Dark red lines wrapped around his ribs and stomach, and there were bruised-looking marks across his skin.
“You’re hurt!”
I reached toward him.
“What happened?”
He gently caught my hand.
“I’m not injured the way you think.”
“Then what caused that?”
For a long moment, he seemed too embarrassed to answer.
Finally, he reached into his suitcase and pulled out a black compression garment.
“Men’s shapewear.”
I stared at it.
“Why are you wearing that?”
He looked away.
“Because I didn’t want you to see what happened to me while you were sick.”
“I don’t understand.”
Jeffrey sat heavily on the edge of the bed.
“When you got sick, I stopped taking care of myself. I barely slept. I quit exercising. Sometimes I forgot to eat. Other times I ate everything I could find because it was the only thing that calmed me down.”
He rubbed both hands over his face.
“I’ve gained almost sixty pounds since your diagnosis.”
I stared at him.
“That’s why you’ve been wearing those huge shirts?”
He nodded.
“And why you change in the bathroom?”
“Yes.”
“When you told me we were coming here, I panicked. I remembered our honeymoon photographs and what I looked like twenty years ago. I bought that compression thing because I thought if I wore it all weekend, maybe you wouldn’t notice how much I’d changed.”
I looked at the angry marks around his waist.
“But you can’t sleep in it.”
“No.”
He let out a broken laugh.
“I can barely breathe wearing it. I couldn’t lie beside you all night knowing you might feel what was underneath. So I booked another room.”
I stared at him in disbelief.
“Let me understand this. You rented another hotel room because you thought you were too heavy to sleep next to your wife?”
He lowered his head.
“Yes.”
“Because you were afraid I wouldn’t find you attractive anymore?”
He nodded.
And suddenly, the absurd truth hit me.
We had both spent months hiding from exactly the same fear.
PART 4
I sat beside Jeffrey on the bed.
“I need to confess something too.”
His head lifted immediately.
“For the last five months, I’ve been standing in front of mirrors hating everything I see. I convinced myself you stayed because you felt sorry for me. I kept waiting for the day you would finally admit you didn’t find me attractive anymore.”
“I could never feel that way about you.”
“And all this time, you were thinking the exact same thing about yourself.”
For a second, neither of us spoke.
Then I laughed.
It came out mixed with tears.
“We’re idiots.”
Jeffrey’s mouth twitched.
“We really are.”
“Twenty years of marriage, and we drove all the way back to our honeymoon hotel only to hide in separate rooms because each of us thought we weren’t good enough for the other.”