Love Unrehearsed

He tried to squirm out from underneath me and just like that a new fissure cracked into my patchwork heart. “Ryan, don’t. Oh God, please don’t. You promised me!”

He resigned back into the couch. “What do you want?”

His momentary rejection u

“You’re breaking my heart! Don’t you see that? Is that what you want? You want me off of you, pushing me away like that? Is that what you want?” I knew my voice had risen in volume but damn he was pissing me off.

“I just want to chill. That’s it. Is that so hard to understand?”

I glared at him for a moment, shocked at his harsh tone. “Fine. You want to chill, have at it.” I started to climb off his lap but his hands clamped my thighs.

“Where you going?”

“I’m getting off of you and going to live my life. You’re not chilling, you’re rotting away here, letting that shit in your head fester and eat you alive. You don’t want to talk to me, get it out and move forward, then you can sit here and continue to chill on your own. Let me know when you’re done.”

“Stop,” he groaned.

“Why? A second ago you were pushing me off of you.”

He studied me for bit, his eyes scrunched and pained with so much mental poison. “I’m sorry.”

I picked up one of his hands, curling it in my own and pressing it between my exposed breasts, pulling it as close to my heart as it could go. “Don’t be sorry, babe. Talk to me.”

He shook his head, fighting it, not able to find the courage or the words.

“Tell me,” I pleaded softly. He was tight-lipped and scowling. “You said once that a man should own up to his situation. You also said we’d always talk it out. You promised. Talk to me!”

Ryan was so forlorn. “I can’t shut it off. Can’t shake it.”

I placed soft kisses on his fingers, patiently waiting, trying to encourage him to go on.

“God, you’re so fucking beautiful,” he said softly but with so much conviction. His eyes drifted downward, landing on my stomach while he pondered. I let him take his time, glad he was at least touching me again.

“You would have been seven months pregnant by now.” His fingers drifted over my flat belly button.

“Oh, honey . . .” I breathed out my warning plea for him not to go there.

“I think about it all the time. I wonder if our daughter would have had our blue eyes or if our son would have taken on some of my traits. What their face might have looked like.”

I wished I could hush his sadness by kissing his skin. “We’ll have beautiful babies . . . when we’re meant to bring them into the world. I promise.”

He tapped the tip of his finger lightly on my tummy, seeming to disagree. “That was our first and I took that from you. My career”—he sneered as if the word was dirty—“took that from us.”

I tipped his chin up, aching from seeing him look so lost. “No. Stop, Ryan. Things happen for a reason.

Things that you have no control over. We would have managed, but we weren’t ready for a baby. We need to be strong together before we bring a child into this world. What happened to me—you can’t take that on your shoulders. You can’t. I won’t let you.”

Ryan disagreed again, stuck in something powerful. “There was so much blood when you lost the pregnancy. I thought you were dying on me.” He bit into his bottom lip while his eyes got watery.

“I’m here.” I nuzzled his hand. “I’m right here, baby.”

He stared at my thigh, tracing an invisible line with his fingertip. “Sometimes I forget how strong you are. Resilient may be a better word. Life keeps throwing you punches and no matter what, you keep getting back up.”

I laced our fingers together. “That’s because I have something worth fighting for. You. A promise of forever. You make me want to be stronger.”

He snorted and squirmed underneath me. “That’s because I’m doing such a bang-up job keeping you safe. What a great job I’ve done.”

I clutched his neck and pressed his shoulders back into the couch. “Stop it. Don’t say that. I have never felt as protected and cared for as I have by you.”

His head swayed, defeated.

“You’re letting them win.”

I combed my hands through his hair, tugging until I had his eyes back on me. I took his mouth with desperate longing, kissing him as if I could break the wicked spell that was pulling him under. “Fight with me,” I breathed on his lips, which seemed to refuse me passion. “Please, baby. I can’t do this without you. I need you. I need you.”

His jaw tensed as the pain he’d been holding in so tightly finally cracked. A soft sob slid up his throat.

“I’m so tired, Taryn,” he croaked, his voice stuttering from trying to keep it in check. But the hurt had nowhere else to go except out. “So tired. All I do is bring us pain.”

A tear slid down his cheek. And then another. I knew it was killing him to show me this much weakness but it all needed to be purged, excised from his system like a soul-sucking demon. Seeing him cry was my undoing. He’d finally succumbed to the pressure and that made me mad.

“No you do not! You are the love of my life and my best friend! No matter what life throws at us, we take the good with the bad, Ryan—the good with the bad. We roll with it because that’s how we roll.”

He pulled me down to his chest, clutching me as if he needed me to get his air back.

I held his head while he buried his face in my neck. “Oh, babe. We’ll get through this. Honey, you know how to fix this. You stopped taking your medicine.”

He frowned, sniffing. “I’m not taking shit, Tar. No pills.”

“Ryan, you’ve tossed your body into confusion. You can’t just suddenly stop taking them.”

“Pills to cope . . . What’s next? Pills to sleep? Pills to keep awake? That’s a sure way to die. You know how much I hate that shit, Tar!”

I held his face in my hands. “Ryan, look at me. I did a lot of research when the doctor put me on antidepressants after the accident. My situation was temporary. You’ve suffered from anxiety attacks for a long time, even before all of this. It’s when you stop taking them that your system gets out of whack.”

Resistance to that slipped over his face. “I don’t want to rely on drugs, Tar. I don’t.”

I wiped his cheeks with my thumbs, erasing the physical evidence of his stress. “Doesn’t matter. You need them. You need to regulate the serotonin. It’s not a sign of weakness, Ryan. And it doesn’t make you any less of a man. It’s a body imbalance, that’s all. There’s no shame in that.”

He closed his eyes. “I tried to work through it on my own but I feel like I can’t shake it. It’s like a never-ending loop. Seeing the disappointment on my father’s face when they put me in that squad car; I know it broke his heart. I did that to him. Me.” Ryan rubbed his palm over the center of his breast plate.

“It presses in on me, right here. Like I have an elephant sitting on my chest. Sometimes it’s hard to breathe.”

“I know, but we can change that. You don’t have an addictive bone in your body, Ryan. You need to take one little pill to regulate your body chemistry. That’s all.”

“Okay,” he whispered, conceding. “I’ll start taking them again. I can’t live like this.”

“I’ll make an appointment for you to see my doctor. We’ll get your smile back. I promise.”

It was Monday. We’d been back in Seaport for two weeks when my birth father called again. Ryan, Mike, Marie, and I were at Seaport’s Sandy Cove Beach enjoying the hot weather and gorgeous day. Ryan and Mike were tossing a football back and forth while from the comforts of our beach chairs Marie and I enjoyed the incredible sights of them shirtless and tan.