Chapter Thirty-Seven
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
My house smells like sugar and cinnamon when I wake. Bleary-eyed, I stumble out of bed and cross to the window.
It’s completely dark outside. I’ve been asleep all day.
I follow my nose to the kitchen. Will is sitting at the island in a chair too small for his frame, the bluish light of his computer screen lighting up his wan face. When he sees me, he glances up, his gaze evaluating.
“Did you bake muffins?” I point to the pan on top of my stove.
“Bought you a muffin pan, too.”
I walk from the hall to the stove, reaching for a muffin. Before my hand makes contact, Will yanks me up by my waist and deposits me on the counter.
“You enjoy putting me up here,” I comment.
“How are you feeling?”
“Hungry.”
Will frowns, reaching behind him to grab a muffin. “They’re raspberry.”
I accept it and peel back the paper. When I take my first bite, some of the sugar dusting rains onto the floor between us. The corner of Will’s lip curls into the ghost of a smile.
“How are they?”
I give him a thumbs-up while I chew. “What time is it?” I ask through a mouthful.
“Nine. You slept for ten hours.”
I raise my eyebrows, both alarmed and unsurprised.
“Camila came by, but she didn’t want to wake you.”
I swallow. “She didn’t say anything about extending her employment, did she?”
“No, but she did say something about forced PTO. For you. She’s seriously worried about you.” After a second he adds, “I am, too.”
“Today was bad,” I agree. “I’m not usually that bad.”
“Wrong. You’re usually better at hiding it.”
I laugh brittlely. “This muffin is delicious.”
Will glances down at it, then back up to me. “Yeah, well, I knew you liked raspberries.”
“How?”
“That’s the popsicle flavor you ordered in Barcelona.”
His mention of Barcelona reminds me of my dream. My expression must shift; his does, too, like a mirror. “What’s on your mind, Josie?”
I sigh. Lick the sugar from my fingertips. Will licks his thumb and uses it to sticker some of the sugar off my thighs before he presses it to his tongue. I temporarily lose concentration before my brain recalibrates.
“I didn’t do a thorough evaluation of the Barcelona supplier. Or the ones in Bangalore, for that matter. I was too… love drunk.”
Will’s eyebrows draw together. “There wasn’t anything we saw on those visits that could have prevented what happened today.”
“But that’s the point, Will. We didn’t see anything. Or at least, I didn’t.”
His lips fold downward. “You act like we walked past a glaring red flag and ignored it.”
“I just…” I put the muffin down and focus my attention on him. “I was distracted that day, is what I’m saying. I was distracted the entire rest of the trip.”
“By me.” His eyes search mine, plunging past my walls and hunting around the vulnerable parts of me that aren’t saying what I really mean.
“Yes. By you.”
For a few more seconds we’re quiet.
“I did it again,” he whispers, his blue eyes warm but sad.
“Did what?”
He looks sideways. “Ruined another thing for you.”
My regret hits me like a boxing punch. I was only explaining my own shortcomings. I didn’t want Will to blame himself for this.
I tip his chin back until he’s facing me again. “You keep envisioning yourself as a catalyst for ruin,” I say. “But Will—the truth is you’re only a catalyst for change. And maybe it starts messy. But it always ends better.”
“How is this better?” he asks, looking desperately disappointed. “This is exactly what you were afraid of.” Will’s hands move up my thighs to my waist, clutching tight. “Before we started this, you told me you were afraid I’d become very important to you, and it would distract you from what’s most important. Revenant. I tried not to do it—tried to fit into your life in a way that allowed for both—but if you don’t think it’s worked, I’ve failed.”
My eyes mist as I watch him watch me. My fingers trail over his cheek. “That’s just it. You didn’t become very important to me. You became what’s most important.”
I pull on his neck until my face is buried in his shoulder. “I love you,” I whisper. “I don’t want to part with you. I wouldn’t be able to go on without you. But I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know how to balance it all. I can’t do it.”
I cry against him as he holds me, his hands rubbing circles on my back. “I love you, too, J. So much. But I can’t do it either. If you aren’t happy, if you aren’t fulfilled, I can’t be—I can’t help—” He cuts himself off, unable to articulate, and keeps rubbing circles.
My body feels like a wrung-out dishrag, wrinkled, used up. After a few minutes, Will pulls back and puts his hands on my cheeks. His eyes lock on mine.
“You and I are going to have an adult conversation about this,” he says. “And at the end of that conversation, we will not have broken up. Agreed?”
I nod. “I couldn’t break up with you if the world depended on it, Will Grant.”
He smiles tightly, looking conflicted by my admission. “You start. Say whatever you want, and we’ll work through it.”
I take a deep breath, feeling nervous and safe all at once. “When I picture your perfect partner, I don’t picture a workaholic. I don’t picture a basket case who can’t open a social media app without coming close to a mental breakdown. I still feel like a villain half the time, Will, especially now, with the Forbes piece, and I just… I want better for you than me.”
He presses his lips to my forehead—a gesture I’ve come to realize is meant to soothe him, primarily. “You say workaholic, I say driven. You call yourself a basket case, but I’d call you self-aware of your boundaries. And besides, the reason you’re my perfect fit is because you’re imperfect. I happen to love your imperfections.”
“And any other time, I’d be selfish enough to let you,” I whisper. “Because I want you that much. But this time, I bit off more than I could chew. I thought I could have it all, but I’m not that kind of girl. People don’t root for me; they pray for my downfall. I’m going to be spending the rest of the year working my ass off to make sure Revenant doesn’t tank for good. It isn’t fair to you, to ask you to stand by me through that.”
“ Fuck fair,” Will says, his face heating. “ Fuck fair, Josephine. I don’t need fair, I don’t want fair. I’ve never even heard of a relationship that’s entirely fair. Together, we make it whole. Together, we add up to one hundred percent. I can meet you more than halfway. I’ll meet you at the seventy percent, eighty percent, ninety percent mark on your worst days if I have to, because I know you’re giving me everything you can. And besides—you know what isn’t fucking fair ? It’s not fair that people in Wisconsin and Florida and Oregon are acting like they know a single fucking thing about you.”
I shake my head, voice weak. “Even Camila couldn’t make it all work. She needed a change, wanted something different for herself, for her marriage, but I don’t have that option because I made this business. I don’t get to walk away from it like everyone else does.”
Will comes back to me, puts his hands on me again. “Remember when I asked you what would happen if this all stopped? And you said you’d fall apart?”
I nod.
“You haven’t fallen apart. You’re in a tough spot, but you’re whole.”
“For now,” I counter.
“So do something about it now, ” he replies. “Don’t keep going one hundred miles per hour when you burned out a long time ago. It won’t work. ”
“But I don’t know where else to put my self-worth,” I say, very slowly. It’s a heartbreaking, vulnerable admission, but Will loves me enough to hear it. “When Revenant succeeds, I feel good about myself. When Revenant fails, I feel like a failure. ”
His eyes shine. “I know that you know how unhealthy that is, sweetheart.”
“I know. Believe me, I know,” I say with a sob. “But I’ve always been like this! I’ve always stacked myself up against standards that are at least partly out of my control. Beauty standards, social media statistics, B Corp scores.”
“The only person who has the power to change that,” Will says, “is you.”
His body slots between my legs. I rest my head on his shoulder, staring at my mint-green sewing machine on top of a stack of books I wish I had time to read.
After half a minute, Will asks, “Have you ever seen a therapist?”
I shake my head. “I’ve thought about it. Never scheduled anything.”
“Do it, for me,” he says.
“I will. I promise.”
He steps away from me and settles against the opposite counter, hands slipping into the pockets of his trousers. He watches me thoughtfully, head tilted just so.
“I’m going to give you some space to sort this out. I’m not going anywhere,” he clarifies when my face floods with alarm. “But even I can admit you need to figure this out on your own. I want to be there for you, Josie, I really do, but I’m not sure you know what you want yet. What your path forward looks like in a world where you stay whole.”
“I want you,” I say. “I love you.”
His eyes darken. “I love you, too.”
He comes back to me and kisses me tenderly, coaxing my head up, narrowing my world to only him. Will’s lips taste like sugar, mine like salty tears. He slides his mouth against mine, soft but bruising. We kiss for seconds, minutes, years.
He is, without a doubt, the most important thing to me. In only three months, that’s what he became. What could Will mean to me after six months, a year? How much paler will the importance of anything else be in comparison to him?
“Do what you have to do, Josephine,” Will whispers against my lips. “Be honest with yourself. And rest easy knowing whatever solution you come up with, I’m going to love you through it.”
Without another word, Will grabs his computer, his backpack, a raspberry muffin that means a lot more to me than a nine p.m. breakfast—
And he leaves.
He takes my permission to breathe with him when he goes.