Always Only You by Chloe Liese (z-lib.org).epub

Ren pushes off the bed, pacing the room like a caged animal. Scraping his
hands through his hair, he sweeps up his ball cap from the hospital cart and tugs
it on, brim pulled low.
“I can’t believe you’re that cynical, Frankie. I can’t believe you’d say that
about me.”
I stare up at him, as hot tears spill from my eyes. “I’m not cynical. That’s
what happens, Ren.”
“No, that’s what happened. And it was wrong. But that wasn’t me, Frankie.
What about me? Don’t I get a say in how this goes?”
His words land uncomfortably close to my heart.
Trust him. Believe him.
He takes one look at whatever face I’m making and sighs in defeat. “Because
if not, how do I ever outstrip your past? No matter how much I reassure you that
I will never resent you, that I will never consider you and my own happiness at
odds, you don’t believe me. I have to act how you think I should. I can’t have my
own needs in this relationship.”
“That’s not fair.” My throat hurts from talking. I reach for the cup of water
and Ren strides forward, helping me when I can’t even hold up my arm long
enough to get it.
I suck on the straw and peer up at him as my eyes fill with fresh tears. Will
he really always look at me like this, when I’m at my worst? Like he loves me,
like my pain is as real to him as it is to me?
Like there’s nowhere else that he’d rather be?
“How is that not fair?” he says quietly, setting down the cup.
“Ren, I’m just trying to say there’s a compromise here. When I feel like this,
you can take care of me in reasonable ways, but don’t put your life on hold.”
He shakes his head. “No. That’s literally saying my love for you has to have
conditions. I’m not okay with that. That’s you trying to find a loophole so that
you don’t have to trust me all the way.”
I glare at him. “You’re being so fucking condescending right now!”
“Frankie.” Scrubbing his face, he sighs. “I understood becoming a couple to
mean that, among other things, when either of us was hurting, we were no longer
alone in that. So, I have a relationship to your pain. It’s not mine, and I don’t get
to tell you what to do with it, but I get to choose to love you through it. And if
and when you need care and comfort—which, like it or not, the past forty-eight
hours, you did—I get to be the person who gives it to you. That’s basically the
point of a relationship. Isn’t it?”
My jaw’s tight. I feel pushed and cornered and talked down to, tired and sick
and infuriatingly defeated. “Well, then we probably would have been better