Robert, Her Billionaire Widower

Chapter 9

Vanessa was excited for a session for the first time in a very long time indeed. She was excited because of the fact that the last session had been so much fun. She had enjoyed the sessions that had preceded the ones where Robert had started to get depressed but that had been more due to a clinical fascination with what Robert was going through rather than anything else. She didn’t really get what she had been craving from the moment she had met Robert, and that was his company.

Sure, she had been in his presence while he was telling her about Marie, but he had not been present. He had been far away, thinking about what was going on in his life and how it was different from what he had previously enjoyed with his wife. He was thinking about someone else while Vanessa was in the same room as him and this was not easy for her to go through at all because she liked him very much, and a large portion of her feelings were romantic in nature. It wasn’t easy for her to think this way. It wasn’t easy for her to go there day after day and listen to a man that she was quickly developing feelings for talk about another woman.

Now, however, a brand new avenue had opened up. The previous session had been a lot of fun, and they had talked about music all day until it had started to get late and Vanessa had to get home. They were both quite sad that they would not be able to talk anymore so Robert asked Vanessa if she wanted to come over the next day as well to do a session. Naturally, Vanessa said yes, that she would be absolutely delighted to do an extra session.

She was a little concerned as well. This was heading into somewhat dangerous territory. What if he got attached to her, that would allow her to feel safe getting attached to him? What if he felt like everything was going the way he had wanted it to and this would facilitate them being in a relationship? It was a disconcerting thought. Even though she wanted a relationship with him, she couldn’t see it ending well. She couldn’t think of a single scenario in which she would be able to be with him without the ghost of his dead wife haunting pretty much every single aspect of their relationship. She couldn’t think of a single situation where she would be able to be happy for very long because Robert had a lot that he needed to get over and she didn’t think that he would be emotionally available right now.

Regardless, humans crave what they want no matter what the consequences might be, and so she was quite enjoying the thought of going to Robert’s place today and talking her heart out at last, she enjoyed the thought of being in his presence and feeling like everything was going to be okay, like everything in her life made sense.

What she really liked about Robert was how he made her feel understood. She loved the way he made her feel like everything she thought and felt held real weight, that it was important to him not just as a fellow human being but because he personally liked Vanessa as well. He made her feel special. He listened to her completely and that made her feel like everything in her life was going to be okay which, if she was being honest with herself, was a bit of a first for her. She was not used to feeling like everything was going to be okay. She was used to uncertainty, she was used to feeling like she wasn’t good enough. However, this was not the case when she was with Robert. When she was with him she would feel like everything she did was good enough. She would feel, in all things, completely adequate.

This was what she craved. The feeling of being adequate. All her life she had felt like she was not really worthy of love, mostly because the relationships that she had been in had not ended so well for her. In pretty much every relationship she had been in so far, she had been made to feel awkward or weird, she had been made to feel like the things she liked or was passionate about were somehow separate from the things that normal people thought about and this made her feel very alone indeed. This made her feel like some kind of ‘other’, a person that was not worthy of love because they did not think like everyone else did.

If she was honest, she would say that Robert did not really understand a lot of the things she said either. She had a way of thinking that was very different from what other people thought so this didn’t surprise her in the slightest. She knew that if she tried to find someone that was like her, that thought in the exact same way, that felt the exact same things; she felt she would be doing an injustice to herself. She would be being unfair to herself because that was not at all how life worked. Life was not so fulfilling and romantic, life was not so easily lived.

Robert did not share a lot of her opinions and views about the world. She was okay with this because she knew that he, at the very least, understood that she had a right to feel that way, understood that she was well within her rights to think whatever the hell she wanted and that he should accept her for who she was. This was what attracted her to him. The thing she had been craving for so long was being given to her so readily, but by a man that she could not be with.

She needed to be with him now, however, so she left for his place. For perhaps the hundredth time he greeted her with a warm smile but this time something was different. There was something in his smile that had not been there before. No, that was not quite right. There was something missing from his smile, but this was not a bad thing at all. This was not something to be worried about. No, the thing that was missing from his smile was something that had never belonged there in the first place.

She realized with a start that his smile was not as tinged with grief as it had been before. It was still quite sad, it had always been a sad smile, but what surprised Vanessa was that it was not nearly as sad as it had been before. A lot of sadness was missing from it and this made her happy because she felt like she had had an important role to play in the removing of this sadness from his smile. She felt like she had played a part in making him happier and that made her happy because that was simply the kind of person that she was.

She always felt happy when she made others happy. It made her feel better about herself, it vastly improved her sense of self worth, and it made her feel like if that person loved her in any way she had done something to deserve that love. This was something that Vanessa had felt in every single relationship of her life, both intimate and platonic. She had felt the need to deserve the love that she was getting. She had felt the need to make that person feel like she was worthy of all of the positive vibes they were giving her.