage you. I was trying to make you dependent upon me, by being the bridge between you and your sister, so that you would never leave me. That’s my damage, and it took you refusing to put up with it for me to see it.”
“So what you’re saying is I’m good for you?” I asked, only partly kidding.
“Yeah.” She laughed.
I glanced up at the night sky. It was a vast expanse of darkness with just a few pinpricks of light. No shooting stars. Pity. I really needed some celestial magic at the moment.
“Now that we’ve acknowledged how good we are for each other.” I cleared my throat. “Does this mean you’re willing to give us another go?”
“Yes,” she said. Just like that. No hesitation. No second-guessing. My god, I loved her.
Before she’d even finished saying the word, I kissed her. Her mouth fit perfectly under mine, and I wasn’t sure how I had survived without this for two whole weeks. I kept my hands on her hips as I pulled her in tight and plundered her lips with mine. As I’d told her before, I didn’t need any shooting stars in the sky because she made me see them every time she kissed me.
She broke the kiss and grabbed my hand. With a swish of her hips, she led me to the door. She stopped cold when she saw the envelope taped to the double doors. She turned to look at me with one eyebrow raised.
“Is this an eviction notice?” she asked.
“I did write it before we made up,” I said. “It occurred to me that if you were going to continue living here, we were going to have to renegotiate the rules.”
She weighed it in her palm. “It feels thick.”
I took her keys and unlocked the door. “We can talk about it inside.” I opened the door and led her inside, switching on the lights and noting that one French door was open a crack and Sir was asleep on his red blanket. He really needed a better name and a litter box.
Annabelle followed me into the living room. Her steps were slow as if she were walking to her doom. I felt terrible. What had seemed like a good idea while we were estranged suddenly felt like the stupidest thing I’d ever done in my life.
I held out my hand and said, “You know what? Why don’t we just destroy that? We can burn it. Pretend I never wrote it.”
She shook her head. “No, I need to see it.”
Uh-oh.
She slid her thumb under the flap, tearing it open. The sound seemed inordinately loud, and I started to sweat.
The sheets of paper fell to the floor, scattering around her feet. We both dropped into a crouch to retrieve them.
Annabelle snatched up two before I could stop her. She scanned the pages then she looked up at me, smiled, and burst into tears at the same time.
Then she read it out loud.
Goddess: Be advised that the
following is a list of rules that I
encourage you to read with an
open heart and mind:
Rule number one: I love you.
Rule number two: I love you.
Her voice wobbled and tears coursed down her cheeks. She glanced up at me and then at the second page she held.
She read more. “Rule number three hundred and ten: I love you. Oh, Nick, how many times did you write it?”
My throat was tight, my voice gruff, when I said, “One thousand.”
She sobbed. I glanced at the pages in my hands until I found the last one. I handed it to her.
She dropped one of the pages, wiped the tears from her face, and took it. She scanned the tail end of the nine hundred and nineties and then the one-thousandth I love you. Then she gasped. She tried to speak but she couldn’t get the words out, so I took the page and read it to her.
Rule number one thousand: I love you.
Your besotted landlord, who hopes you’ll consider him for the role of devoted husband.
She dropped the note and stared at me. Her eyes were enormous.
“Too soon?” I asked. “We can wait. It was just an idea, you know, because I’m a mess and you’re a mess and our messes really seem to complement each other—”