Torin and Summer

Chapter 18 (Summer): Show Up

Why was I nervous? This wasn't a first date or even a date. This was a meeting with my estranged husband, the man I was married to but not married to, the man I hadn't even seen or spoken to in six months. 

At exactly six-thirty, there was a knock on my door, and I opened it to Torin. Neither one of us spoke for a second, and I realized we were both taking in all the changes in the other, cataloguing the outward differences, seeing if there were any signs of the inward differences.

"I like the green hair," he finally said with an admiring smile.

Torin was used to my phases. Most of the time, my hair was my natural color, but sometimes I went off road and changed it to something funky. Five months ago, I'd felt the need to be funky to shake me out of my...funk.

"And I like the buzz cut," I said to him. His hair was the only difference I was willing to comment on, but he was much more muscular, too, which was saying something because Torin had always been built on very big lines. 

His shoulders shrugged and he must have seen me looking at his chest because he said, "Work, working out and therapy got me through the last six months. I hit the gym harder than ever."

"It shows," I said. "Come on in, and we can eat then talk."

He stepped inside and I closed the door behind him, then he followed me to my little kitchen with his four big bags of take out.

"What'd you get?" I asked as he set the bags down on the counter.

"Everything you wanted," he said, pointing to the bags as he named them. "Thai, Greek, Mexican and Italian, and for dessert some chocolate, raspberry-filled, ganache-iced cupcakes."

Why did I always want to go straight to dessert? Who had the stupid idea that dessert came after the meal?

I got out the plates, utensils, napkins and drinks while Torin put out all of the containers. I closed my eyes briefly against the familiarity of the way we worked together, the way we had always worked together until he'd been discharged from the service. We sat down to eat, and Torin peppered me with questions about the last six months, keeping it light, his eyes on me the whole time. It wasn't until coffee and dessert that we got serious.

"What do you want, Torin?" I asked bluntly.

"You," he said just as plainly. "I want to see if you'd be willing to start again with me."

"What does that mean exactly? You want things to go back to the way they were? I mean, the way they were before our marriage went off the rails?"

"No. We can't get back to how it used to be. It's not the same now. You're different. I'm different. Things changed because I changed them, so now we have two choices: we can start like we're new and see if we still want to move forward together or we decide we can't get past what happened and we move on down different paths separately."

Separately. The word was so depressing. We'd married for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, 'til death do us part. And now, after all those years of good, a year and a half of bad and six months of nothing...we had the word separately as an option. My stomach hurt and it had nothing to do with all of the food I'd just devoured, not even the two cupcakes.

"I'm afraid to ask," he said to me. "But I'm going to. What do you want, Summer?"

"I wish we could have what we used to have. I want to know that you're my rock, that you're my fairytale, that you aren't going to do to me what you did before. But, Torin, I don't know if you can give me that and I don't know if I could trust you to give me that."