Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 140874 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 704(@200wpm)___ 563(@250wpm)___ 470(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 140874 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 704(@200wpm)___ 563(@250wpm)___ 470(@300wpm)
“No, it’s me. It is entirely me.” He squeezed my hand. “I have been letting my feelings about my previous marriage interfere with my feelings toward you. That isn’t fair.”
“Oh.” I frowned. This was one of the parts of couple’s therapy that I didn’t like. Hearing stuff you sort of expected, but had convinced yourself you were being paranoid over, confirmed in front of another person.
“Don’t act surprised. You’ve noticed. That’s what all the talk about setting a date was, wasn’t it?”
I wished he hadn’t noticed. “Look, I don’t want you to do the weird thing you do where you ignore your emotional needs in order to protect what you perceive to be my feelings. Remember when you did that and you had no idea what my feelings were, and we broke up?”
“Neil isn’t going to do that this time,” Ashley said with her characteristic no-bullshit tone. “The two of you are coming into this marriage with your own past baggage and some reasonable fears. You’ve just been through an incredibly turbulent year, and you’re both emotionally raw. But the very last thing you can do in this situation is assume that your feelings and your partner’s feelings are the same, or that you know what’s going on inside their head without asking.”
“It’s kind of good that you mentioned that, because I am dying to know what Neil thinks of something.” I’d been working up the nerve to broach the subject with him, and it was a relief to know how to start the conversation. “How do you feel about Emma living with us?”
Neil sat up straighter, adjusting his shoulders against the back of the couch. “I, um. Well, it feels normal to me, I suppose. Though Valerie and I tried to keep our custody arrangement as equal as possible, I always somehow ended up with Emma more than I was without her. And she doesn’t have anywhere else to live right now.”
“Where does her fiancé live?” Ashley asked, her fingers poised above her iPad to type a note.
“He has roommates, so it’s not an ideal situation for a couple starting out.” Neil said this as though it was an apology to me, but he couldn’t have worded it more perfectly.
“Yeah,” I said with an arched brow. “I know.”
He hung his head in good-natured shame. “Ah.”
I put a hand on his knee and gave it a little squeeze. “It isn’t that I don’t love Emma. I do. But it’s a little weird having to worry, in my own house, that I’m going to do or say something in front of her that makes her uncomfortable. Like the other morning, when we were in the kitchen.”
It had been a blissfully lazy Sunday, and I’d thought the coast was clear because Emma had stayed the night with Michael. Neil and I had just had fantastic morning sex, and we’d gone to the kitchen to put on some coffee. So, of course Emma would come home exactly when I was standing in the kitchen in one of her father’s t-shirts and nothing else, punching buttons on the needlessly complicated coffee maker. The fact that Neil had been standing behind me, his arms around my waist, clad in just his boxers and a smile was the icing on the uncomfortable cake. It wasn’t an abnormal interaction for a couple to have, but Emma had walked into the kitchen and right back out again, and disappeared for most of the day.
“I feel so guilty about touching you or kissing you in front of her, because I feel like it gives her the massive creep outs,” I finished, my frustration obvious in my tone. “I’m making her totally uncomfortable just by being your girlfriend, whether she admits that or not.”
Ashley nodded, her lips pursed. “Weren’t you two looking for a new place to live?”
“We were… I don’t know if we put that on hold…” Neil said, looking uncertainly to me.
“What happens if you do find a place to live?” Ashley went on. “Is the expectation that Emma will move in with you there? Or her and Michael both?”
“That’s not something I would be comfortable with,” I stated firmly, but I know my expression was totally apologetic as I shrugged. “That’s just how I feel, I’m sorry.”
“No, I would never have expected you to agree to that.” The fact that he even had to say that meant he’d thought about it. Yikes. “When we were looking for a new place, I’d assumed Emma would stay in the apartment after we moved. At least until she and Michael found a place of their own. That way, we would have some privacy, and so would they. But after our discussion at the lake…”
“What discussion was this?” Ashley prodded.
“We said no big life changes.” It sounded silly that we were sticking to that, considering he’d proposed to me just a few days later. “I guess that went out the window.”