Ren just stares at me. “Frankie, you’re more important than a hockey game. Unequivocally.”
“Maybe one game. But this happens to me, Ren. I catch shit because my immune system hates me, and my meds don’t help. Trust me, it won’t be the last time. Down the line, you’ll be glad that I keep this stuff to myself.”
He shakes his head, blinking rapidly. “I…I’m… Are you serious?”
I frown at him. “Absolutely. Tell me how the hell you would have felt if you didn’t play that game, and they lost. If you sat next to me in the hospital, useless, while I slept in a drugged stupor with a perfectly curable issue, and you watched your team struggle and fail without you. In the back of your head you would have been wondering if you should have been there, if, with your help, they would have won, thinking ‘if only Frankie hadn’t gotten sick’—”
“That’s the last thing I’d think.”
I laugh bitterly but it’s complicated by a coughing jag. Ren pours a cup of water, plops a straw in it and holds it to my mouth. I drink half of it and drop back on my pillow with a sigh.
His face is taut, his jaw clenched.
“Why are you angry?” I ask, confident I’ve read this emotion correctly.
He whips his head toward me, pinning me with those wintry eyes that feel particularly cold at the moment. “Because what you’re saying is bullshit.” The word snaps in the air. Swearwords really do have more weight when a person uses them rarely.
He stares at me, unblinking. “I was here with you. I’m the one who had half an eye on you and caught you before you nearly cracked your head on the concrete. I’m the one who knew what to do. I’m the one who wouldn’t let anything come between you and me until I knew that you were okay and that you were going to wake up.”
I stare at him in disbelief. “You missed the game.”
“Of course, I missed the game, Frankie!” He sits back and stares at me, stunned. “How could you even—”
“I told you that’s the last thing I ever wanted!” I yell hoarsely. “I didn’t need you here, Ren.”
He leans in, a breath away from me. “I needed to be here.”
“Exactly. This is your trip. And every time you choose my health problems over your own life, it will be your trip, too. Then, when it builds up, when you make these choices, time and again, you’ll resent me for it. If you didn’t act like a lovesick idiot every time I got a cold—”
“Double. Lung. Pneumonia,” he growls, ripping off his ball cap and slapping it onto the cart. “You were unconscious. Your oxygen saturation level was terrifying. This isn’t a head cold, Francesca.”
“You shouldn’t have come.” I drag myself up higher in the bed, trying to get some kind of ground over him. “You can’t choose me and my health shit over your career and commitments. Eventually—”
Ren stands abruptly, sending the chair scraping cross the room. Planting his hands on my hospital bed, he leans in, eyes locked on mine. “I will always choose you. And I will never resent you for it. That’s what we agreed—that I would demonstrate what I just said with my actions. But apparently even that’s impossible to trust. I have to be an asshole who leaves his critically ill girlfriend in the hospital to play a stupid hockey game to prove himself.
“Guess what, Frankie? I’m not that guy, and I never will be. If you can’t trust me, after all that I’ve entrusted to you, showing you who I am and that I am a man of my word, then that really fucking hurts.”
“You’re making this about you,” I counter. “You’re letting emotion cloud your judgement. And this is how I will end up getting hurt. In the moment, you didn’t want to feel guilty for not being with me. To avoid that, you stayed. But every time you do that, it’ll feel a little bit less worth it. And every time, you will blame me a little bit more. Even though I’m telling you I don’t need you here.”
Ren pushes off the bed, pacing the room like a caged animal. Scraping his hands through his hair, he sweeps up his ball cap from the hospital cart and tugs it on, brim pulled low.
“I can’t believe you’re that cynical, Frankie. I can’t believe you’d say that about me.”
I stare up at him, as hot tears spill from my eyes. “I’m not cynical. That’s what happens, Ren.”
“No, that’s what happened. And it was wrong. But that wasn’t me, Frankie. What about me? Don’t I get a say in how this goes?”
His words land uncomfortably close to my heart.
Trust him. Believe him.
He takes one look at whatever face I’m making and sighs in defeat. “Because if not, how do I ever outstrip your past? No matter how much I reassure you that I will never resent you, that I will never consider you and my own happiness at odds, you don’t believe me. I have to act how you think I should. I can’t have my own needs in this relationship.”
“That’s not fair.” My throat hurts from talking. I reach for the cup of water and Ren strides forward, helping me when I can’t even hold up my arm long enough to get it.
I suck on the straw and peer up at him as my eyes fill with fresh tears. Will he really always look at me like this, when I’m at my worst? Like he loves me, like my pain is as real to him as it is to me?
Like there’s nowhere else that he’d rather be?
“How is that not fair?” he says quietly, setting down the cup.
“Ren, I’m just trying to say there’s a compromise here. When I feel like this, you can take care of me in reasonable ways, but don’t put your life on hold.”
He shakes his head. “No. That’s literally saying my love for you has to have conditions. I’m not okay with that. That’s you trying to find a loophole so that you don’t have to trust me all the way.”
I glare at him. “You’re being so fucking condescending right now!”
“Frankie.” Scrubbing his face, he sighs. “I understood becoming a couple to mean that, among other things, when either of us was hurting, we were no longer alone in that. So, I have a relationship to your pain. It’s not mine, and I don’t get to tell you what to do with it, but I get to choose to love you through it. And if and when you need care and comfort—which, like it or not, the past forty-eight hours, you did—I get to be the person who gives it to you. That’s basically the point of a relationship. Isn’t it?”
My jaw’s tight. I feel pushed and cornered and talked down to, tired and sick and infuriatingly defeated. “Well, then we probably would have been better served discussing this philosophy of yours rather than middle names and numbers of kids over dinner. Because I’m not sure I agree with that.”
His eyes narrow as he tips his head. “I was here because I love you. Partners who love each other are there for each other. You don’t agree with that?”
Stubbornness draws the arrow. Wounded pride aims. Anger fires, fatally accurate. “I never said I loved you.”
Ren opens his mouth, then freezes. Slowly he straightens and stares down at me. I can see his gears turning. It’s playing with semantics. We both know I’ve meant it, even though I have yet to say those exact words.