Page 128 of Slapshot Baby

“You can tell me about it.”

I don’t want to tell him. But his chest is so comforting and the sense of safety I feel opens my mouth.

"My father left. Over and over. He didn't leave once and disappear. That would have been easier. He left and came back several times until leaving was just another thing he did, like brushing his teeth or picking up milk. He made kissing his daughters' foreheads and saying 'I'll make it up to you' while his car keys were already in his hand look like child’s play."

My throat burns. I shudder.

Kai’s hand grips mine.

"You want to know what it did to my mother? She's the strongest woman I know, yet every single time he left, she went quieter and smaller. And I couldn’t do anything about it."

I'm shaking. I can feel it in my hands and my voice and the backs of my knees.

"So don't stand in my kitchen and tell me this is simple. Saying yes means becoming her. I swore to myself when I became old enough that I’d never give a man the power to switch me off."

The kitchen goes quiet except for my ragged breathing and Biscuit's anxious whimpering from her corner.

"Now you’ve showed up, and you're good to me in ways I can't even process." My voice breaks. "It’s made me want to believe you in a way that terrifies me more than my father ever did. Which means if I let you in and you leave, the fall will be so much further than anything Mom survived.”

I wipe my face with the heel of my palm. Angry at the fact that I just handed him every weapon he'd need to annihilate me.

He doesn't speak for a long time.

Then he turns me around and takes my face in his hands. His thumbs wipe the tears that keep running down my face.

The tenderness of the gesture hits my bone marrow.

I break.

Not the pretty kind of crying.

The ugly, heaving kind that comes from deep in my heart. I fist his shirt in both hands, press my face into his shoulder and cry for every time I watched my father's headlights disappear, breaking my heart.

He holds me through all of it, solid and warm and immovable. His chin rests on the top of my head.

By the time the crying has ended, my whole body feels hollowed out, scraped raw from the inside. I tilt my face up.

The look in his eyes is so nakedly tender, I want to start crying all over again.

"I'm not a man who makes promises, Ava. I never have been. I make decisions, act on them, and don't reverse them when things get hard. Everything I've done since I met you is evidence of that."

His thumb traces my left cheek.

"I decided to rebuild my career, and I'm doing it. I decided you were worth more than a fake arrangement, and I took you on a real date and told you I wanted all of it. Losing everything showed me what actually matters."

"You can't know you won't change your mind."

"I know that no part of my recovered memory contradicts who I am with you. The man you're afraid I'll become is not me."

A sound escapes me. Half laugh, half sob.

"I'm so scared of you," I whisper. "You're the scariest thing that's ever happened to me.

"I know."

"If I say yes and you leave, it will break me in a way I can't come back from."

"I hear you."