Chapter 15 After #3
Rhys’s arm tightened around me. “I saw it too.” Quiet. No anger — just the careful tone of a man who understood, better than most, what it looked like when someone had been broken young and built themselves wrong. “Doesn’t excuse what he did.”
“No.” I leaned into his side. “But I hope he finds whatever he was looking for. In the right places this time.”
The balcony garden was small and entirely Rhys’s project — herbs, one stubborn tomato plant, a jasmine vine he’d trained up a trellis with patient dedication, having discovered at thirty that nurturing living things was a feature, not a flaw.
It reminded me of the mansion garden, our garden, the place where all of this had started on a night when neither of us could sleep and both of us were lying about why.
“Do you regret it?” I asked, leaning into his side. “The show. The cameras. All of it.”
He considered the question how he considered everything now — openly, taking his time, as if honesty were a material he’d recently discovered he could work with and he needed to test its properties.
Three months ago, this pause would have been a wall.
Now it was just Rhys, deciding how much to give me, and the answer was always more than yesterday.
“I regret every day I spent without you.” His voice was low, unhurried.
“Everything that led me to you — the show, the cameras, my brother’s terrible sense of humor — I’d do it again.
Every challenge. Every elimination. Every time Mason interrupted us at the worst possible moment.
” He paused. “Which was seven times. I counted.”
I laughed. “Of course you counted.”
“I count everything about you. I can’t stop.
It’s an architectural disorder.” His arm tightened around me, and the city hummed below, and the jasmine was blooming — tiny white flowers catching the streetlight — and the air smelled like the garden and his soap and the particular alchemy of a life built by two people who’d spent years convinced they’d never have this.
I leaned my head against his shoulder and thought about the tweet I’d posted that morning.
Found one who listens. Technically accurate.
Wildly insufficient. What I’d actually found was someone who listened and remembered and showed up and stayed and did the exact, unglamorous work of loving another person every day — no cameras, no contestants, no throne.
Someone who brought me coffee stirred counterclockwise and knew my favorite podcast and had once, during an argument about closet space, stopped mid-sentence to say, “I’m getting mean because I’m scared, and you deserve better than my fear.
” The boy who’d been told tears were for women at eight years old.
The one who’d walked into a television studio and said I don’t kneel.
And the fact that he could name his fear aloud now, three months later, hand it to me like a fragile thing he trusted me to hold — that was the most extraordinary thing I’d ever witnessed.
My mother had called last week. It was a conversation that used to send me spiraling — the small pauses where she chose diplomacy over approval, the careful “That’s nice, sweetheart” that meant she was deciding whether my choices were too much or not enough.
But this time, when I’d hung up and sat on the kitchen counter with my feet swinging and my teeth clenched, Rhys had handed me a glass of wine and said, “She’s wrong about you.
She’s always been wrong about you. And I’ll tell her that, if you want, but I think you already know.
” I did know. I was learning to know it without him, which was the real gift — he made me believe it until I could believe it on my own.
The princess treatment, it turned out, had nothing to do with thrones or crowns or televised competitions.
It was being seen — fully, clearly, in the kitchen and the bedroom and the ugly Tuesday nights when you were crying about nothing and everything.
Being seen by a person who’d chosen to look and kept looking.
“Hey.”
He turned his face toward me. The city lights caught his jaw, his eyes — blue-grey, warmer now, the color of a building at dusk when all the windows go gold.
The real smile was there, the one I’d chased across ten weeks of television and found waiting for me on the other side.
It lived on his face now. It had moved in, same as him — same as the toothbrush and the phone charger and the dark t-shirts and the drafting table by the window. It lived here.
“Good boy,” I whispered.
And the smile broke open — full, unguarded, incandescent — the version that turned him from devastating into something that ached in the best possible way, and he leaned down and pressed his lips to my forehead and held them there.
And I closed my eyes, and the jasmine bloomed, and somewhere eleven floors below us the city kept moving but we stayed exactly where we were, breathing the same air, unhurried, with nowhere else to be.
“Always,” he said.
And the garden grew.
My phone buzzed on the railing. A text from Mason, timestamped two minutes ago: I said yes.
Followed immediately by: I know, I know.
But Sloane — I keep thinking about what Rhys said.
About finding your person. And then, before I could respond: What if there’s someone out there who looks at me and sees more than the golden retriever?
Like I could be enough? Not fun enough or bright enough or easy enough.
Just… enough. I stared at the screen. The city hummed below us and Rhys’s hand was steady on my back and Mason Rivera was out there somewhere, terrified and hopeful, about to sit on a throne built for someone braver than he thought he was.
I typed: You’ve always been enough, Mase.
Now go sit on that throne and let someone prove it to you.
I set the phone down and looked at Rhys, who’d read the texts over my shoulder because personal boundaries were a concept he applied selectively and with architectural precision.
His mouth did the thing — the almost-smile, the one that meant he was feeling a feeling he’d only recently learned to name.
“He’ll be terrible at it,” Rhys said.
“The worst.”
“He’ll fall in love by Episode Three.”
“Episode Two.” I smiled into the night. “Golden boys always fall fast.”
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