Chapter 12 #2
“I’ll figure you out,” he jokingly threatened. “I am serious, though, you were not at all like I expected. I was scared you’d want nothing to do with me, and that would’ve made my week very difficult.”
“Why was that?”
“Because you were gorgeous and I wanted to at the very least talk to you. I practically begged Sue to make you eat dinner with me Sunday night.”
Gorgeous.
Gorgeous had heft to it.
Gorgeous was a word people used to describe people like Evan McLeod. I was pretty most days, beautiful sometimes, and hot when the lighting was right. I had never heard the word gorgeous reserved for me in a casual sentence.
My inclination was to believe that every compliment was a lie wrapped in a pretty bow, and this was no exception. Even after we had kissed and had a few moments that may have felt like romance.
“You’re completely bullshitting me,” my knee jerk reaction slipped out.
Evan was visibly frustrated by my resistance, his eyes narrowed into icy blue daggers. “I’m completely not. Can you stop acting like me being interested in you is something impossible?”
When I was with Evan and too preoccupied by affection to think, it was easy, but when things got quiet, or like now when things were becoming verbalized, and therefore, real, it was a harsh reminder that he was still the Evan McLeod. “People like you aren’t supposed to fall for people like me.”
“Who decided that?”
“Everyone? Society? Every TMZ article I’ve ever read?” The words were spilling out of me now. Of course I’d had passing thoughts of the comments and snark pages dedicated to scrutinizing everything about me, and that was aside from the fanfiction.
Evan stopped behind me and grabbed my arm to turn me towards him.
“Aren’t I ultimately the one who makes that decision?
Something is different about you, Dani, something precious.
I know we’re still essentially strangers to one another, and I know this whole thing is moving too fast for it to make sense, but I don’t want to let this go yet. It would be foolish of me to.”
There it was. My own romantic monologue.
Something I’d watched in romcoms, period dramas, and of course, on Thorndown. They were words I could have written. No writer had handed Evan a script. It was all him, steeped in honesty.
“Yes, but—” I’d lost all sense of reality now, I was grasping for reasons I could make this come to a grinding halt. My secret hung over my head like a dark storm cloud, heavy with rain.
“But what?” he remarked.
But everything. Everything about this was wrong, horribly wrong. I didn’t want to be falling for him like this, I didn’t want him to say these sweet romantic words. I didn’t want to be here with Evan because with every passing moment I knew that it was going to hurt more and more when it ended.
“I’m worried this is a passing phase because I’m a warm body in close proximity to you,” I spit out, fingers trembling. The woods surrounding us had been quiet, like the birds and trees were eavesdropping on our vulnerability.
“Trust me Dani, if I wanted to avoid you this week I easily could have. Did you think I actually needed a guide to take me to the falls after your uncle wrote me detailed directions down to every last twig? I’m not impulsive or rash, I’m of sound mind and body right now, and I want you, desperately. ”
I was straddling a chasm between truth and fiction.
It was getting harder to hold on. “I don’t understand,” tears sparked by confusion and stress were welling in my eyes, the storm cloud bursting open.
If I walked away the tears wouldn’t have to fall.
I began trudging up the hill again. He followed closely.
“And you don’t have to,” he was nearly chasing me up this mountain. My legs were moving abnormally quickly. “At a minimum there’s clearly some chemistry with us, I think you can agree with that.”
Enough chemistry we needed our own lab.
“I can,” I said without looking at him.
“So, are you open to letting this week play out before resigning yourself to the fact that it won’t work? It’s only a few more days, we can manage each one as it comes.”
He was reading my mind. I’d be mad about it if he didn’t peg me like this. I wanted to be stubborn. I wanted to word vomit all the reasons why yes, of course it won’t work. There was a persistent devil on my shoulder whispering all these doubts in my ear.
I stayed quiet.
Evan’s brows lowered and he nervously ran his fingers through his hair, “do you actually want anything to happen with us?”
“Yes,” I squeaked out.
Everything. I wanted everything to happen between us. This was the stuff of passing fantasies I’d make up when trying to fall asleep. My tired mind would conjure up scenarios just like this one, fingers grasped around a bicep, bodies close together. A future, if my subconscious was daring enough.
Behind these walls I’d tried and failed to build up there was one pressing thing: fear. I was nothing more than someone scared of the new and unfamiliar. This was a risk that couldn’t be calculated. How could I begin to quantify the benefits—and the consequences—of dating Evan McLeod?
“I think I’m allowed to be terrified of all this, no?” I asked quietly.
He took a step backwards, as if he was the one who was terrifying. In a way he was. “You can be. I don’t want to pressure you, I don’t want you to feel any obligation to me because I’m spilling all this out to you or because of who I am.”
I had to correct myself before I let this all slip away, my avoidance was surfacing like a floating, bloated corpse. I needed to bury it and not let it fester. I willed myself to do something, to say something.
“You don’t understand how much I want it.
None of this feels real.” My breath was getting shaky and I couldn’t tell if it was from the physical stress of the hike or emotional stress of this conversation.
“This entire week has been one wild shock to my system after another. And it’s incredible, don’t get me wrong, but it scares me, a lot.
I like things that are easy and this is definitely not easy. ”
“Not easy because of me, right?” he stiffened and paused before stepping over a root.
I rubbed my temples with my index fingers. “That’s not what I’m saying. It’s not your fault the world has a weird relationship with celebrity, and that everyone in your sphere has a microscope on them.”
Evan lived like an ant under a magnifying glass in the hot sun. I lived like a pill bug under a rock. There would never be an equal comparison of our two lives.
Evan nodded slowly. “But my end of things would be what complicates us. I’m not completely immune to that fact.”
“I know, I know, I regret saying it. I have a lot of…stuff…I need to get over.”
“I can help you get over it, you’re not the first non-famous person to date a celebrity.”
“But I’m the first Dani Grant to date Evan McLeod.”
Evan smiled when I’d said date so casually. “So we agree, this thing we’re doing is dating?”
My heart was pounding. I didn’t know if this was dating, or a fling, or a well-crafted fantasy conjured by my comatose subconscious.
“Dating is the closest word in the English language to describe whatever this is.”