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Carol always felt safe in Darryl’s arms. He loved to hold her, he had ever since they were kids and he hit that growth spurt that finally gave him the height advantage. Carol’s growth petered out, Darryl kept getting taller, and the entire way, he loved to wrap his arms around her shoulders and pull her to his chest. He was warm, soft, and she never understood why her coworkers would complain about their husbands’ arm hair. She liked how fuzzy Darryl was. It lined up with the sickeningly sweet nicknames they gave each other.
“I love you, Dare-bear.” “I love you too, Care-bear!”
He was always going to be her Dare-bear. Marrying Darryl came with its regrets, but she knew she wouldn’t give it up for the world. Maybe that was why this hurt so bad.
His arms were warm, and their bed was warm, and the tears beading up in her eyes were warm when they spilled over and trailed down the bridge of her nose. Darryl hadn’t noticed, she had always been a quiet crier, but she was sure he would realize as soon as she spoke. She hooked her arms over Darryl’s, holding them around her torso, and he shifted closer to her.
“Didn’t know you were still awake, Care-bear,” he murmured, his voice low with oncoming sleep. She didn’t want to lose that voice. Her entire chest hurt.
“I think I’m a lesbian,” she responded, her voice unsteady the way it only was when she cried, and Darryl was silent. His arms tightened around her torso, reassuring, and she curled up further as the tears started coming harder.
“I am not very surprised by that,” he answered after thinking on it for a moment and she let out a hiccuping laugh.
“I still feel like I loved you, though. Is that insane?” Carol sniffed and Darryl was quiet again. She could tell from the way he inhaled that he wasn’t going to speak this time. “I don’t love you romantically anymore but I think I did. I still feel like I loved you. I don’t regret marrying you. So I can’t be a lesbian then, right? But I don’t like men at all, not anymore.”
“Uh…” Darryl breathed more than said. Carol swallowed down a rough lump in her throat.
Plaintively, through a whisper, she added, “you’re still my best friend.”
Darryl’s breath hitched and his next words were quiet and watery around the edges. “You’re my best friend, too, Carol. I like being married to you.”
“Do you love me?”
Darryl’s fingers started stroking her arm, running up from the top of her wrist to the curve of her elbow. “I love you like family.”
“You won’t hurt my feelings if you say no.”
“It would hurt my own feelings to say I don’t love you,” Darryl replied, still tracing up and down her arm. Carol breathed out a laugh.
Of course, they both felt the same way. They usually did.
“Do you love me like a wife, Darryl? Or do you love me like your best friend?” She put her hand on his, stopping the nervous movements, and Darryl was silent again.
He had gotten better at talking since his fateful soccer trip, even if it took a second, she knew she would get an answer. She bit her lower lip to make herself more patient. She played with his fingers as he thought, lifting each of them one at a time before letting them fall back against her skin. He paid no mind to it, more than used to the way that she used him as a human-sized fidget toy.
“I love you,” he reaffirmed, and she sighed, already knowing his next words. “I love you like my best friend.”
“I am not very surprised by that,” she echoed his words from earlier and he laughed.
He pressed his face into the top of her head and even with the hair covering her head, she could tell he was crying from the soft sniffles he let out. The ache in her chest grew and she curled her knees up to her chest, fighting down a deeper sob. Darryl laced their fingers together, his wedding band pressing into her skin, and she let go. For the first time since Grant was born, she sobbed, the noise rattling in her chest as the tears wracked her body. Darryl’s shoulders were shaking behind her, more restrained but enough to be felt, and it just sent her tumbling even further. She cried until she couldn’t breathe, gasping around tear drops and the way her body shook.
“Sorry,” Darryl murmured and Carol scoffed between choked-out noises that were getting further from cries and closer to the sounds of a dying animal.
“You can be sad, too, Darryl.”
“I don’t wanna, you know, take away from your emotions with, like, mine,” Darryl said, fumbling through words he must have learned from Samantha or the Oak-Garcias, and she squeezed his hand.
“I think you’re allowed to cry over us not loving each other. We’ve always done everything together, this doesn’t have to be the exception.”
“We haven’t really done anything together over the last few years besides sleep together,” Darryl responded, his voice growing increasingly thick with tears, and Carol sighed.
“We had Tax Day?”
That broke Darryl. He laughed, then sobbed, clinging to Carol like she was his lifeline. She was his lifeline. God, it hurt to think that she might not be his lifeline anymore.
Dully, she realized that Grant could probably hear them crying. She could hope that he was asleep, but he didn’t sleep well nowadays. That familiar Wilson trait of suppress, quiet down, don’t worry the baby kicked up in the back of her head, but then Darryl took a big shuddering gasp that she recognized as him trying to get words out, and anything she could have said died on her tongue.
“What do we do from here, Care-bear?” he asked and she laughed. The sound was shaky and unsure even to her own ears. From the way Darryl squeezed her, he picked up on the hesitation.
How unfair the world was, that her husband only learned emotional intelligence once she no longer loved him.
Except she did love him. Just not in the right way, not anymore.
Unfair.
“I don’t know, Dare,” she responded. “I really don’t know.”