For several seconds, we simply looked at each other beneath the warm hotel lights.
No oversized shirts.
No locked bathroom doors.
No second room down the hallway.
No pretending.
I placed my hand gently against his stomach.
He tensed instinctively but didn’t pull away.
Then Jeffrey reached toward me and carefully rested his hand against the scar tissue on my chest—the part of myself I had spent months avoiding in mirrors.
His touch was gentle.
Warm.
Familiar.
“No more hiding,” he whispered.
“No more hiding.”
He rested his forehead against mine.
That weekend didn’t restore our bodies to the way they looked twenty years earlier.
My hair didn’t magically grow back.
My scars didn’t disappear.
Jeffrey didn’t suddenly lose the weight he had gained.
But none of that was what needed fixing.
What we needed was honesty. We needed to stop assuming we knew what the other person was thinking. We needed to stop hiding our pain because we were afraid it would make us less desirable.
And we needed to understand that both of us had survived the previous year in different ways.
The woman in our honeymoon photographs no longer existed exactly as she once had.
Neither did the man standing beside her.
But the people underneath those changes were still us.
Still married.
Still frightened.
Still imperfect.
And still choosing each other.
For the first time in almost a year, Jeffrey didn’t turn away from me.
And neither did I.
To see the full cooking instructions, go to the next page or click the Open button (>) and don't forget to SHARE it with your friends on Facebook.
