Where You Are

Shediac

Birgitta

The next two days were beautiful, hot and sunny. Jesse and I spent the mornings being lazy and the afternoons and evenings on the beach. The third, and final, day was overcast and threatening rain. Jesse had the idea to cook a nice meal together, so that's what we spent most of the day doing. I wouldn't have thought he be the type to enjoy cooking, but he did. We went back to the grocery store and he taught me how to cook a roast beef and make Yorkshire puddings. It took most of the afternoon, but at the end, we had a really nice roast beef supper.

We talked late into the night and I enjoyed our lazy mornings together, making enormous breakfasts, drinking tea and planning our days. I wanted it to be comfortable, I wanted it to be the same as it always had, being with him. I desperately wanted to be myself around him, but I just couldn't do it anymore. I carried myself a bit stiffer, made less eye contact and was jumpier in general. And though he didn't say anything, I knew he noticed.

I would give just about anything to be back in Manchester, where we'd had so much fun and I'd been the happiest that I could ever remember being.

It just wasn't the same as it had been before. It was like there was a film covering my vision, making it look the same, but it didn't feel the same. No matter how hard I tried to push the feelings of doubt and insecurity away, there was no ignoring them. I didn't know if things ever could be the same again.

He tried to touch me a bit more intimately while we slept, but I moved his hands firmly back to my waist every time he did. I hadn't forgotten the feeling of betrayal. I was still nursing it, and trying my best to forget it. But I didn't want to be intimate if it was never going to be anything more. I didn't want him to make me feel good if he didn't trust me with the real relationship I really wanted.

We still hadn't discussed what had happened on the first day. It was there, I could feel it like an elephant in the room and I knew we had to talk about it before he left. We couldn't just go on pretending like it had never happened. I didn't think it was far from his mind, either.

So Jesse and I tucked ourselves into my tiny bed on his last night, way too early to go to sleep, but one thing I was learning about him was that it wasn't so much the jet lag that made him want to crawl into bed, he just really liked to cuddle. When he'd said he wanted to go to bed at seven o'clock, I knew he just wanted to go somewhere comfortable to snuggle and didn't actually mean he was ready to go to sleep. And damn it, I really loved that about him.

'We need to talk about Sunday,' I told him quietly.

We were facing each other in the bed. Not entirely comfortable as his legs were so long and he took up a lot more space than I did in my tiny bed. But I wanted to be facing him for this. I felt like it would be the coward's way out if we discussed this facing away from each other.

'I know,' he sighed. 'I'm sorry, Birgitta. Really, I am.'

'I believe you,' I told him. It wasn't quite dark out yet, I could still see his features clearly. I saw his relaxed expression tense up the second I told him we needed to talk. 'But... Jesse, I feel like things are getting really serious between us.'

'They are,' he said, sounding a bit tentative. 'Isn't that a good thing?'

'I honestly don't know,' I sighed again. 'I mean, if you don't trust me, and if you're never going to, what's the point of all of this?'

To my relief, he didn't argue. He held my gaze, starting to look a bit anxious.

'It's not that I don't trust you,' he explained. 'I've just been hurt before. It's hard not to think that it'll happen again.'