Maybe, just maybe, everything will be alright.
Thirty Nine
Noah
I’ve spent my entire life feeling unloved, worthless, and trapped in the walls of my own making.
I never wondered what I had been missing until I had it. And now that I have Andie Moore in my life—the woman who literally breathes oxygen into my lungs—I’m not sure if I can ever let her go.
There goes one more adjective to add to the list: Greedy.
I’m not even ashamed about it. ButIamafraid. Afraid of making mistakes and hurting her. Afraid that one day she’ll wake up and realize that she made an error by trusting me, loving me.
Terrifiedthat even though I asked her to teach me how to love her, I’ll fail and let her down in the worst way possible. She has worked so hard on herself to be where she is today—happy and thriving—and I detest the idea of pushing her back into cold days and even colder nights.
That’s one of the many things I talk about during my therapy sessions over the next month, along with my past, my nightmares, and my instincts to not give a damn about my own self.
It’s difficult to open up to a total stranger, especially when I spent every day waking up and wearing a mask, shoving everything so deep inside me so that no one would ever suspect that something was wrong with me.
Now, I’m scared to reach it and open Pandora’s box.
But the look of love when I get back home from those sessions, I get to see on Andie’s face, keeps me going back. “I’m proud of you,” is the first thing she says the second I step inside, kissing me softly with those words on her lips.
I’d crawl through hell on my hands and knees for her to look at me with love gleaming in her ocean eyes.
Every day for the last month, I’ve been trying my level best to learn what love feels like, racking my brain to understand how you know if you love someone. Spending your entire life being rejected, abhorred, and devoid of love does that to you.
I’ve never felt more incapable and hopeless in life than I do when I have to fucking wonder if what I feel for the woman who’simprintedin my soul is love.
In my desperation to figure out my own fucked up mind, I even asked Ezra how he realized he loved Kaeli one day when we were the last ones left in the locker room.
For a second, he looked at me with eyes that were trying to peep into my soul, and I almost panicked and blurted out about Andie. But luckily, the mention of his fiancée is enough to put the man in a good mood.
“For so long, hockey was my everything, and while I craved someone to go home to every night, I’d never have imagined loving something or someone as much as this sport,” Ezra spoke, adeliberate expression on his face, his eyes unfocused as he thought about his words.
“Then what happened?” I asked, leaning just a little bit closer to understand what changed.
A small smile played on his lips as he answered, “Then it became increasingly difficult to control my rage every time she had tears in her eyes. She’s the only thing I’m thinking about, no matter where I am or what I am doing.”
My brows furrowed, wanting to know more. “So you figured you love her because you wanted to kill anyone who messed with her?”
“Pretty much,” he agreed, shrugging his shoulders. “And mostly because I know I’ll never look at any other woman for as long as I breathe, Noah. She’sit. She always will be.”
Wrapping up the conversation there, we both left for the day. And eventually, Ezra’s words started to make sense.
I relate to every single thing he said he feels. I want to obliterate the world when Andie’s hurt, and there’s nothing I won’t do to see her smile. It has been the case for as long as I can remember.
I’ve never even looked at a woman twice. Then there’s my Andie, the woman I can’t take my eyes off of, even when she should be the lastwoman I should be pursuing. Nothing in this world can keep me from her, not even my most important friendship—a friendship I’d die for.
But I would lose it in a second if it meant I get to have her for just one more day. And that realization is frightening, not because I’m afraid of love, but because this means that I’ve nevernotloved her, even when I didn’t know it myself.
She has always been the one flowing through these veins from the moment I saw her for the first time, all those years ago, tagging along into the bar with her brother, hitting me like a freight train right in my solar plexus.
It’s always been her.
What bothers me, though, is that she doesn’t even know this. She doesn’t know that I’ve always loved her. The woman who filled my life with colors, hope, and abundant love doesn’t know she’s the center of myentirefucking universe.
I hate that.