Chapter 19 #2
“I’m here because I told you everything except the one thing that mattered most and then tried to build around saying it.”
Her eyes stayed locked on mine.
The street was quiet. A dog barked somewhere farther down the block. The late afternoon sun caught in the tops of the trees and turned the whole ordinary little road gold around the edges.
There had never been a less dramatic place to tell the truth.
“Kelly.” My voice roughened despite every effort at control. “I love you.”
Silence. No movement from her. Not even a blink.
I felt my own heartbeat everywhere.
I kept my hands at my sides.
“I loved you long before the beach,” I said. “I’ve sought you out since we met because there was something.” I exhaled slowly. “And after all that time I got to know you, and I was terrified of standing in front of you with only that.”
Her face moved then.
“I know I hurt you,” I said. “I know I reached for the one thing that made you feel purchased instead of chosen. I understand that now in a way I didn’t when I sat across from you in that room.
” My throat tightened once around the next part.
“And I also know that understanding it after the fact may not be enough. For you. For us. I know that.”
Kelly was looking at me like she had forgotten how to breathe.
I wanted to brush the hair off her shoulder, cup the side of her face, and feel whether the pulse in her throat was as wild as mine. But I did not move.
“I am okay if your answer is no,” I said.
That one hurt. I took a breath and met her gaze. “I’m not okay with leaving you without the truth because I was too proud or too practiced to speak plainly.”
That was the only honest thing left.
For a second, the whole world narrowed down to Kelly’s face. The tiny movement in her mouth. The wet brightness gathering in her eyes. The way her fingers curled once against her own palm and then went loose again.
I waited.
Finally she spoke, and asked, “Why now.”
It had been felt like a lifetime since last night.
“Because I should have said it before I ever put anything else on the table.” I looked directly at her. “And because if I let you go without hearing it from me plainly, then I would still be trying to control the loss instead of respecting it.”
I saw it. She looked down once. Just briefly. Then back up.
“You are okay if I still say no.”
I’d be wrecked, but that was for me when I was alone in a dark room where no one would see, but that wasn’t what she meant.
“Yes.”
Her breath left her slowly.
I watched it. Then she did something that nearly tore me open where I stood. She stepped closer.
That alone felt like too much hope, so I kept myself still.
Kelly looked up at me and said, voice soft now, “I wanted you to say it like that.”
I closed my eyes for one brief second because hearing that and not touching her felt like an internal war.
When I opened them again, she was still there. Still close. Still looking at me with all that impossible honesty she kept trying to hide and failing at when it mattered most.
“I don’t always know what to do right away,” I said.
She laughed softly through tears that had finally started to spill and said, “No, you didn’t. That was the whole issue.”
That got me.
“No,” I admitted. “I didn’t.”
Kelly wiped at her cheek with the heel of her hand and looked absurdly beautiful doing it.
I wanted to kiss her but I did not. I waited.
She looked at me for one more long second, then said the thing that finally let me breathe. “I’m still hurt.”
“Yes.”
“And I still don’t know if you can love me in the way I need.”
I held her gaze. “That’s fair.”
She looked down briefly, then back up.
“But I love you too.” The world stopped moving.
The sounds on the street. The breeze in the tree overhead. The distant car door slamming two blocks down. None of it reached me in the same way after that sentence.
She loved me too.
I looked at her and let the weight of it hit where it wanted. Her eyes filled a little more as she watched me take it in.
“I hate that this is complicated,” she whispered.
“Me too.”
“So did I.” Her mouth trembled once and then steadied as she corrected me.
This standing in the uncertainty with her, this letting love exist without forcing outcome, was the new language. The one I was only learning. The one she had asked for all along. So instead of reaching for a plan, I said, “Then let it be hard.”
Kelly found my face and very slowly, she smiled through the remaining tears.
That felt like the first truly right thing I had done since the restaurant.
She stepped the last inch into me then and rested her forehead against my chest. My hands stayed at my sides for one full second while I made sure this was what she wanted.
Then she took my wrist and pulled my arm around her. I put both arms around her carefully, like a man handling something precious and real and not remotely his by right.
We stood like that on the quiet sidewalk while the sun lowered and the ordinary world kept moving around us.
After a while, she pulled back enough to look up at me. “I’m not promising you anything tonight.”
“I understand.”
Her mouth softened. “That was almost annoying.”
“Almost.”
She held my gaze for one more second and then asked, “Can I kiss you?”
That one got me worse than anything else had.
I nodded once because words were briefly unavailable to me. Kelly kissed me softly.
Her mouth was warm and careful and full of feeling and the kind of tenderness that made me want to conquer the world if she chose me.
I kissed her back as softly.
When we parted, she stayed close enough that our foreheads almost touched.
Then she said, “I’m still making you prove you can speak my language.”
I smiled despite everything. “That seems fair.”
“Good.”
I laughed under my breath because she’d decided to steal that from me. Then she stepped back fully and looked up at her building.
“I should go inside before I change my mind and do something very irresponsible.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a promise.”
I studied her. The sweater. The bare face. The woman I loved standing on a cracked sidewalk with her whole truth finally in my hands and none of it secured.
“I can live with that.”
Kelly looked back at me over her shoulder, smile small and precarious now.
“Can you?”
Probably not, but for the first time in days, that didn’t feel like the point.