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“I didn’t tell her anything incriminating,” she reassures me. “I just don’t like lying to her.”

“I know that,” I say a little too quickly, a little too defensively. “I don’t want that either.”

“I told her I was seeing someone,” she says. “I told her I really liked this person and I want it to work out more than anything.”

Her honesty silences me, because how am I meant to argue with a confession like that? I want all those things too. As I sit here in her kitchen, making breakfast for her after a night wrapped up in her body, I wantthislife more than anything.

“When you’re ready, you tell her.” She places her hands on either side of my face. “I won’t rush you on that, but I at least want her to know just how important you are to me. I want to be able to say I’m going to see my girlfriend, and not have to lie about it.”

I swallow at her confession, not at all disliking the word but disbelieving that a woman like her could truly want someone as inexperienced as me. “I’m your girlfriend?”

“Well?” She reaches for my hand, holding it between both of hers. “I don’t want you to walk out of here on Monday morning thinking that you’re anybody else’s but mine.”

“Zara,” I breathe out, completely bowled over by her revelation.

“What?” I don’t miss the hint of anxiety in her voice when she asks, “Do you not want that?”

I slide off my stool and stand between her legs, tipping her chin up so her eyes meet mine.

“I want it,” I say, my voice earnest. “I wantyou.So much.But I don’t know what it’s like to let myself want things.”

The truth hurts to say out loud, that painful reminder that I have been unintentionally living a life based on everybody else’s needs and Zara is the one single reason that I’ve started to question it.

Everything between us is new, but it’s also very real. And the possibility of not having this woman in my life hurts just as acutely, if not more, as all the other things I’ve let myself walk away from, and yet I can’t make all the pieces in my life fit together.

“I don’t even know what I like.” My hands flail wildly as I ramble. “What I dislike. I didn’t even know I could be into women. I’m a hot mess.”

“Hey.” Her voice immediately soothes me as she curls her hand around the back of my neck, her thumb rubbing soft circles over my rapid pulse. “I don’t care about how messy you are. I like you just the way you are.”

“How?” I argue. “How, when you don’t really know me? How, whenIdon’t really know me.”

I’m challenging her now, greedy for reassurance but asking for it in all the wrong ways.

“Do you know how many times one person can change in a lifetime?” she asks rhetorically. “Or how late in life some people discover and come to terms with their sexuality? I don’t know where you got the idea that everyone but you is so put together, but we’re not.” Her voice loses its certainty. “I’m so far from put together, Clementine, but I want this with you all the same.”

Her perception of herself is real-life proof that the person we see when we look in the mirror every day is almost never what everybody else sees. It should’ve been comforting that we’re all walking around, struggling with imposter syndrome, and yet my insecurities do not give me the concession I know I deserve.

“I live in survival mode,” I explain. “I always have. I do what I need to, to make sure my carefully constructed world stays the way I need it to.”

“And how is that?” she asks, genuine curiosity in her eyes.

“I make sure everybody else is taken care of.” I don’t know why it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to say that out loud, but it’s never felt like a burden till this very moment. “I make sure nothing can disrupt the peace, and if it does, I’m the only one who takes the hit.”

“How is that fair?”

“It’s not.”

“So why do you do it?”

I shrug, feeling hopeless. “I’m just scared.”

Her hold on me tightens. “Of what?”

So many things.

“I’m scared to be selfish,” I say truthfully. “I’m scared to put myself first, to finally want things. For every one thing I could have, it’s another thing I could lose.”

I see the understanding settle on her features. The devastation of loss and just how irreparable life after it could be. I know she’s lived it.