Chapter 34 Taylor
TAYLOR
Since Gabriel crashed into my life—thankfully not literally—I’d found myself in situations I’d never expected.
My life pre-Gabriel was routine. Work, home, work, home, brunch at Margo’s on Sundays, rinse, repeat.
Now, I was attending volleyball games, playing mini golf, and planning to make my nineties drag debut at my boyfriend’s birthday party.
Spare time was still lacking, but I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
The end of tax season was so close. For once, I had something to look forward to.
Somehow, Gabriel was still here by my side through the late nights and weekend hours, and I wanted to believe that if someone could survive me during tax season, they were in it for the long haul.
I’d been worried when I asked Margo to design the logo for his business that I’d overstepped, but at every turn, Gabriel surprised me.
He’d had the logo printed on labels and business cards and popped it into the header of the simple one-page website he’d made, where people could sign up to be notified when he had a new batch of bitters for sale.
Today, to celebrate another big order from his friends’ bar, Gabriel picked me up from my office in his yellow bug and dragged me to the park for an impromptu picnic. No one could get me to close my laptop quicker than he could.
He pulled a collection of meats and cheeses from a canvas tote bag for us to snack on, along with some boxed wine and grapes—although the grapes mostly ended up on the ground.
Gabriel kept asking me to toss one into his mouth, and I had terrible aim.
But we laughed and laughed until our bellies were full of cheese and our heads were buzzing.
“That one looks like a dragon breathing fire. Do you see its wings?” Gabriel pointed up at the sky from where we were stretched out on the picnic blanket.
Holding hands and leaning our heads together, we searched out a sunflower, the Eiffel Tower, and two cats sword-fighting.
It reminded me of the fanciful daydreams of my childhood before I’d taken the weight of our family and my sister’s life on my shoulders.
How long had it been since I’d taken the time to stare at the sky?
Gabriel made it easy to remember. Gabriel was magic in that way.
We’d been lying on the grass for a few hours watching the cotton candy sunset, and the sky was as dark as it would get in the city.
No stars, just a faint orange glow of the city lights on the horizon.
As the evening chilled, we’d wrapped ourselves tighter around each other.
Now, we were on our sides facing each other on the quilted picnic blanket, faces close, with our legs tangled, and my head on Gabriel’s bicep.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
While it was too dark to distinguish colors by now, I knew the hazel of Gabriel’s eyes was one of my favorites. And those eyes watched me with an open, curious expression. I stroked through his hair, and he played with my hipbone, fingers pressing in.
“You,” I answered, pulling him in for a kiss.
I lost myself in his kisses for a while. Gabriel had never held back, while I felt like I’d been pressing my finger in the crack of a slowly crumbling dam. I’d always said I didn’t want love. Love was a weakness, a vulnerability.
But Gabriel showed me that it was also a strength.
Sure, love could turn you into the worst version of yourself—I’d seen it happen with my parents—but it could also turn you into the very best version of yourself.
Ultimately, I could decide which path I wanted to take.
And with Gabriel’s arms around me, his chest against me, his lips and tongue dancing with mine, I wanted to be better for him.
With that revelation, the dam broke, and the emotion I’d been running from hit me like a flash flood.
Holy shit. I loved him. I was in love with him.
“Gabriel…” I breathed as I pulled back in surprise.
Suddenly, we were doused in a spray of water as the park’s sprinkler system turned on all around us. We shrieked and jumped into action, gathering our picnic and our blankets while the water soaked us. Gabriel dragged my hand as he laughed, running toward the sidewalk.
I let the picnic bag fall as I stopped, pulling him back. Our clothes were soaked through, and the sprinklers were still going, but I grabbed his waist and spun him around. Like I knew he would, Gabriel jumped in with me, giggling and running through the spray.
I became an adult at fifteen, whether I wanted to or not, thrust by a horrible crisis into a world I didn’t choose.
I forgot how to see the magic, or maybe I was forced to stop looking for it.
I’d spent the last seventeen years as the responsible one, the dependable one, the problem-solver.
I didn’t regret the decisions I made to give Margo the life she’d fought so hard for, but somewhere along the way, I lost sight of who I was as a person outside of that role.
Being with Gabriel reminded me how to live again. I was finally breathing after drowning for eons. I couldn’t hold back the tears of laughter as the two of us jumped around like wet dogs with a hose. Gabriel danced under the sprinkler water, and I floated higher.
Maybe I should have been more afraid of this feeling I’d been running from my whole life. But how could I when, in this moment, it felt like transcendence?
We were both gasping and panting by the time the sprinklers shut off. Gabriel’s shirt clung to his muscular chest, and his curls were pasted to the side of his face. I’d never seen anyone so wonderful, and I was never letting him go.
“I love you.” The words spilled out of my mouth with a sigh.
There. It was out in the open. I tensed, waiting to be hit by lightning. Another part of me drifted in a timeless, euphoric haze. Gabriel stood frozen, eyes wide, and the panicked part of me might have won out were it not for the broad smile on his face.
“Finally,” Gabriel said as he pulled me to him, his eyes twinkling. “Feels like I’ve been waiting for ages.”
“Excuse me, what?” I squeezed his sides as I laughed, finally releasing all the built-up tension.
“I’ve loved you since the day you yelled at my mom. It’s about time you got with the program.”
I kissed his lips, his cheek, his jaw. I held him close and whispered ‘I love you’ into his ear until he was shivering. At that point, I wasn’t sure if it was from being cold and wet or my breath on his neck.
When we were finally popsicles, at least by Southern California standards, we took off our soggy shoes and padded barefoot back to the car, hand in hand.
Back at Gabriel’s apartment, I peeled off our damp clothes and pulled him under the shower spray with me. The hot water and the proximity of all his smooth skin went a long way toward warming me up.
“I can’t believe you kept that secret for weeks,” I murmured as I ran my hands up and down his arms. “I had to blurt it out the moment I realized.”
Gabriel smiled at me, water droplets catching in his dimples. “Well, I didn’t think you were ready to hear it. And I wasn’t ready to say it.”
I ran my fingers through his hair, scratching his scalp and watching the shampoo foam up. He closed his eyes and leaned into my touch.
“Maria and I fucked around in college. It was a hookup thing, and we were having fun, but I caught feelings. When I asked her to be my girlfriend officially, she laughed. Told me I was a fun time, and I was way too messy for a serious relationship.”
I was in danger of getting mad all over again. Apparently, people could walk all over me as much as they wanted, but they had better watch out if they came for the ones I loved.
“Your spontaneity is one of your best qualities,” I said with a huff. “She didn’t know what she was talking about.”
Gabriel hummed as I continued to massage his scalp.
“It reinforced so much about what my parents told me my whole life. I’d just come out.
I was struggling in my engineering classes, and I felt like I was letting everyone down.
Especially when Maria got engaged to her now-husband six months later.
She wanted something serious… she just didn’t want it with me. ”
I moved him under the shower spray so he could rinse out the shampoo.
“You deserve a partner who loves every part of you, who would never try to change you into someone you’re not,” I said. “I’d been in stasis for so long, and I feel like I’m living again because of you. You’re a fucking treasure.”
I pulled him close and wrapped him in my arms. His ex may have been willing to walk away, but I was keeping him forever. He trailed his fingers down my back and squeezed my ass in his hands. I couldn’t help laughing and squirming a bit.
Gabriel brushed a thumb across my cheek. “I love seeing you smile. You seemed so weighed down when we met.”
“You make me smile all the time,” I whispered against his lips as I leaned in to kiss him. “So perfect for me.”
And it was true. I’d been so focused on how my parents’ love had let me down that I couldn’t see how the love from my true family—Margo, Kai, and now Gabriel—had helped me become a better person.
We kissed under the shower until all our fingers were pruned, and then we relocated to the bed, limbs and hearts intertwined.
“Remember when we watched that documentary about the monarchs together the other night?” I’d wanted to learn more about them since they overwintered in a part of Mexico not far from where Gabriel’s family was from.
He nodded.
“You know how the first two generations spend their whole lives flying north for the summer? They’ve only seen warming weather, long days, and blooming flowers.
They’ve never experienced winter themselves.
But then the third generation is born, and something inside them tells them they need to fly south.
The opposite direction of their parents and grandparents.
Toward something they’ve never seen, for some reason they don’t understand.
Then they end up in these beautiful mountains with all these other butterflies and find a safe place to rest.”
I pulled Gabriel close to me as I continued. “I know you feel like you’ve been swimming upstream your whole life, but maybe you’re the winter butterfly. Maybe you’re the one who has to fly south, and that’s exactly what you were made for.”
Gabriel’s eyes were so wide that I wasn’t sure I was making any sense, but he rolled me onto my back and settled his head onto my chest and his body between my legs. “I’ve never had anyone see me like you do, Tay. I love you.”
“I love you too, angel.” I ran my fingers through his damp hair as we traded sloppy, sleepy kisses.
When he reached between our bodies to stroke me to hardness, I groaned into his mouth. And when he straddled me and took me inside with nothing between us, I’d never experienced anything so perfect. So right.
What had I been so afraid of? This was the best feeling in the world.