I hope you'll pardon me for fast-forwarding in this narrative and skipping over four months' worth of dates with Diana. You might think I'm doing this is because I'm not able to spin a narrative that would keep your interest, and you'd be partially correct, but not for the reason you'd think at first. It's not because I can't spin an interesting narrative; it's because there's really nothing of interest to report.
Other couples have exciting interests that you can use to fill anywhere from a few paragraphs to a few chapters. Things like sports, travel, kinky sex...
We epitomized "boring."
It turns out that "boring" is okay sometimes. "Boring" was just what I needed right then: no pressure, just show up and be yourself and be happy for a change. "Boring" was good, but it was hardly anything that could be embellished into an interesting tale.
It turned out that we did not have much in common, but that didn't seem to stop us. She was not concerned with sports like I was, and I did not share her passion for black-and-white movies. I played guitar, sort-of; she played piano but had not practiced in a couple of years. Diana preferred board games; I preferred playing out the hero online, since I could not be a hero anywhere else. She wished for simple answers; I felt that many problems had complexities reaching back centuries. But we both liked simple things: courtesy, honesty, common sense. We thought deceit, greed, and bigotry were evils that society should eliminate instead of ignoring. We both valued family. We appreciated honest talk. We liked walking. We liked sightseeing. We liked classical music. Although we didn't share a lot of hobbies, we shared enough interests and common ground to give us an excuse to continue seeing each other.
Our first kiss came in rom-com fashion in the middle of the main train station at the end of our second date. Despite the hundreds of people milling about, we seemed to have all the privacy we needed in the middle of the main floor next to the Information booth. I was a little out of practice at it, but I soon remembered how to kiss a woman. Diana certainly knew how to kiss a man, and did it damned well.
After about five dates, what we really discovered is that we just wanted to be with each other. We didn't need a picnic in the park to give us a reason to be with each other, or a fancy dinner, or a musical in midtown. We even gave up the dinner-and-a-movie cliché, which wasn't hard considering that Hollywood was turning out turd after turd those four months.
There were two significant developments in those four months which I should mention, because they are important.
The first was that I moved into the greater metropolitan area, a little further upriver. Diana was quickly becoming someone that I wanted to spend time with alone so that we were not under the scrutiny of the omnipresent random public every time we were together. But my apartment was no place to bring a woman unless she was the pay-by-the-hour type. Diana helped me find a new apartment in the northern suburbs that was a twenty-five minute train ride from my midtown job, a ten minute walk from the station, and a fifteen minute cab ride from her family's place. I got about double the space, triple the privacy and infinite improvement in the noise level for less money, even if it was a wash monetarily because I used what I saved in rent to pay for the new longer commute. Thankfully, those commutes were not exercises in solitary confinement, because Diana rode the same line at the same time with me.
The second...
The second is the one that still hurts to mention, because it concerns the monster.
I knew the monster was lurking in the shadows, and those shadows were quickly retreating. Soon it would be exposed in the light of day I would no longer be able to ignore it. I piloted through all the checkpoints in the Dating Progress Chart: the first date; the awkward first kiss; the exchanging of phone numbers and addresses; the romantic dinner; the junior-high-school heavy petting session; meeting her family; the Embarrassing Parade Of Past Failures, where I bared my soul about Lisa Williams and she let loose her frustrations with Peter. I was now down to the Final Four: meeting my family; living together; the Proposal; and...
...The monster. The destroyer of all my relationships. The beast that ate Lisa and me and shat us out.
Sex.
I was terrified of that monster, and not of what it would do to me. I was afraid of what it would do to Diana.
It had surprised me how gently, how unnoticeably Diana had become important to me. Perhaps it was because I had not gone into this relationship expecting it to go anywhere but just to fill the space in my life until I figured myself out. Perhaps it was because I was so focused on the monster and keeping it in the shadows. Perhaps it was because I had placed so much importance on sex in my relationships before now, making sure that I was giving as much as I was taking from it, trying to make it an act of mutual affection and not the satisfaction of a biological urge. With Diana, I was not giving sex any importance at all, because it had destroyed the best thing I ever had and I did not want it destroying this, destroying her.
I was oblivious to how much I needed her until one Thursday when Diana had to cancel our standing weekly date night because she had to head home early for a doctor's appointment upstate. I missed her company so much that night that I was miserable, far more miserable than I had been before I started dating her. More miserable than when Lisa Williams began consuming my every thought again.
I finally knew for sure. Diana was important to me. Diana had long ago become more than simple loneliness therapy. Diana was... my girlfriend.
Girlfriend? Did I even know that the word meant anymore?
Did I deserve one, going into this relationship like I did? Trying to prove more to myself than I was to her?
Had I evolved, changed? Was I worthy?
Was this my chance?
The monster began snarling in the corner of my mind, its saliva dripping from its yellowed fangs with anticipation of fresh meat to devour.
I'd been here once before, and I fucked it all up. Dear God, how do I not screw it up this time?!
There was only one answer that I could see: keep the monster leashed.
Unfortunately, leashing a monster does not mean that the monster cannot also cause catastrophic damage, especially when someone else decides to yank its chain.
Which is exactly what Diana did without realizing what she was doing.
We had decided to head to my apartment after a small dinner to just relax. I didn't have a car yet, so Diana was doing the driving. The plan - as I understood it - was just to just sit around and enjoy each other's company, maybe do a little light petting along the way, but nothing more than what would be acceptable for junior-high-school-chaperoned dating content. That was fine with me, because "boring" was just what I needed as I contemplated how I was going to possibly handle the monster with so little checkpoints left in our relationship between us and it.
"You really ought to take a trip to IKEA," Diana joked as she surveyed the sparse contents of my apartment with its hand-me down furniture and large, vacant space intended for a dining room table and chairs.
"Overlooking the fact that I don't have a car and you have an econobox," I bantered back, "how do you propose that I get those cartons up two flights of steps?"
"I'll help," she insisted.
I looked at her in mock appraisal.
"Uh, maybe not?" she muttered.
I mentally kicked myself. Damn, if life didn't need a dress rehearsal for every damned scene. Now I had gone and silently berated her girly strength. Nice Going, Shit For Brains. Trying to make the best of a stupid mistake, I added, "I'd ask some of my friends from work, but they only sports teams they were even on were the Mouse-Button Clickers. I'd have to take most of them to the emergency room afterwards for sprains and strains."
"Can I use the bathroom?", she asked, seeming eager to change the subject. Either that, or eager to purge bilges.
"Sure," I answered. First, I knew it was clean. Second, I knew there was paper in the roll. Last, if a woman ever needed anything in life that wasn't already in her purse, it was a bathroom. I let her go about her business as I headed over to the stereo. Turning it on, I knelt in front of it and looked in my music CDs in the lower drawer for some 1960's smooth jazz that my cubical-mate in work had recently introduced to me. It seemed a good for background music: no lyrics, no furious shrieking of random notes, and nothing that sounded like cheesy make-out music. Finding it, I slipped it into the CD player and let the device come to life at low volume.
Turning on my knee, I suddenly found myself facing a woman's crotch. Literally. Not a woman's slacks or belt or underwear, but a naked crotch covered in dark pubic hair.
If I had stared at Medusa's face, I could not have been turned more to stone than at that moment.
I remembered telling Diana a few weeks back when she was trying to plant subtle hints as to where our next date should be that I no longer played the Hinting Game. I had been thick as a brick with Lisa and it had cost me everything, and I did not want to repeat the same mistake with Diana by either misinterpreting any signals that she was sending or not noticing those signals entirely.
Obviously, the bathroom trip was a ruse. Diana had decided against subtlety, opting instead of the ten-pound sledgehammer form of a hint by leaving her pants and underwear back there.
Diana stood before me, an embarrassed but anticipating smile on her face, waiting for my reaction.
The beast awoke, growled, and yanked against its chain so hard that the anchors almost flew out of the dungeon wall.
I'm ashamed to admit this, since it paints me as more of a wuss than before, if that is even possible from reading this far into my story. But let's be truthful here. I panicked.
Damn it, I'm not ready for this! Not yet!
I'm an architect, which means that the work that I do is planned out in detail, accounting not only for what is supposed to go right but also accounting for the thousands of things that can go wrong. If you fail to account for harmonic frequency disruption in your plans for a bridge, the bridge will waver like an accordion and collapse. The same if you fail to account for crosswinds, or forces of high and low tide, or thousands of migrating geese perching themselves on the suspension cables, or the once-a-century Category 5 hurricane, or heavier than anticipated traffic, or the weight of vehicles and ice, or traffic moving 10 miles per hour faster than the posted speed limit which always happens. Anything critical needed to be planned out, accounting for contingencies and putting in place safeguards for failure. I was good at that, because I had practiced much of that preparation in my own life with anything that I considered important. Anything that was important was worth doing right.
But when it came to women, I sucked at that. Just ask Lisa Williams.
Sex with Diana was the most critical risk I had ever contemplated in my life, because there was no woman on the planet that I wanted to please more than her. She was the most important thing in my life, something I didn't dare risk losing. However, I had yet to plan for the contingencies. I had no safeguards in place. We hadn't discussed it at all since that first date, although I had purposely overlooked her recent hints. I didn't know anything about her experience with her ex-fiancé Peter and what emotional baggage that carried. I had yet to piece together enough of the Diana Barnes puzzle to find if the straight-laced persona she used in public was going to be the same one she used when we were intimate. I didn't know if her romantic tastes mirrored the old black-and-white movies she watched, or if they would clash with my more modern expectations. I didn't even know if Davie Junior would stand at Attention once the clothes came off, or if my terror of screwing this up would keep me limp no matter how many Orion Slave Girls suddenly beamed down into the bedroom.
All I had was a leashed monster in my head that had already destroyed the best thing I ever had, and no idea how I was going to prevent it from doing the same thing again with this young woman who was beginning to wipe the memory of Lisa Williams from my mind.
I had remained frozen and silent too long. The anticipatory smile dropped into a quivering frown and the eyes above them turned red and watery.
I quickly rose and tried to wrap her in my arms, but I was a second too late. First, I had belittled her strength, and now, I hadn't giving her the lusting reaction she expected. The combination proved to be too much for Diana to accept.
"What the fuck, David?!," she barked and shoved me away. She then marched heavily to the bathroom, cursing me as she went. "I'm good enough to take out but not good enough to take home? Is that it?!"
All decks, brace for impact, here comes the Earth Shattering Kaboom...
"No, that's not it!" I shouted after her as I followed, only to have the bathroom door slammed in my face. The door barely muted her voice as her rant came forth.
"Guess I'm not hot enough for you?!" she accused. "Not so ugly that I can't be seen in public with you, I guess. But want anything closer than that? No! No, Diana's too damned ugly, too damned fat!"
"That's not true!" I protested, but even I heard how unconvincing those words were. A substitute soap opera actor could do better.
"You've screwed every other girl!" she yelled. "You screwed Debbie...!"
Who the hell was Debbie? Before I realized that she meant to say Donna, she was on to the next accusation.
"You screwed Paula!"
"I never slept with Paula!" I shouted back in reflex before I could stop myself. It was a pointless denial, because she wouldn't have believed me if I told her that white was indeed white under the influence of her anger.
"Sure, and Clinton never screwed 'that woman'!" she barked. "That's what 'boredom therapy' is with Paula! Sex! You screwed her, alright!"
And then the war went nuclear.
"And Lisa!," Diana laughed harshly behind the door. "Oh, if I hear Little Miss Perfect's name one more fucking time, I'll rip your fucking throat out! I'm never going to measure up to her! I don't even know why I'm trying...!"
Unfortunately, Lisa's name was still hard-wired into my Angry Response system. At the mention of it, I wrenched the doorknob, breaking the cheap lock inside of it and shoved the door opened before my better sense got a grip on my emotions. The sight of Diana - standing with one leg in her slacks and her eye make-up running in a stained river down the sides of her nose - shocked me back to reality. She glared back at me with such anger and misery that I should have been struck dead instantly.
"Tell me again about Little Miss Perfect," she growled and then sniffled as more tears came down. She then resumed both her dressing and her tirade. "The 'best thing you ever had,' right?! You know how it makes me feel to hear you say that all the damned time?! Like I'm nothing! Like I'm just someone you're using until the next Lisa comes along!"
I swear to Heaven that I wanted to apologize for that right then, but Diana had sucked all the air out of the room and I couldn't breathe anymore, let alone attempt to mount a defense.
"I don't know what I was thinking!" she raved on. "I thought that maybe you misinterpreted me on our first date, but it turns out I misunderstood you! It wasn't that you didn't want to have sex with me then, it was that you don't want to have sex with me ever! I should've known a plain, dumpy girl like me had no chance with a guy like you! But I let you get my hopes up! Yeah, stupid Diana, trusting a man again! After my father and Peter - twice! - I should have learned my damned lesson! But no, Diana's got to learn the hard way! Diana always has to learn things the damned hard way!"
"Honey...," I whispered, finally getting enough breath to at least make a feeble attempt at an apology. And trust me, it was going to be feeble if I got anywhere beyond the first word, but I didn't.
"You don't have the right to call me that!" she growled, her head snapping back up and her eyes blasting lasers at me. "Only a friend can call me that! You aren't! In fact, you can't call me anything anymore! Don't call me! Don't message me! Don't text me! Don't send flowers to the house! Don't send a friend to talk to me! Don't accidentally stop by the office! Don't even fucking look at me if we see each other on the damned train, because you are nothing to me! Good fucking bye!"
She ran faster than I had ever seen her run before passed me, slamming the apartment door on her way out.
This is the point in the rom-com where the male lead is supposed to step directly into the path of the female lead's car and trust that she will brake hard and not run him over, proving that he loves her enough to risk his life and that her love will eventually conquer her misplaced anger. Trouble was, Diana's anger was not misplaced. Every shot had hit a bulls-eye in my heart. Everything she had said had about Lisa been true once, and she was never going to believe me if I tried to tell her that it wasn't true anymore. I wasn't even sure that I would believe it myself.
I let her drive off in a squeal of spinning tires that the whole apartment complex heard, and I did nothing to stop her. Not because she was right, but because I couldn't convince myself that she was wrong.
And damn it, if I didn't hate myself more than ever because of it.
I had kept the monster on a leash, on purpose, just to avoid this. But it still destroyed me. Destroyed her. Destroyed us. Just because it was there, just because it existed.
Destroyed...
My fists clenched.
No...!
My molars ground against each other in anger.
Not this time...!
I felt the flame flash hot from my eyes.
Not her!
I stormed across the room and ripped my cellphone from the top of the bureau.
Damn it, not her! She's innocent! It's not taking her too! Not without a fight!
I unlocked my cellphone and went to the favorite contact list. I hurriedly tapped the screen.
"Yes? I need a cab at 15 Styvesant. Fast as you can. I don't care what it costs, but get it here now!"
The taxi took forever to arrive. The clock on my phone tried to convince me that only ten minutes had passed, but I was sure that it was lying to me because the monster made it lie to me. Fifteen minutes after that, I was back in the cab with a floral arrangement half as tall as I was, throwing a heavy tip towards the driver to get me to the suburbs by the fastest possible route. Twenty minutes further, I was two houses down from her family's house, dumping the remainder of my wallet's contents into the palm of the driver's hand and ordering him to leave.
Why did I send the driver off? I knew myself well enough to realize that, had I left myself a path to retreat, I would chicken out and use it. It was time to be a man for the first time in my life. I pulled out my cellphone again, looked in the favorites, and tapped. I had already violated two of her demands, but I figured that I would warn her in advance that I was about to violate another.
The phone rang three times.
"Hello..."
The voice was dull and hurt, but I recognized it.
"This is your idiot ex-boyfriend," I announced. "I'm going to be knocking on your front door in about two minutes. Just give me two minutes more of your life, and then you can do with me whatever you want. I won't stop you."
Long silence replied.
"Diana?" I prodded.
"Okay," came the hesitant reply.
Three minutes later - again, according to my lying cellphone clock - I knocked on her front door. It opened, revealing Diana in a bathrobe that was drawn tightly around her. The look she gave me made it clear that a gift of flowers was going to be insufficient as an apology.
I hadn't meant them as an apology. I was wielding them more like a shield, intending them as an initial offer in the peace negotiations.
"Come in," she curtly said, taking the flowers from me and heading further into the house. I waited in the entryway until she returned. Diana gestured towards the living room, which was completely vacant.
"Two minutes, starting now," she said, and sat rigidly in a padded chair. She avoided the sofa seemingly on purpose, letting me know in no uncertain terms that she was off-limits until she decided otherwise.
Two minutes to save my life. Hardly enough time. But probably more time than my life merited to this point.
"You deserve the truth," I managed to stammer out. I sat gracelessly on the sofa without waiting for her invitation and I stared at an arrangement of paper flowers in the corner of the room to focus on something other than her. I needed to focus, and I didn't want to witness what harm my words were going to do to her.
"Sex is the 800 pound gorilla in my life," I began. "It's what kept Terry and me together as long as it did. It's the only thing Donna and I had between each other. And..."
Fear clamped its invisible fist around my throat and constricted it. Breathing became a conscious effort. My words struggled out in a strangled gasp and tears began to sting the corners of my eyes. But for Diana's sake, I had to continue.
"...And it's what ruined my life with Lisa; destroyed it, destroyed me. Every relationship that gets to the Sex Phase with me... dies. Dies painfully."
I finally dared to look at her.
My prelude to the apology had captivated her interest, but at the moment, it seemed to be the shocked interest of a passerby seeing the mangled wreck of two smoldering automobiles with bodies strewn alongside. She sat stiffly with her hands clasped nervously in her lap, her fingers intertwining and wringing around each other.
"Diana, I care about you," I said, and for the first time, those words did not sound hollow to me. "You're the best thing to happen to me in a long time, maybe ever. For the first time in a very, very long time, I'm ready to risk falling in love again."
I gulped, an effort made much more painful by the fear clamping down around it with its strangling grip. It's amazing how uttering that one-syllable word - love - immediately conjures another one: fear.
"But I'm more afraid of this than I've ever been afraid of anything in my life. I can't risk losing what we've got. I can't let that monster back into my life again, I can't let it ruin this! If it destroys me, okay; maybe I deserve it, maybe I'm supposed to live out my life alone, I don't know. But you're innocent in all this! I can't let it destroy you!"
Diana sniffled but did not reply. In the silence, I could no longer sense the growling of her anger. Perhaps I was only imagining it, but I began to feel the gentle warmth of concern. For now, she was giving me all the space I needed to continue, but she was not abandoning me.
I looked back at the paper flower arrangement in a silent plea for inspiration to continue. It did not give me much of a response.
"I'm sorry that... that I'm making you feel less of a woman because I'm not trying to have sex with you," I continued. "I'm sorry if that makes you feel like I don't think you're beautiful or attractive. The last thing I want to do to you is make you feel inferior..."
Damn, my eyes were beginning to sting painfully. My words were also beginning to tremble. The dam holding back years of pain and failure and self hatred was beginning to crack down the middle. But I had to continue the confession for her sake.
"You've been wonderful to me," I said, forcing myself onward. "You've been patient. Kind. Understanding. You haven't judged me. And I've been an ass. I went into this expecting nothing from it. Something to do while I tried to sort my life out. But then, you began to mean something to me. You became important. You became someone I wanted to be with, not just someone I could be with. I started to care again. I started to care about you, about your life, about what made you happy, about how I could make you happy.
"But then I came face to face with the monster," I admitted. "I couldn't avoid it any longer. There were no other stages left. It was the next logical step. And I couldn't play the 'saving myself for marriage' card because you knew better by then. But if I go there..."
The first tear streaked down the left side of my nose. I hurriedly wiped it away, but in reflex I sniffled.
Oh, we're being so very manly today, aren't we? Quite a show to put on while you're apologizing before the woman you're begging to take you back. If she doesn't find this whole scene childish, she'll think it's an act.
However, sincerity was the only currency I had left.
"If I let that monster loose and it wrecks this..."
Now I had to wipe the right side of my nose.
"I don't want sex to define us. It's defined all my other relationships. It's what I built those relationships around, and they all went down in a flaming wreck. I can't let that happen again. I want to build a relationship around trust, understanding, caring... l-love..."
Yes, I said that simple-looking, hard-to-say-convincingly word again. When you've got nothing left to loose, you're ready to risk everything.
"And I finally see that chance here with you..."
I risked a look back at her.
She was sitting erect, trying very hard to control the quivering in her lower lip. The whites of her eyes were taking on a pink tinge.
"...But I can't let you believe that I don't find you attractive," I rambled on, beginning the circular explanation again. "I can't let you feel like I don't see you as a woman, that I think you don't measure up to the girls in my past, that I'm comparing you to some standard and deciding that you're not desirable. I haven't wanted so much in so long to please a woman as I want to please you and make you happy, but..."
But the monster lurks in the shadows of my life, ready to pillage, plunder, and burn all in its path.
I swallowed. The effort to do so was not growing any easier, and my explanation was spinning over itself.
"You've let me see inside your heart," I whispered vulnerably as I stared at the floor. "I'm letting you see inside mine. Diana, I'm afraid. I've always been afraid. I once ruined the closest thing I've ever had to love and now I'm afraid that I'll ruin everything I touch. And now, I have this chance, this glorious, wonderful chance thanks to you, but... I'm afraid! Diana, you're looking at a coward."
She practically leaped from her chair and crashed down into the sofa beside be. She flung her left arm around my shoulder and yanked me against her with it. She pointed in strict school teacher fashion at me with her right hand.
"You are not a coward!" she scolded me in a trembling whisper. "Peter was a coward! My father was a coward! I know what a coward is, and you are not a coward!"
I cocked my head like old Farley did when our Golden Retriever was confused by something.
"You are the bravest man I've ever known," she continued, her voice growing louder but trembling under the weight of heavy emotion. "No man has ever dared to be this honest with me!"
"How do you know I'm not just putting on an act?" I asked meekly, because even then, I could not say for sure that I wasn't.
She gave me a smile that trembled like a California earthquake and raised her right arm to circle around my neck. She leaned her forehead against mine and closed her eyes.
"Because I've learned who you are," she replied simply.
I scoffed. "Yeah, a broken, desperate, stupid, idiot coward."
"No," she corrected me in a trembling voice. "You're the man I love."
Four words.
Four words that I could not remember anyone ever saying about me before.
Not even Lisa.
True, Lisa and I did say The Three Little Words to each other and probably meant them a few of those times, before the monster destroyed us and we were just saying those words to soothe our feelings and ignore our problems. But even Lisa - the closest thing I ever had before now to a Happily Ever After - never called me The Man I Love.
I knew that Diana liked me. I knew that Diana cared about me. I knew that Diana thought that she could "make do" with me as a boyfriend. I knew that Diana wanted to be more intimate than I was allowing. But I had no idea that I meant this much to her.
With those four words, I suddenly felt so small, so petty, so arrogant, so villainous, so unworthy, so asininely stupid. For starting our relationship with a Beggars Can't Be Choosers mentality. For using her at first as a simple antidote to loneliness. For judging her against a standard. For making her feel unattractive and inferior. For viewing her through the prism of Lisa Williams. For not giving her and this relationship my full and honest effort until it was beginning to crash down around me and destroy her in the process.
"I haven't earned that," I said, my words coughing roughly out of a dry throat.
"Yes, you did," she wept in reply. "Five minutes ago."
That was the brick that finally dislodged in the dam holding back my pain, my bitterness, my shame. Once that brick tumbled free, the others followed, and the emotions they held back gushed forth through the gap, ripping loose more bricks in a torrent of tears that I could not staunch no matter how hard I tried.
I don't know how long she cradled my head against her chest, sopping up my tears and muffling my sobs with her robe so that her mother and sister wouldn't hear. I don't know how many times she whispered, "it's alright," into my ear to console me. What I do know is that I could feel the radiant, healing love beaming from her halo and the soft breeze that the whispering flutter of her angel wings created around me.
I had been falling, racing without a parachute at meteoric speed towards a head-first crash for five years, and God had finally sent an Angel to catch me. Being the damned fool that I was, I hadn't seen it before now. I didn't deserve it, I hadn't earned it, but I had at long last been saved.
Oddly enough, a conversation with a tall, bespectacled brunette resurfaced in my head.
Miracles happen every day... only if we help make them happen.
Damn, Allison had been right. Who would have thought that the wife of my former girlfriend would provide exactly the push I needed exactly when I needed it? I was going to have to thank her for that someday. But not right now. My Angel deserved all the thanks that I could offer, and she was going to get every single bit of it.
I finally raised my head and blindly sought out her lips with mine. Only then did I know that she had been weeping harder than I had been. I tried to pour every ounce of my soul into her through that kiss, releasing myself entirely into her mercy as she had wished to do with me earlier that evening. I felt her tremble against me, her body wracked by a fear that mirrored my own. She had caught me, but now she was struggling to keep us aloft under our combined weight. I broke the kiss and wrapped her in my arms, resting my chin on her left shoulder.
"I've got you, Angel," I whispered into her ear. "I've got you. I'm never letting go. Lean on me for a change."
"I have been," she whimpered. "Leaning on you, letting you carry me... worried more about me than about you..."
"That's not true," I corrected her gently. "If that were true, you'd have slammed the door in my face five minutes ago."
"I'm sorry," she coughed.
"Don't be, I'm the fool here, not you."
"We're all fools," she said. "We demand perfection in an imperfect world. And when someone as near perfect as you comes along, all we focus on are the flaws."
"Guilty, Your Honor," I confessed, considering her to be a far shade closer to perfection with that glowing halo over her head than I was with the horns protruding out of mine. I then forced myself to whisper four words into her ear, four words that I prayed with all my heart would not sound hollow, because the rest of my life was riding on how she heard them.
"Diana, I love you."
Apparently, they did not sound hollow to my Angel.
"I love you too, David."
I will swear until my dying day that the room suddenly filled with a gentle light streaming directly from Heaven when she whispered those words. Instantly, all the shadows in my heart were dispelled, sending my stupid uncertainties and crippling fears fleeing, only for them to evaporate as that gentle light shined upon them in their flight. Well, all shadows except one in a distant recess of my mind, where a monster now cringed in a fetal ball as it stared wide-eyed at the light that crept inexorably towards it.
Bitter at losing its power over me, the monster snorted, dredging up the most bitter of my memories.
"Please, do me a favor?" I asked timidly.
"Anything," Diana sniffled back.
I pushed back from the embrace far enough that I could look her in the eyes.
"Promise me we'll never use the word 'nothing' with each other?" I gently begged.
Diana knew that story and understood what that word came to mean for me. She beamed to me a smile filled with love and commitment.
"I promise."
I knew. There were no more questions, no more doubts. I finally knew.
I loved this woman. Great God Almighty, I loved this woman! And damn it, I was going to prove it to her!