Page 133 of Love Unwritten
“Not a single soul besides my previous therapist.”
“What about your family?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t want them to look at me differently.”
My fickle little heart clenches at the revelation.
At the trust.
But the tiny voice in my head reminds me that I’ve been burned too many times by Rafael to get my hopes up. “Why are you telling me, then? You don’t even trust me.”
He takes a few moments to meet my gaze, but when he does, I can see his guard dropping. It starts with the softening of his frown, followed by the lessening of the tension lines by his eyes, all before he reveals the broken man hiding behind a grumpy exterior.
I see him, not as a weak person, but as someone strong enough to be vulnerable with me, knowing I could possibly hurt him. That I could take his secret and use it against him if I wanted to.
I’ve always thought he was handsome, but in this moment…
He is beautiful.
His short inhale breaks the silence. “I can’t expect you to earn my trust if I don’t give you a chance to keep it.”
I look away first, unable to bear the weight of that particular stare for longer than a few seconds. “Okay.”
Saying anything else would betray how much his statement means to me, and after how he behaved earlier, he hasn’t earned my vulnerability.
Yet.
His deep breath fills the quiet. “I developed this screwed-up mindset at a young age about relationships. That if I became the version of myself that I thought people wanted me to be, then they wouldn’t ever want to leave me.”
My bottom lip wobbles, so I bite down on it to hide just how much his words affect me. Was any of it real, or was the man who caught my attention in high school and earned the Best Smile superlative always faking it solely because he didn’t want to be abandoned again?
The thought of it being the latter makes my heart feel like someone stabbed it with a thousand needles.
He continues, “I was a people pleaser to a fault, but it didn’t feel like a sacrifice because I had what I thought I wanted. Family. Friends. Security.” His upper lip curls. “Moving to Lake Wisteria gave me an opportunity to reinvent myself, and in the process, I convinced myself that I was happy.”
“But you weren’t.”
“No, but I tricked myself into believing I was.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want to give my aunt and uncle a reason to get rid of me.”
My chin trembles.
He looks away. “I’m not telling you this for you to feel bad for me.”
I don’t feel bad. I’m heartbroken, knowing he struggled with so much at such a young age. Knowing how much it still affects him all these years later.
A wrinkle appears between his brows from how hard he frowns. “That kind of mindset applied to a lot of my relationships, including the one with my ex-wife.”
The knot of dread in my stomach tightens.
“I already had trust issues before her, but she only made them worse.”
I can’t speak.
“And then she accidentally got pregnant despite promising me she was on birth control.”