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“No, I’m okay, I just… I just need some Advil,” she repeated.

I moved her to the couch, and once she was settled, I hurried to the kitchen for a bottle of water. “How do you feel?”

“Sore. Not too bad,” she assured
me. “I’m kind of out of it.”

“
Here.” I placed the pills in her palm, and she took them with quiet thanks. “Can I make you some toast?”

“Sure,” she agreed.

“Peanut butter and honey?”

“Is there any other way?”

She tried for humor, but I could tell that she was in pain. I made her breakfast in silence, managing to put on a pot of coffee for us both.

I lowered her mug to the table, and she lifted her beautiful face to mine.

“You’re being too quiet. Am I going to be able to see again?”

I
froze, lowering slowly to the seat next to her. “Baby, of course you’ll be able to see.”

She tore at the napkin beneath her cup, and I watched one single tear race down her cheek as her chin trembled.

“
I hate him,
” she burst, her shaking hand covering her mouth.

I wrapped my arms around her, and her shoulders shook.

She suddenly felt so small and frail in my arms.

“
San
,” I whispered, kissing her forehead softly. “Don’t cry.”

“I wasted so much time loving that… monster,” she sobbed. “I didn’t even realize that I was… changing. I was rushing home when he called me, or not going out if he didn’t want me to. He was controlling me, and I had no idea,” she poured, whimpering as she held her hand to
her forehead. I knew that the pressure in her eye from the tears had to be painful, and that she was trying to calm herself down. “I was so fucking stupid-…,”

“You’re not stupid. You’ve never
been
stupid. You’ve been in love, and sometimes love makes you blind to what’s hurting you. Especially when it’s him.”

She sniffed, nodding and pulling away.
“I’m not hungry. I’m going to go back to bed,” she managed, letting me walk with her to the bedroom.

I stared at the coffeepot and the dishes in the sink, finally grabbing my phone and crawling into the bed next to her.

She was restless. I felt so sorry for her as she tossed and turned next to me in the bed. She tried hard to get comfortable, finally covering her face with her hands. “I never sleep on my back, and I can’t lay on my side without… the pressure…”

“
Hey.” I stretched my arm behind her, and she lifted her head, settling on my chest. “What can I do to make it better?”

“Talk to me. I want to hear your voice.”

I glanced around the room, reaching for my phone. “Want me to read to you?”

“Anything.
The way your words rumble in your chest feels good against my head.”

“Well, glad to be of service,” I teased, pulling up my Kindle app. “Tolstoy?”

“You’re reading Tolstoy? Wow. You were taking the ‘I’m-dating-an-author’ research way too seriously.”

“Maybe I wanted to read Tolstoy.”

“You think Carissa Steel reads Tolstoy?”

I smirked.
“Quiet, Boss.”

She smiled.

I took a deep breath, opening the book. I was proud that I’d at least made it to Chapter Nine of
Anna Karenina
but had put it down a week ago and never opened it again.

I read for a while, and felt her body relax against me. She had her arm wrapped around my waist, her ear pressed to my chest.

More than ten minutes passed, and I was almost positive she was sleeping.

“
He stepped down,” I began softly, brushing my hand over her hair, “trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”

I paused, re-reading the passage in my mind.
She gave a soft sigh.

“
That’s how you are to me,
” I finally realized, lowering my phone to the bed. “You’ve always been there. I just couldn’t look at you, but you have always been the brightest place in my life. Loving you isn’t new, Sandy.
Letting
myself love you is new.”

Her reply was soft, a half-breath, and I knew that she was finally asleep.

I closed my eyes.

We slept for hours. Sometime that evening, I woke up as she struggled through a nightmare.
When she finally was fully awake, she made her way to the bathroom. I stood to help her, but she held her hand up to stop me.

“I’ll be okay.”

When she returned to the bed, she’d taken off the gauze. Her eye was swollen, but not nearly as bad as after Jack had hit her.

I gazed at her, and she gingerly lowered her head to the pillow. “We need to go home,” she
whispered.

“Do you want to go home?”

“Yes.”

I reached for her hand, and she curled her fingers in mine.

“Do you feel up to the ride?”

She nodded.

Long minutes passed, and finally, she tried for her voice. “Jason, thank you. For being there for me.”

“Where else would I be?”

She sighed.

“Can we leave tonight? Do you feel up to driving?”

That took me by surprise. I nodded, tightening my grip on her hand.

“I can, if you want to leave.”

“I need to see my mom,” she admitted softly. “I’m so sorry.”

“
It’s okay, San, don’t be sorry. I’ll start gathering our stuff.”

We were on the road within the hour.

The drive was long, and I kept the music playing to fill the silence between us. I knew that she was uncomfortable, and I was glad that we were traveling at night so the sun wasn’t bothering her eye.

We stopped halfway home, and I saw her reading through her phone while I took Joplin out to walk. When I climbed back in the truck, she turned to face me.

“Jack called? You talked to him?”

I narrowed my eyes. “What, did he call back?”

“He texted me. He said you told him about my surgery. I can’t believe you told him,” she cried, and I shoved the key into the ignition.

“Sandy, I was exhausted, and we’d just gotten home from the hospital. I admit
, I wasn’t one hundred percent on my game-…”

“I hate that he knows! I feel like he hit me all over again, Jason, like I just keep
letting
him hurt me, over and over!”

The desperation in her voice urged me to
press the brake. I pulled along the curb of the rest stop. “San…”

“He has all this… power over knowing… what he did, and I just keep feeling like a victim,” she sobbed, gripping the handle on the door. “And now he’s texting me, begging me to forgive him, saying that he made the worst mistake of his life and it’s killing him that he can’t be there for me, to help me heal… and….,”

She cried into her hands, and I froze, wanting so badly to reach for her. “But he’s the one who hurt you, baby.”

“
I know that!” she screamed, and Joplin whined from the back seat. “I feel like if I let him apologize, I can just put it behind me… and let it go, not continue to play this…
victim
.
I
control my choice, I
let
him apologize to me. That’s what I want!”

I scrubbed my hand over my face, sitting back to stare at her. “If that’s what you want to do, then do it. I’m not going to stop you.”

She turned away from me to look out the window, and I shifted into drive.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

Sandy

Ambivalence, I found, was a state of being.

I watched my life though shadowy glass. The rage that I felt for what Jack had done
to me had dissipated, leaving me drained. The court order, the counseling, the full-steam ahead attitude toward my life with Jason, all of it took a backseat to my overworked mind.

Dr. Adams
prescribed me something stronger than the herbal supplement. I took the written prescription without protest, sliding my big sunglasses over my eyes and meeting Jess in the parking lot of the doctor’s office.

“Hey,”
she said softly. Smiling, she took a moment to rest her head against my shoulder. “You okay, hon?”

“Hmm
,” was all I could manage, turning to stare out the window.

“Jason called. He asked you to call him as soon as you could.”

I thought about our first days home from the beach, nearly three weeks ago.

At first, I
stayed locked inside my room- or the guest room- for two days. Jason had waited on me hand and foot, making me meals and taking me to the follow-up appointment for my eye.

On the way home from the eye specialist, I asked him to take me to my mom’s.

“Sandy, please let me be there for you. Just to support you, nothing else. No pressure, no wedding talk, nothing like that. Just me.”

“I can’t do this right now,” I’d sobbed, curled in his passenger’s seat
. “I can’t be anyone’s burden-”

“You aren’t my burden, how can you say that? I lo
ve you. I love you so much. San.” He’d reached to brush his hand over my curls, but I had forced myself not to turn into his touch.

“
I love you, too.
”

~

He’d taken me to my parents’ house. Jason came over for dinner the first few nights, and I poked at my food and answered him when he spoke to me. I couldn’t find the will to laugh about things at work.

One night,
I went up to my old room and cried until both of my eyes hurt too badly to continue.

My mom came in, lying next to me on my canopy bed, tucking the blankets around me. “
I’m here, honey. Just rest.”

“Mom,” I sighed, accepting the tissue that she offered me. “I feel like my life is falling apart. And I don’t want him to have that kind of power over me, you know? But no matter how hard I try to… to move on with Jason, or to make plans, or… I jus
t end up even worse than I was…”

“That’s my fault. I pushed you with the wedding plans.
Your dad was the one to show me that I was wrong to do that.”

“No, I got caught up, too. So did Jason.”

“You both feel a sense of urgency, because you’ve known each other for so long. You feel like you have to make up for lost time,” my mom explained, and I accepted my favorite stuffed teddy bear as she tucked it into my arms. “And that’s perfectly normal. But what you really
need
is time right now, sweetheart. Jason knows that. And that’s okay.”

“
It seems like the more time that passes, the worse I feel, instead of better.”

“Having surgery was an entirely new setback.
You have to deal with some of those raw emotions again. Which is exactly what you’re doing.”

A fresh wave of tears took over, and I buried my face in the teddy bear. “I don’t want to hurt Jason. I can’t hurt h
im. I love him more than… than…”

“
I know how much you love him,” my mom assured me. “I’ve known it longer than you have.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

She laughed softly, brushing my hair out of my eyes. “You were happy with Jason just the way you were. I’d never do anything to take that away from you. But I’ll be honest. When you and Jason showed up here three weeks ago, announcing that you were getting married, it was one of the happiest moments of my life. Next to marrying your father and the day you were born.”

“
You
love Jason,” I said with a half-hearted smile.

“I’ve always loved that boy. And I always will, no matter where life takes the two of you.”

I never went back to Jason’s house.

That Saturday, he brought Joplin over in his truck, as well as two suitcases full of my clothes.

“I know you need them, Sandy. It killed me to pack them up. I wish you’d come home with me.”

His words came straight from his heart; I knew him well enough to hear the emotion in his voice. He wanted to talk. I stood in my parent’s driveway, petting Joplin.

“Thank you for doing this. Again. You need to get back to work, and I need to take care of my shit, Jason. I, um…,” I took a deep breath, finally meeting his eyes. “I’m coming back to work on Monday. I need some normalcy. Some routine.”

“Are you sure?
That’s the day after tomorrow,” he pointed out quietly. “I mean, as your
boss
, I’m glad to hear it. Jess is having a hard time covering both of your territories. As your fiancé, I worry that you’re not taking enough time.”

I lifted my trembling hand to my eye, touching softly. “What about as my
… friend?”