Chapter 24 #3
“My senior year of college, my girlfriend, Helen, who I thought I loved and who I thought loved me, broke up with me. She claimed I wasn’t serious enough to be serious about.
I believed her. Maybe even agreed with her.
I mean, that rang true with things I’d heard from my dad growing up, too.
And since then, it’s been easier to push people away.
If I don’t let anyone get close, I can’t get hurt.
But with you I did get close, I did let myself care.
And every time I suggested that maybe this could be more than just a one week thing between us, I felt like you were pushing me away, trying to keep us a secret because you were embarrassed about being with me. ”
I pull away from his embrace, planting my hands on his hips and looking up at him. “The only thing I was embarrassed about, Beau, was that I let myself love you, even though I knew you were going to leave and break my heart.”
“You let yourself love me, huh?” he says as he reaches out and brushes the errant piece of my hair back behind my ear where it belongs.
Then he cups my cheek in his hand. “I’m relieved I’m not in this alone.
I don’t know how you did it, Sierra, but you managed to change everything about how I view myself and my world.
You make me want to be a better person; you make me want to be the person you think I already am. ”
I reach up and grip his wrist, bringing his hand to my heart. “You already are that person, Beau. You just do a damn good job at hiding it for some reason.”
“The things I care about, I hold close. I hide them to protect them—or more likely, to protect me from losing them.”
“Is that why you hid your feelings for me?” I ask him, still clutching his wrist as my heart pounds steadily under his hand. “Were you afraid you were going to lose me?”
“Everything you said reinforced that this was a short-term thing in your mind,” he says, and I wince at the pain in his voice.
“I felt differently, and sometimes I thought maybe you did too. But you kept insisting that this end when I went to Aspen and you were adamant that my family never find out about it.”
“I thought I was upholding our agreement. I didn’t want to be that clingy girl begging you not to go. I thought if you wanted more, you’d tell me.”
“I did tell you. I asked you to come to Aspen with me.”
“Beau, you asked for another weekend together. I didn’t realize you wanted more than that. Or at least, I assume that’s what you’re telling me?”
“I want whatever you’re willing to give me, Sierra,” he says. He reaches into the pocket of the flannel he’s wearing and pulls out a folded envelope, then hands it to me. “Open it.”
I lead him over to the couch where we sit down facing each other.
Then I do as he asks, sliding out a folded piece of paper, printed double-sided with calendars of the next two months on one side, and the following two months on the other.
On it, he’s written locations and used an arrow to denote the duration of each trip.
In the next three months there are six trips, but every day that’s not part of a trip he’s highlighted in yellow.
On the last month, May, he’s blocked out a week that’s just labeled as “Surprise.”
“What’s this?” I ask after I finish reading the calendars.
“It’s a calendar of all the places I’m committed to being over the next few months.
The days highlighted in yellow are mine to spend however I want.
And I want to spend them with you. It’ll mean a lot more flying, but I can be here more than half the time.
” He looks at my face and it looks like he second-guesses himself. “I mean, if you want me to be here.”
“Yes, I absolutely want to be with you,” I tell him, then pause. I can tell he senses my hesitation by the way his jaw tenses. “But maybe not here.”
“Where then?”
I gulp, because in my mind I still had a whole day of travel to figure out exactly what I was going to say to him when I showed up in Laax.
“I sort of left my job, and put nearly everything I own in storage. Those suitcases and my skis”—I nod toward the luggage we left on the other side of the couch—“that’s everything I was bringing with me to Laax.
I wasn’t planning on coming back. At least, not for a while. ”
His jaw hangs open like he can’t find the right words.
“You’re not saying anything,” I say, lowering his hand from my chest. Oh crap, I haven’t read this situation wrong, have I? Maybe he still wants those trips to be a guys-only thing, and he just wants to come home to me in the interim?
“That’s the most un-Sierra-like thing I’ve ever heard,” he says, his voice low and smooth.
“I did have a plan, actually.”
“I’m all ears,” he tells me, and reaches back up to rest his hand against the side of my neck, stroking my jaw with this thumb. The fact that he can’t stop touching me has to be a good sign.
“I know you’re still growing your photography account, and I happen to have some experience in social media.
” I give him a tentative smile. “I thought maybe I could work on helping you grow that account. Not take over the creative piece, but I could work on the more administrative part, at least for the next few months.”
“And what happens after a few months? What happens when you get tired of traveling all the time and you want to be settled somewhere?”
“I honestly don’t know, Beau. If the traveling is too much for me, maybe we try it your way. We find a place to settle down together—whether it’s Park City or somewhere else—and I don’t travel with you, or I only go sometimes. I’m okay with not knowing, because I trust that we’ll figure it out.”
He takes both his hands and slips them along either side of my jaw so that his thumbs are resting on my temples and his fingers curve around the base of my skull.
Then he pulls me toward him, meeting me halfway.
He brings his lips down over mine and sweeps into my mouth like he owns it—I’m pretty sure at this point that he owns me.
Every nerve ending in my body is singing as our lips clash together and our tongues meet again. I will never get enough of him.
He pulls away too quickly, but rests his forehead on mine. “Are we crazy?”
“I quit my job to follow you after we’d only been together for a week.” My laugh is a low, self-deprecating rumble. “I’m pretty sure that’s totally normal.”
“I hope we look back on this moment and know that this is when we made the right decision for our future,” he says.
“I’m reasonably sure we will. We’ve done everything backward, Beau. We lived together, then slept together, and now we’re choosing to make this a real relationship. Just because things happened in the reverse order doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right way for it to happen for us.”
“Brilliant and beautiful. Pretty sure I hit the jackpot in Vegas.”
With our foreheads still pressed together, I can feel his smile more than I can see it, and I’m fine with that. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Beau, it’s that it’s okay to do what feels right even if you can’t quite see what will happen as a result.