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“Lisa, you kissed her. That’s the thing I can’t get past,” Carla said in frustration.
“It wasn’t like that, Carla,” Lisa protested quietly.
She knew deep down that for a moment she had imagined that kiss since the day her wife came back into her life. She still loved Becky, as she had admitted to Roy, maybe even more now than before. But she loved Carla too; the most infuriating and complicated woman she had ever met and fallen in love with. Carla was the one she wanted to build a future with, not Becky.
She also knew she could never completely remove Becky from her life because of Betsy. Becky was her child’s other mother, and Lisa wished things were easier between them. She wished they could be civil without Becky trying to provoke Carla every time she visited. But she knew Becky was jealous of what she and Carla had, and there was no changing that.
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A few days later, Carla was already in bed by the time Lisa walked into the room. They had not made love since the day Carla returned from Ireland. That afternoon, they had locked themselves in their bedroom to reconnect after two weeks apart, and for once, no one had interrupted them, neither Betsy nor Becky until much later that day when the mother daughter duo arrived.
In those two hours alone in the house, Carla had shown Lisa just how much she had missed her, and Lisa had been left drowning in guilt over everything that had happened while Carla was away. She knew telling Carla about the Halloween kiss had been the right thing to do, but she also understood the risk it carried. Carla could have walked away without looking back, and the thought of that twisted Lisa’s stomach until she felt sick.
She also knew that by confessing, she had taken away one more weapon Becky could have used against them. If she had kept it a secret, Becky would have eventually found her moment, and that would have been it; the final grenade thrown straight into their relationship. And Lisa was certain that if that had happened, Carla wouldn’t have stayed. She wouldn't have just gone for a walk to clear her head, she would have walked away forever.
She could now easily picture her life without Becky in it because she had already lived through that absence for four long years. But when she tried to picture her life without Carla, something in her chest caved in. The thought alone made her heart ache in a way that felt physical. That was when she realised that even though a part of her would always love Becky, she had already survived losing her. She had healed, slowly and painfully, and she had done it with Carla by her side, the woman who had helped her rebuild a life worth living, the woman she now called her fiancée.
“I love you, Carla,” Lisa whispered in the dark. She lay still on her side of the bed, afraid to reach out again after being pushed away so many times since Halloween night. She waited for a response, but Carla said nothing.
“I’m in love with you,” Lisa added after a long pause.
“You love Becky too, Lisa. Let’s not pretend you don’t,” Carla murmured, her voice tired as she turned further away from the centre of the bed.
Lisa blinked rapidly as her vision blurred. She nodded to herself in the dark, her chest tightening. When she finally spoke, her voice broke.
“I do. I love Becky, but not the way I love you. Do you want to know what’s different? When I picture my life without you, it feels like someone’s ripping something vital out of me. I can’t breathe when I think of you not being there. It feels like my heart’s being crushed from the inside. I grieved Becky. I cried for her, I fell apart, and then I learned to stand again. But you…” She swallowed hard, tears slipping down her cheeks. “You’re in everything now. You’re in my mornings, in my nights, in every bloody part of me. I don’t know who I’d be without you anymore.”
She let out a trembling breath, her hand clutching the blanket tightly. “I never thought I’d be able to love again after Becky. Then you came along, and you changed everything. You made me believe I could be happy again. You held me when I broke down, you loved me when I couldn’t even look at myself. You taught me how to feel again, and that’s not something I can ever unlearn.”
Her voice cracked as she spoke the last words. “I can live without Becky because I already have. But if I ever lose you, Carla, I don’t think I’ll survive it. I don’t even want to imagine what that would be like. It would destroy me.”
Carla’s tears wouldn’t stop rolling down her cheeks. She knew Lisa loved her, she had never doubted that but the weight of constantly fighting the ghost of Lisa’s past was suffocating. It had been there almost their entire relationship. She had lived beside the grieving woman for so long, patiently waiting for the day the grief would loosen its grip. And just when she thought they had finally made it through, that ghost had returned and not as a memory this time, but in flesh and blood. And Lisa, the woman she loved, seemed to slip right back into the place she once fought so hard to leave behind.
With anyone else, Carla would have walked away by now. She would have thrown in the towel and saved herself from the exhaustion that came with trying to hold on to someone who kept drifting back into the past. But this was Lisa and that was what made it so painful. It wasn’t easy to stop loving her. It wasn’t easy to imagine her life without her. Yet she could feel the cracks widening inside her, and she didn’t know how much strength she had left.
“I don’t know, Lisa. I just feel so tired,” Carla admitted, her voice trembling. Fresh tears slid down, soaking into her pillow.
She kept her back turned to Lisa, staring blankly at the wall, her breathing uneven. The silence between them was heavy, filled with the sound of muffled sobs and shallow breaths.
“I don’t know how much longer I can take this, Lisa,” she hiccupped, her voice breaking as the words escaped.
Lisa turned her head toward her fiancée and saw her shoulders shaking. The sight hit her like a punch to the chest. “Can I hold you?” she asked softly, inching closer but keeping a small distance between them. “Please, Carla. Just let me hold you.” She begged her own tears soaking through their beddings.
Carla didn’t respond, but she didn’t pull away either. And in that small silence, that lack of rejection was all Lisa needed as she scooted closer still to her fiancée.
Carla rarely cried. And when she did, it shattered Lisa. Watching her like this made Lisa hate herself for the pain she’d caused. She hated that her lack of boundaries and indecisions in regards to Becky had dragged them here again, to this breaking point.
“I’m so sorry, Carla,” Lisa whispered, her voice raw. “I’ve been such an idiot. I’ve been so wrapped up in my own guilt and mess that I never stopped to think what it was doing to you.”
She reached out and touched Carla’s shoulder lightly. When she didn’t feel the usual shrug-offs which had become the norm the last few days, she moved closer, wrapping her arm around Carla and pulling her gently against her chest. Carla didn’t resist.
Lisa held her tighter, pressing her face into Carla’s hair, breathing her in like she was terrified she might vanish. “I love you, Carla,” she murmured, her voice shaking. “You’re the woman of my life. Only you, babe. Only you.”
Carla didn’t answer, but Lisa could feel the faint rise and fall of her breathing against her chest and in that quiet, aching space between them, Lisa held on as if her whole world depended on it.
Lisa hoped to God they could survive this, because imagining a life without Carla wasn’t just unbearable, it felt like a slow, certain death she wouldn’t know how to come back from.