“I know. I’m sorry for everything too.”

She took in a shaky breath. “How will we ever get over this? Is it even possible?”

“Shhhh,” I quieted her, placing a finger over her lips. “Now isn’t the time.”

She watched me again. Her tears stopping, her eyes widening slightly at the realization that I was brushing this aside. Would she dissent from that opinion? Force the conversation that we’d been avoiding since the moment I’d found out about the cancer, her pregnancy, the huge gap that had widened between us when we hadn’t been looking?

“When will it be the time, Adam?”

I took a breath and let it go, touching her cheek again. “When you are strong and healthy again. Come on. You need to sleep. It’s going to be a long day for you tomorrow.”

And just when I was readying myself for her protest, trying to outthink her argument, she only nodded and moved to stand up without my help. I rose beside her and she slipped her small hand inside mine. I clasped it firmly, pulling her toward the doorway. She sighed and leaned against me.

“I don’t want to sleep alone tonight. Please…can I sleep with you?”

I wanted to tell her no, encourage her back into her room. I wanted to push her away again. Because she was getting too close. The safeguards around my feelings and that tiny bit of willingness to hold on to past resentments stood to take a battering. But she needed me. And I needed her to need me.

She came to my room and I changed, lay on the bed and pressed her close against me, wrapping her in my arms and burying my face against her neck, immersing myself in her smell. That ever-present sting, like a scab that had been ripped off my soul, intensified.

She was asleep in minutes, so still and frail in my arms. And my mind was wandering through all the possibilities that the future held for us—even to those unthinkable yet all too possible ones that I never allowed myself to consider.

If I lost her, I’d lose everything.

But there was more way than one to lose her. She would survive. She had to. But that didn’t mean that we as a couple, could. I had to admit it…I had my doubts. We were human, after all and there was a lot of water under that bridge—a lot of hurtful things had happened between us. It would be a long, hard road to mutual and self-forgiveness. The love was there…oh God, it was there. But obstacles like this required more than love to overcome.

My eyes finally closed hours later and in what seemed like seconds, my alarm was blaring in my ear and the space beside me where she had been was empty and cold.

Chapter Seventeen

Mia

“Online Friendship: Is It the Real Deal?” –Posted on the blog of Girl Geek on March 3, 2014

What’s a “real” friend versus an online friend? Are those relationships the same or even similar? Should they be stuck with the same label? Recent studies on the online social media phenomenon have shown that a person usually has far more virtual friends than real-life ones. These same studies, however, claim that the virtual friends can be no substitute for “face-to-face” friends because real-time experiences cannot be shared in the same way through text chat and comments on your favorite social site.

With online gaming, such is not the case.

It can be argued that with our online friends, we have complete control over how we present ourselves. We have time to formulate responses to them. We can be selective in the information that we share. We don’t have body language or weird tics or insecurities to hide. These facts can lead to the belief that your gamer friends cannot possibly know you like your face-to-face friends do. The medium of online gaming allows us to form a buffer for ourselves, erect a façade of the written word. We can even provide an avatar as a visual in order to prevent exposing our real identity.

But those same online friends we hold at such a distance are, in many ways, our close comrades in arms. We go off to battle together, spend long hours working on quests together. We adventure together, virtually. We sit for long hours waiting for the right spawn to show up with the items we need. We joke. We play around. We make memories. And they may be memories shared over bits and bytes rather than stories swapped over the campfire, but is there really a difference? These are our companions. We fight virtual wars together. We comfort each other through disappointments.

And sometimes…sometimes we meet in person. And we find that that same chemistry that brought us together as friends over the game exists even more in real life. Because aside from forming that bond based on geography, as you would with random classmates or roommates from school—you have shared epic experiences. Events that, at some later time, you’ll still chuckle at and start your sentences with things like, “Remember that time we were fighting the Cinder Dragon in Ashenstorm Castle and it took us eight hours to clear the place because we all kept dying over and over again?”