Page 68 of Forever Only Once

Chapter 15

Hazel

Paris:You still haven’t talked about his eggplant. We’re going to need the details.

I crossed my eyes as I looked down at my phone, shaking my head.

It was my day off, and I was meeting Cross later for a date. We might be discussing his eggplant at that point. But I had no plans to talk about it with my friends. Oh, I had joked that I was going to draw it in dramatic detail. But nobody needed to know exactly what I had with Cross beyond my current feelings. Not that I could talk about those. Because I needed to work through them first, and that was the hard part. Figuring out exactly what I wanted and how I could be safe emotionally and physically, then making that happen.

It wasn’t going to be easy, not when every time I felt like I could get close to Cross, thoughts of Thomas came back.

That wasn’t fair to Cross, and we both knew it. However, I knew he was giving me leeway for that.

But I was here. I was whole enough. I had to be.

Thomas wasn’t part of this. He wasn’t even near me. He wasn’t going to come after me.

He couldn’t.

I was safe.

And if I kept telling myself that, I wouldn’t live in fear like I did. I might let myself trust Cross and my friends, but I couldn’t trust anyone else.

My hand gripped the knife in my hand as I looked down at the lettuce I was cutting, and I slowly forced my fingers to relax, letting the blade go.

Just because I was stressed out and needed to speak with my therapist again, didn’t mean I had to bottle my emotions. I was allowed to feel.

I just had to figure out exactly what I was feeling.

I wanted to be with Cross, didn’t I? That was the hard part, figuring out exactly what everything meant.

It was if I had some mental block, telling me that I couldn’t be with him, even though I should be.

Part of me wanted to be with him. Part of me needed to be with him.

And I didn’t know what to do about that yet. He made me happy. He made me smile. He made me really grateful that he had been the one to show up at the bar and not Stavros. Because I knew for a fact that I wouldn’t be in this situation if Stavros had been the one to show up. Because there was nobody like Cross.

Right?

I paused and started making my salad, trying to clear my thoughts. Maybe that was the case.

Did I love him? Could I let myself feel that again?

The problem was, I couldn’t look back on what I felt for Thomas without remembering the pain of what he’d done. He’d hurt me. Stalked me. Then he’d hurt me again. He was in another state now, out of prison, but still far away, yet part of me still felt like he was right next to me.

And that meant I couldn’t entirely trust my feelings.

Yet…yet I’d gone through with the pact for love and finding happiness because I’d wanted to trust those feelings.

So maybe…maybe I could love Cross.

And perhaps I could see if he could love me.

I let out a breath and shook my head. There was no use going over and over exactly what I was feeling for Cross. I needed to let myself be. I had to live in the moment.

Something I really wasn’t used to.

That wasn’t me, the person who could just be. I had to make plans. I had to figure out exactly what I was doing. The fact that I’d even let him sit at my table at all meant that I had already started changing in more ways than I could count.