“I hate you. I thought that voice was reserved for me. I can’t believe you share it with other people.”
“Tallus, I’ve been growling, snarling, grumbling, andgravel-voicing, whatever the fuck that is, since I came out of the womb. It’s not sexy. It’s repulsive.”
“What’s repulsive is your use of the wordwomb. Please refrain. It’s like saying vagina or… vulva.” He shuddered.
“What the fuck?”
He made a gagging noise. “Gay men should avoid mentions of female anatomy at all costs. It was in the contract. Didn’t you read the fine print?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Can we work before this turns into a tangent?”
“It’s already a tangent.”
“Tallus—”
“Promise me you’ll never flirt with Nurse Donna again.”
“I wasn’t flirting. I was securing her help in a kindly way.”
“In a flirty way.”
“You’re right. The gay man with zero social skills and a crippling ability to make small talk with strangers was willfully flirting with a woman he has no interest in. What’s next? Christ, maybe I’ll spontaneously propose to her. It supposedly takes guys my age longer to come around to these things, but I think I’m ready. I feel a touch of bi-curiosity coming on. She’s it for me. Never had a vagina in my life, but no time like the present.”
That shut him up. Tallus’s jaw unhinged, and he gawped for words that wouldn’t come.
Smirking, I asked, “Can we work now?”
“Your sense of humor sucks, and I hate you.”
“I wasn’t making a joke.”
“Those were my mother’s words, not mine. I don’t want to marry you.”
“Great. Feeling’s mutual.”
The good-natured ribbing slipped away. I’d gone too far. The wedding and marriage ordeal was my problem, and he’d told me a hundred times—a thousand—that he didn’t need a ceremony or a certificate. Why couldn’t I get it through my thick head? Between his mother’scomment and Tallus’s spontaneous mention of weddings when we were chatting with Elwood, it made me wonder if he wasn’t sharing something, but I didn’t know how to ask.
Tallus meant the world to me. He’d changed the course of my life. I no longer questioned why he chose to date me, why he loved me, but I did often wonder if I gave him enough positive things in return. Did he know how deeply I felt for him? How frightened it made me when I considered a life without him? How, if I was a different man, I would marry him in a heartbeat?
The ring was supposed to be enough. It was a symbol of my love. Of my dedication and commitment.
But like everything in my life, I couldn’t help wondering if I’d missed the mark. I didn’t know how to take this thing inside me and put it into words, present it in a way others understood. It was too immense. Too undefinable. Too terrifying. It seeped through my veins. It woke me in the dead of night. If I tried to contain it or explain it, I put myself into a full-fledged panic attack.
I had no idea the power-hold love could have on a person until it caught me in its grasp.
No one had taught me what it felt like to love someone this deeply. If I’d known…
I’d have still fallen. It was inevitable.
Tallus was inevitable.
If I knew one thing for certain. Love could not be controlled or commanded or contained. It was something you experienced. It became part of who you were. It stole the breath from your lungs and made you weak and vulnerable.
It also made you exquisitely happy.
This was my life now. A pendulum of emotions. I only wished for a better way to make Tallus understand how I felt inside.
“There’s nothing here,” I mumbled after twenty minutes of silently dissecting the guts of the laptop with Tallus breathing down my neck. He’d brought the chair into the room but had yet to sit in it, choosing to loom over my shoulder instead.