25. What He’s Not Waiting For
Twenty Five
What He’s Not Waiting For
Itold Marcus myself, in person, at the Perry Street site two days before the opening — not because I owed him an explanation, exactly, but because he’d been honest with me from the very beginning, and I wanted to return that honesty in kind rather than let him hear it secondhand from Lucy, the way Sebastian had once heard about him.
We walked through the finished lobby, the furniture in place now, the gray-green glowing warm under the newly installed sconces, everything exactly as I’d sketched it eight months earlier in a dusty studio I’d nearly given up on.
“I need to tell you something,” I said, once we’d reached the quiet of the reading nook by the window, the one detail Marcus had insisted on that I’d initially resisted and had come, eventually, to love. “About Sebastian.”
“You don’t have to explain,” Marcus said, gently, before I could continue. “I think I already know.”
“I still want to say it properly. You deserve that much.”
He nodded, and waited, patient the way he’d always been patient, and I found the words slowly, carefully, wanting to get them right.
“I’m not getting back together with him tomorrow,” I said.
“I want to be clear about that. There’s no wedding on the calendar, no grand reconciliation.
But I told him I’m willing to try again.
Slowly. Honestly. Dating, actually — the way we should have, years ago, before either of us knew what we were building. ”
“I’m happy for you,” Marcus said, and I watched him mean it, genuinely, even as something more complicated moved beneath the surface of his composure.
“I want to be honest, though, since honesty’s been the whole foundation of whatever this has been between us.
It’s not easy to hear. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. ”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. You never promised me anything, Claire.
I think that was actually the thing I respected most about you — you never let me believe there was more certainty here than there actually was.
” He looked out the window for a moment, gathering himself.
“Can I say something honest? Not to change your mind. Just because I think I need to say it, for my own sake, before we close this chapter.”
“Please.”
“I could have waited for you,” he said quietly.
“That’s the truth, and it’s the part that scares me a little, admitting it out loud.
If you’d asked me to wait — genuinely wait, indefinitely, while you figured out whatever needed figuring out with Sebastian — I think I would have.
I think I’d have waited a long time, actually, hoping it would eventually resolve in my direction. ”
“Marcus—”
“Let me finish. That’s the problem, Claire.
Not that you chose him. You’re allowed to choose him.
The problem is that I was willing to wait indefinitely for a maybe, and somewhere along the way, I think I need to learn that I deserve someone who chooses me completely, from the start — not someone working her way toward certainty through me while she figures out something else entirely. ”
I felt that land, precisely, exactly as honestly as he’d intended it to.
“You deserve that,” I said. “You do, Marcus. You’ve been nothing but generous and patient and honest with me this entire time, and I think the fact that you can say this to me right now, clearly, without bitterness, is proof of exactly how much you deserve someone who gets to love you without any complications standing in the way. ”
“I know,” he said, and something almost like relief moved across his face, the relief of a man finally naming something he’d been carrying quietly. “I think I’ve known it for a while, honestly. I just didn’t want to look at it directly while there was still a chance it might not be true.”
We stood together in the reading nook for a moment longer, the light doing something soft and gold across the room he’d built partly on my vision and partly, I understood now, on a hope he was choosing to release.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “working with you was never a mistake. Not the design. Not any of it. I got the best possible version of this project because of you, and I’m not going to let whatever happens with Sebastian make me forget that.”
“Same,” I said. “Truly. You reminded me what it felt like to be asked instead of managed. I don’t think I fully understood how much I needed that reminder until you gave it to me.”
He smiled, finally, something easier and more settled in it than I’d expected. “Good. I’m glad I could be useful for something other than sconces.”
“You were considerably more than sconces, Marcus.”
“I’ll take that as the highest compliment you’re capable of giving a client.”
We hugged, briefly, warmly, the kind of embrace that closes something honestly instead of leaving it open and unresolved, and he walked me to the door of the hotel that would open to the public in two days, carrying both our names on the credits, though only one of our futures would carry forward from here.
“Good luck, Claire,” he said. “I mean that. With Sebastian. With all of it.”
“Thank you, Marcus. For everything. Truly.”
I walked out into the cold evening, carrying something bittersweet in my chest — gratitude, mostly, for a man who’d given me exactly what I needed at exactly the moment I needed it, and the particular ache of watching someone step back with more grace than the situation strictly required of him.
He deserved to be chosen completely.
I was still learning, slowly, what it looked like to choose anyone that way myself.