My Heart Insists It’s Time for Forgiveness
When we graduated from high school, I remember this moment during the ceremony when our valedictorian told us a story about our kindergarten field trip to a grocery store. While his story focused on the idea of the experience of growing up, I remembered the trip for a different reason. I’d stood there in my red graduation gown, recalling five-year-old me standing in the aisle of that grocery store, the cereal aisle, with Seth beside me, his hand in mine. My crush on him by graduation was a painful weight in my chest, especially now with school ending and no reason to see him each day. That kindergarten trip, we’d chosen to be one another’s buddy. I went to kindergarten everyday excited to see my friend Seth. That day, we’d been scolded for talking about the cartoon characters on the colorful cereal boxes instead of listening to the host. I’d teared up, embarrassed for getting into trouble. But Seth had leaned toward me and said, “It’s okay, Hannah. They weren’t mad at you. It was me.” I leaned toward him and pressed a “thank you” kiss to his cheek. He’d looked at me with wide eyes and whispered, “Now we’ll have to get married.”
Now, naked, limbs entwined with Seth in my bed, I recall that memory and giggle.
“What is it?”
“You remember going to the grocery store in kindergarten?”
“No.” His fingertips move back and forth over my shoulder.
“We were field trip buddies.”
His touch stills. “You remember that far back?”
I nod and trace a fingertip across his collarbone. “I kissed your cheek and you told me we were going to have to get married.”
He laughs, the rumble of the sound deep in his chest. “What?”
I shift my head, chin to his pectoral so I can meet his eyes. “Yep.”
He scooches down in the bed, so his face is even with mine. “I was a smart kid.”
“Yes.”
His eyes trace my features. “You have a good memory. I remember bothering you in the third grade by poking you with a pencil.”
I laugh. “We probably have dozens of those stories,” I say. “I don’t remember them all. I just get flashes sometimes.”
He leans forward and presses a kiss to my cheek. “Why did you kiss me then?”
“We’d gotten in trouble, and you tried to make me feel better about it.”
His lips linger on my skin, drifting kisses from my cheek down to my jaw, then my neck. He shifts, and I roll to my back, offering him easier access.
“Just like now,” I say and lay my palms against his back.
“I want to spend my life making you feel good, Hannah,” he says and uses his mouth to show me.
“It’s working.”
He looks up from his position and grins before kissing from my boobs down my stomach. “Do you ever wonder,” he says between kisses, “if other people feel this happy?”
“Like who?”
“Like our parents?”
“You wonder about your parents having sex?”
He looks up and scrunches up his face. “No.” He shudders. “I can’t imagine that.”
“Well, they had you,” I say, my hands in his hair now.
“I was an accident.”
I grab ahold of his head and make him stop kissing me. “What?”
“An unplanned pregnancy before they were married. They got married because of me.” Seth settles down against me, his cheek on my belly. “I can hear you gurgling. We should go eat.”
I’m still thinking about what he’s said. “Did you feel like that? An accident?” His attempt in kindergarten to make me feel better—It wasn’t you they were mad at, Hannah. It was me—makes my heart beat with a tender rhythm. I weave my fingers through his hair over and over.
He sighs, then says, “It’s hard not to when you got beat up by your dad. And when he drunkenly told you that his life would have been better without you. So, yeah.”
I notice he’s distanced himself from it.
He tries to get up, but I pull him back to me. “Seth?”
“Hannah?” He smiles, dimples.
There’s a lot drifting through my mind at this realization, and I’m not sure where to begin, but it feels too important to let it drift away into the shadows. “And now?”
“Now what? It’s time to eat.” He’s deflecting, and sits up, his back to me.
“You’re putting up a wall,” I tell him.
He freezes on the edge of the bed.
I sit up and crawl so that I’m behind him, then wrap my legs around him. “No dinner until you talk to me.”
He looks over his shoulder with a short smile. “Hannah Fleming is always calling me out on my shit.”
“I’m yours. You’re mine. And this is what we do now, okay?”
He nods. “I don’t feel like that anymore, no. My parents and the therapy all of us have done has helped, but the truth is–” He stops and lifts a hand to grab ahold of my arm stretched around his collar bone.
When he doesn’t resume his thought, I squeeze his torso with my thighs wrapped around his waist and my arms around his shoulders. “Truth is what?”
He glances at me again over his shoulder, then turns in my arms, pushing me across the bed, to press me into the mattress with his weight. “I haven’t forgiven him. I can’t find a way to do it. I’m just so angry at him.”
I nod and reach up, skimming locks of hair away from his face even though they fall right back to where they were, enjoying the weight of him holding me down. “Can’t say I blame you.”
“But?”
“No but.”
“He might be sick,” Seth says, pressing his face into the space between my neck and shoulder.
I freeze. “What?”
“He hasn’t been feeling well and the doctor ordered some tests.”
His words wind up my gears and I start moving again, touching him, his hair, his back, his arms, offering comfort. “Have you heard anything yet?”
He shakes his head and just lays in my arms, taking a deep breath before looking up. “You know the worst part?”
I shake my head, searching his face.
“Is that I feel like he deserves it. Like life is offering a twisted form of justice. What kind of person does that make me? What kind of son?”
“A human one.”
He shakes his head and returns to the space against my neck. “Not one that deserves your love.”
“There isn’t a correlation,” I say, then I realize I’d done the same thing. I’d settled for Sebastian because I hadn’t believed I deserved love. I hadn’t forgiven myself for being a human being. “You know where I was while my dad was dying?” I say quietly, as if I’m in a confessional booth.
He looks up and waits for me.
“I was drunkenly having sex for the first time with a guy named Hunter.” My eyes meet his.
Seth’s eyebrows arch over his eyes, and he tilts his head. This isn’t a look of judgment, but rather, curiosity, awareness, connection.
“Does that make me a horrible daughter?” And I realize as I say it, it doesn’t. It never did.
He shakes his head. “Of course not.”
“And when I got back to my dorm the next morning only to learn my father had died, all I felt was this horrible guilt.”
He skims my hair with his hand. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I know.” I trace a finger over his jaw. “That’s rational. But guilt and shame aren’t rational, are they? Neither are fear and anger. You know what my mom told me last time I was home?”
“What?”
“That guilt, shame, fear, and anger are prisons. I never told her about Hunter–” I stop and take a breath– “but she knew I carried them for not being there. It’s taken me until just now to forgive myself for it.” I offer him a smile as tears slips from the corners of my eyes.
Seth dips down and presses a kiss to my cheek.
“You deserve my love. You are wonderful,” I tell him. “You are kind and compassionate. You are sweet and thoughtful.” I push his hair off his forehead so I can see his face. “You are perfectly and wonderfully made, and exactly where you were designed to be, Seth Peters. And I love you.”
His eyes are glassy with his own unshed tears as he uses his thumbs to wipe away mine.
“I don’t know what that means about forgiving your dad or not, but it doesn’t make you a bad son. It doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be happy or to have love. You deserve forgiveness for being human.”
Seth kisses me then, shifting so that we’re completely pressed together, our puzzle pieces coming together to form a beautifully whole picture.