But since I do know her, I understand her compulsion to cling on to the object of her affection and parade it possessively. It’s behavior that drove others away from her, which is something I can never understand. I thrive on her attention. I respond to it in kind. We tangle ourselves together with our need to belong to each other. And our love grows stronger through it. More sure.

Along with my twice-weekly meetings with Dr. Alberts, we see a couple’s counselor every Monday. Dr. Lucille Parns. She insists that we call her Lucy. For Alayna’s sake, I actually succumb to the nickname. I’d worried at first that Lucy would frown upon my and Alayna’s attachment. Call it unhealthy. Surprisingly, she doesn’t. Instead she nurtures the aspects that have worked as strengths in our relationships. She encourages our high-level infatuation and our sex life as a means to connect.

Not that Lucy would have any impact on our sex life. I can’t keep my hands off Alayna, and fortunately, she can’t seem to keep her hands off me either.

Despite what we have going for us, Lucy does expect a lot of work. She focuses on our lack of communication and trust. It’s a mystery to me how I can be determined to share everything with Alayna now, and yet, when Lucy presses us, it’s still so hard to be that transparent. “Old habits die hard,” she reminds us. Then she assigns us a new exercise that sounds easy and proves to be a struggle.

Tonight, our assignment is full disclosure. From me. Though Alayna has figured out the basics of my games with Celia and my scheme regarding her, I’ve never told her all of it. Alayna’s not even entirely sure she wants to hear it.

But Lucy has insisted on it. “Alayna’s already forgiven you,” she’d said. “Use that knowledge to erase any fears you have. But there’s no way for you—for both of you—to put this fully to rest without letting light into every corner of this darkness.”

So this is the night we’ve chosen for my confession—exactly one month after she accepted my proposal. My chef prepared a dinner that we ate together by candlelight on our brand new dining table. We still don’t have living room furniture, and summer’s quickly flying away, so after our meal we take advantage of this warm evening and move to the balcony.

The new outdoor furniture is better cushioned than the set I’d had before, yet I can’t get comfortable in my seat. Alayna offers me a drink, but I turn it down. I don’t want to suppress any emotions that come from this confession. It may not be easy, but I want to feel all of it with her.

She angles her chair to face me head on and curls her feet underneath her. She doesn’t pressure me to start, and we sit for several long minutes in silence. Then I begin.

I start with the emotionally closed-off young man I’d been, the man who wanted to understand the relationships he was missing out on because of his lack of feeling. I tell her how he experimented on people he knew. How he experimented on his closest friend and turned her into a hateful, bitter woman.

I tell it all—how I’d kissed Celia, how I’d fucked her friend, how she’d fucked my father, how she’d gotten pregnant. All of it.

Alayna doesn’t interrupt. She listens intently, her expression changing with the particularly disturbing details. It isn’t until I tell her about the night of the symposium, the night I’d first seen her and my life instantly changed, that the tears start. They’re sweet tears that fall quietly down her face. They make it harder for me to go on to the part where I betrayed her. But I do. I tell her all the things I thought and felt, and how I convinced myself I was doing something good, but I always knew that it was wrong.

I end at The Sky Launch, when Alayna realized the truth. It’s the worst part and the best part. It was the moment I almost lost everything. But it was also the moment that I was finally free to love Alayna in the way she deserved, and in that way, it was the moment I gained everything.

I don’t tell her that the whole thing was Celia’s game. I will, one day. But tonight is for my faults, my mistakes. No one else’s. Admitting my own role as victim shifts the focus away from that.

It takes over two hours to complete my story, and when I do, I’m exhausted. Mentally and physically. And I can’t hide that I’m down. It’s been an evening of recalling my sins. I’m humiliated. I’m ashamed.

Alayna stares at the skyline past me, a breeze blowing her hair behind her so her face is clear and visible. Still, it’s hard to read her thoughts as she takes everything in. I start to think that maybe now I need that drink, but then her eyes swing to meet mine and she speaks.

“It’s not on the agenda for me to disclose anything,” she says, “but I have my own confession.”

I’m not worried about anything she has to tell me. The things she thinks are her flaws are the very aspects of her that I adore most. But I am intrigued.

She clears her throat. “It could be easy to listen to what you’ve said and focus on the heartache that you say you caused. But the part that’s missing is that your experiments were done on grown-up people. Adults who are, in the end, responsible for themselves. You hurt Celia. She had a chance to walk away, and she didn’t. She’s culpable for what she became after that. That’s all her, H. Not you.”

I tilt my head and study her. “You had a chance to walk away, too.”

“I did. And me coming back to you—that’s all me.” Her lips twist into a smile. “Though you did do a damn good job of making yourself impossible to resist.”

Weakly, I return her smile. It’s a small comfort against the weight of my past.

Alayna gets up suddenly and crawls onto my lap, straddling me. My cock stirs automatically from our point of contact, but I ignore it. She wraps her arms around my neck, and my own hands settle around her waist.

“Here’s my confession, H. It’s a difficult one to admit because I don’t want it to sound like I condone the things you did.” She takes a deep breath. “But, honestly, I wouldn’t have given you the time of day if you hadn’t manipulated me. No matter how you chased me. Nothing you could have done would have made me start any sort of relationship with you.”

My eyes narrow. She’s told me before that she was as instantly attracted to me as I was to her. It was in her face, in her body language from the moment we first interacted. Surely if I’d approached her in the conventional method of courtship, I could have won her attention.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she says, apparently picking up on my confusion. “I was attracted to you at first sight. You pulled me to you inexplicably. I was instantly fixed on you. And that made you everything that I should stay away from. I’d been well for a long time before you, Hudson. I’m pretty sure I could have stayed on the wagon. It would have been difficult, but I would have avoided you like the plague.”

She moves her hands around to caress my jaw. The soft flutter of her thumbs against my stubble sends shocks to my groin. “Then you waved money in front of me. And I convinced myself I needed that money enough to break my rules and do the thing you asked of me. If you hadn’t done that, Hudson, if you hadn’t played me…” She shakes her head at wherever her thoughts trailed off to. “Honestly, I don’t think there’s any other way you could have won my attention. Unless you held a promotion over my head in exchange for spending time with you, and that would have been just as shitty.”

She leans down and kisses me softly then leans her forehead against mine. “I would never have given myself the chance to fall in love with you if you hadn’t forced me to. It doesn’t excuse you. But it’s the truth. And for that, I have to say that I guess things happened how they should have. If I had the chance to rewrite it all, I don’t think I would change a thing. This is the path that led to me with you like this. It’s the reason I came back to you so easily. Because I realized I’d rather live through your betrayal and end up with you than never to have gotten you at all.”