Cautious(ly) Now

She walks up to me and she looks girly and fun and soft and warm and all those things. I feel at ease with that slight tension that tells me I straight up like this girl.
It's an odd feeling.
I haven't had it in nearly a year. A fresh face. A new enigma. The potential....the possibility....the time before the hurt and the blasé and the irony.
She sits across from me and I lean in and kiss her. I want to grab her face in my hands and rub my stubble across her face but I casually ask her how her *** was.

We talk and read and make idle conversation. She's hard to read at times. She asks me about my ex. She probes and I give her some information. I give her some truth.

I tell her the truth which was that I had to be true to myself.
I had to save myself.

We leave and go to the *****. She shops idly and time seems to fall away. She places her arm in mine and we're just a man and a woman walking together in the afternoon sun.
I can see her hair balled up inside my fist and her biting my neck.
We talk and it's time for us each to go on our way.
We kiss and she confides that she feels good when she's with me.
I smile.
We make plans and I am glad.

That dark passenger watches on. He whispers that it's not to last.
He whispers that somehow, something will tear it all apart.
He used to whisper that I didn't deserve her or to be happy.
That I wasn't normal like her.
He doesn't whisper those things anymore....because they simply are no longer true enough to be a threat.
I'm strong enough to hope that things can be different and that I don't have to live the way I did before. I don't have to be that person anymore.
I don't really have to hide anything. I can be myself and I can say things without having to wonder if I'll get caught in a lie later.
I don't feel the fear.
I feel the acceptance that if my fear is true, worrying won't change it.
I get in my car, slip on my sunglasses and drive in the warmth basking in the pleasant afterglow of time spent with someone you want to be around.