“We don’t need to put labels on things if it makes you uncomfortable.” But I’m not sure if I’m saying that for me or for her. If we’re in a committed relationship, I have to be up front with her about things, and that isn’t easy, even though she’s been open with me about her own issues. I want to be her rock, someone she’s not afraid to depend on. I need her to see me as whole.
“My boyfriend and I . . .” She frowns and brushes the hair away from her face with an impatient swipe of her hand. “He wanted us to be in an open relationship. I should have told you earlier, but I didn’t know that we would—that you would—that I—” She gives up trying to explain.
It takes me a moment to understand what she’s saying, but then a weird mixture of feelings boils inside me. I was wrong. She wasn’t trying to get over someone. She just wanted to try something new. Because her shitty boyfriend was. It stings that she didn’t tell me, but I get why she didn’t. We were never supposed to be anything.
“Are you angry?” she asks.
Hell if I know the answer to that, so I ask the only question that really matters right now: “Do you still want to be with him?”
She worries her bottom lip and then shakes her head slowly but decisively. “I don’t.”
My heart jumps. My hands ache to touch her, but I keep them down at my sides. “Do you want—”
“I want to be with you,” she says, holding my gaze in a way she rarely has before.
I take a step toward her. “How long have you guys been . . . doing this?”
“Basically since you and I met. It’s surprisingly easy to be apart,” she says. “For the record, there’s only been you.”
I have to smile at that. I’m the only one she hid from in the bathroom.
“Since we’re being honest with each other . . .” Nausea washes over me, and I exhale through my mouth, trying to breathe it away.
She watches me with a frown, waiting for me to speak.
“I didn’t have some kind of injury before. I was sick.” My nausea increases until I’m almost dizzy, and I force the ugly words out. “I had testicular cancer, and they had to remove one. Some people would say I’m only half the—”
She presses her fingers to my lips to silence the rest of my words. “Don’t say that.”
I’m not done. There’s more to drag into the open. But my eyes are watery, and there’s a fist lodged in my throat. No matter how many times I swallow, it refuses to go away. I don’t want to be like
this in front of her. I want to be the person she thought I was, a confident motherfucker who wouldn’t give a shit about any of this. But I do give a shit. I want to be enough—for her, for me, for the people in my life.
She touches my face like I did to her earlier, her eyes creased with concern. “Does it hurt?”
“Not at all. I’ve been healed and cancer-free for a while now.”
A brilliant smile stretches across her face. “That’s the best news.”
“Not quite the best news. I don’t look the way I should down there. It’s not—”
She breaks into laughter, surprising me. Honestly, it burns a little.
“Sorry, I’m not laughing at you,” she says. “But really, I don’t care what you look like down there. I’ve read books where women are obsessed with how a guy’s balls look, and I never understood it. ‘Nice’ ones, ‘not nice’ ones, they’re all the same to me. I don’t, uh, know how to appreciate them.”
I could get angry, I realize. Her words are insensitive in a way. But I know she doesn’t mean them to be. She wants me to know that she doesn’t care if I’m more lopsided than I should be, that it really doesn’t matter to her.
So I let it go.
I choose to be angry at the situation, at cancer, and not at her.
I imagine her puzzling over elaborate descriptions of hairy balls, maybe looking at a mosaic of scrotums as she tries to understand their appeal, and I can’t help being amused. She has a point. Before I had the surgery, my doctor encouraged me to get a silicone prosthesis to replace what they were removing, and I said no. After having cancer, I didn’t want fake junk in my junk. I told myself that I could handle looking different and no one cared anyway. But that was before, when I hadn’t lost anything yet. After the surgery, I felt vulnerable in a way I’d never experienced. I still haven’t gotten over it.
But I want to. Maybe I’m finally on my way.
“You keep talking about these books that you’re reading,” I say. “What kind of books are they?”
She purses her lips, stubbornly silent, though a smile hints at the corners of her mouth, and I sigh and touch my forehead to hers.