Chapter 38
brANDON
Ipace the narrow confines of Tatum’s dorm room, five steps in one direction before spinning on my heel and retracing my path.
My fingers rake through my hair for what must be the hundredth time, leaving it standing in all directions.
The adrenaline from the game has long since faded, replaced by a gnawing anxiety that tightens my chest with each passing minute.
How is it that every time I’ve planned to tell Tatum how I feel, something or someone derails me?
This isn’t how tonight was supposed to go, but from the moment I found her waiting for me in the parking lot and she suggested I hook up with some random chick, something had felt off.
“She should be back by now,” I mutter, checking my phone again. No messages. No calls. Nothing.
When I knocked on her door an hour ago, her roommate Brit had answered with a knowing smile.
“She’s not here,” she’d said, stepping aside anyway. “But you can wait. I’m heading out to meet Tyler.”
Now the small room feels like it’s shrinking around me. Her desk and the floor beside her bed are covered with romance books. It feels like they’re mocking me, because my happily ever after feels about a thousand miles away.
I shouldn’t have left her there with Ethan, but what choice did I have? If I had stayed, I would’ve broken his nose for a second time—or worse—because the sight of him standing there, looking at her like he had any right to her, made my blood boil.
I reach a hand to the back of my neck and squeeze as I picture the look on Tatum’s face when she talked about seeing other people. It’s like she could sense my feelings for her and wanted to let me down easy. Like what we had was just some casual thing she was ready to move on from.
I stop at her desk, my eyes falling on a framed photo of us from last fall. Her arms are wrapped around my neck, both of us laughing at something I can’t remember. What I do remember is how it felt to hold her, how perfectly she fit against me.
“Dammit,” I growl, pulling out my phone again. My thumb hovers over her contact, needing to hear her voice. But if I call, and she’s with him . . .
The door swings open, and I spin around so fast I nearly trip over my own feet.
Tatum freezes in the doorway, her keys dangling from her fingers. “Brandon?” Her voice is soft, her eyes wide with surprise. “What are you doing here?”
Like I’d be anywhere else.
Ignoring her question, I scan her face, her body, looking for any sign of distress. “Are you okay?” The question comes out rougher than intended.
“I’m fine.” She closes the door behind her, dropping her purse on her bed. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
I take a step toward her, unable to stop myself. “What did he want? Ethan?”
Tatum’s eyes flick to mine, then away, and Each second she doesn’t answer feels like an eternity, like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff waiting to fall.
“To get back together.” She says it so casually, like she’s commenting on the weather and not tearing my world apart.
“What did you say?” I ask, pushing past the lump in my throat. My voice sounds hollow, foreign even to my own ears, and I clench my jaw, bracing for the words I know will shatter me.
My hands ball into fists at my sides, fingernails digging into my palms when she laughs, the sound surprising me. “What do you think I said? I told him there wasn’t a chance in hell.”
Relief floods through me, so intense my knees nearly buckle. I drop onto the edge of her bed, letting out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
“You did?” I search her face for any hint of a lie but find only amusement dancing in her eyes.
“Of course I did. God, Brandon. Give me some credit.”
A smile tugs at my lips before I remember what she said after the game, and it fades. “Did you really mean what you said, all that talk about seeing other people?”
She sobers, her expression turning guarded before she gives me her back, busying herself with hanging up her jacket. “I have a confession,” she says.
I straighten, hit with a nauseating sense of déjà vu.
Suddenly, I’m thrown back to that day in this very dorm room months ago, when I was supposed to tell her how I felt.
Back then, she beat me to the punch, informing me that she was transferring schools to be near Ethan.
But this time, I’m not taking chances. I’m not letting another second go by without telling her how I feel.
“Tatum, look at me.” My voice cracks with emotion as I stand, crossing the room to her in two strides.
She turns, biting her lip as she tips her gaze up to meet mine.
“I’m in love with you,” I tell her.
The words hang in the air between us, five syllables carrying the weight of everything I’ve felt since the moment I met her.
“I’ve always loved you, but I got comfortable.
I didn’t want to risk what we had, but watching you with Ethan .
. . it nearly killed me. And when you made that friends with benefits proposal, the only reason I even hesitated was because I was scared to death of what it would do to me to have you and then lose you again. ”
I reach out, cupping her face in my hands, and praying like hell it’s a good sign when she doesn’t pull away. “Because I can’t lose you, Tate. Not now. Not ever. And the thought of you with someone else—”
I stop, swallowing hard against the lump in my throat. My heart hammers so violently I’m certain she can hear it. I close my eyes, steeling myself for rejection, for her gentle letdown, for the end of everything.
But the blow never comes.
When I open my eyes, she’s staring at me, lips parted in shock, tears glistening in her eyes. “You’re in love with me?” she whispers, her voice trembling.
“More than anything.” The truth of it resonates in my chest, a certainty I’ve only ever felt when it comes to her.
“Brandon,” she breathes, leaning into my touch. “I can’t—” Her voice cracks, and my heart splinters.
I drop my hands, certain the throbbing, stabbing pain in my chest is what it feels like to die of a broken heart. “It’s fine,” I say, not wanting to upset her. “I get it. Really.”
She blinks up at me, a crease in her brow. “No.” She shakes her head. “You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say I can’t lose you, either.” She reaches out, placing her hands in mine as hope balloons in my chest. “Because I’m in love with you too.”
The breath leaves my lungs in a violent rush as if I can’t believe my ears.
Gripping her waist, I pull her against me, afraid this is all a dream and she might disappear. “Say it again,” I murmur into her hair. “Please.”
“I’m in love with you. I love you so much it hurts.”
I pull back to meet her eyes, and her fingers trace the line of my jaw. “God, I love you.”
I capture her lips with mine, pouring every ounce of longing, every sleepless night, every moment of jealousy and wanting into the kiss. She tastes like apples and salt, tears neither of us bothers to hide.
I keep her close, clutching the back of her head, afraid I might wake up and find myself still on the sidelines, still waiting and wanting and swallowing down all the things I never let myself say.
My feelings for Tatum weren’t instantaneous.
There wasn’t some cosmic shift the day I met her.
Instead, it was a slow accumulation, a snowball that started with sharing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich all those years ago, rolled all the way here—all these years later—to the edge of my fucking sanity.
There are so many versions of Tatum catalogued inside me I could build a museum: her teeth glowing with blue sherbet at thirteen on the Fourth of July; the way she hums when she’s trying not to cry, clutching her knees in the beanbag chair at three in the morning on game nights as she tries to stay awake; the time she didn’t have a phone stand yet and necklace-chained her phone to her bra so she could record a hands-free video for BookTok that involved uncoordinated choreography and I nearly combusted watching from the window.
There’s the Tatum who texts me pictures of pugs in sweaters at 2 a.m., the one who learned to throw a perfect spiral just to shut me up, the one who never missed a game in high school because she knew my parents wouldn’t be there.
For years the wanting was its own kind of background radiation—never lethal, just always there, a low ache in the bones.
Sometimes, when I was feeling particularly stupid, I’d convince myself to kill it off with logic: She’s your best friend.
She needs you. Don't fuck this up by making it weird. In every version of my internal calculus, I’d rather lose a limb than lose her over some misfired confession.
Even tonight—up to twenty minutes ago, in the lot, with Ethan slunk beside her like a shadow—I questioned my plan to tell her how I really felt.
But thank fuck I did, because I’m here with her against me, both of us shaking. The impossible has become possible.
Even as her lips meet mine, soft and hungry, my brain can’t compute it.
There’s a part of me still waiting for the punchline—still waiting to wake up alone in my own bed, heart kicked to shit while the morning sun slants through the window.
But Tatum is here, pressed against me so tight it’s like she wants to fuse us together.
My hands tangle in her hair, and I fight the urge to collapse with her right here on the floor, just to anchor myself in the reality of her.
She tastes like victory and hope and all the hours we wasted not doing this. I see it play like a movie—the months, the years, the small seconds that built this thing between us while I told myself I didn’t care—we were better off friends because I was so damn scared of ruining us.
Her lips move against mine as if she can transmit everything in all the words we’ve both left unsaid, and I kiss her back, slow and deliberate, until her arms circle my neck and something infinite opens beneath my feet.
We move toward her bed and collapse onto it. I hold her, needy and relieved as her arms wind around my neck, her body melting into mine as if she belongs there. Because she does. She always has.
For the first time in years, everything goes quiet—the noise, the what-ifs, the fear of losing her. All that’s left is this—the steady rhythm of her heart against mine, the warmth of her breath on my skin, the certainty that we finally got it right.
Tomorrow there’ll be practices and exams and a world that won’t stop spinning, but tonight, it’s just us. No pretending. No almosts. No secrets or words left unsaid. Just the two of us, tangled up in a promise we never had to say out loud but finally did.
And as her fingers find mine, lacing together like they were always meant to, I know one thing with absolute clarity—this time, I’m never letting go.