Chapter 20 #2
He watched me for a long second. “No.”
That word hit differently.
Truer.
“No,” he repeated. “You make me less interested in pretending.”
He was right. He made me less interested in performing any version of myself that wasn’t real.
I had been funny or charming or brash or all of it mixed together in whatever combination kept the room tilted in my favor. With Xerses, more and more often, I forgot to do that.
The waiter cleared our plates. Dessert arrived because Xerses had ignored my protest and ordered for us both. Tiramisu. Two spoons. I should have objected on principle. I didn’t have the will.
He handed me one spoon and said, “Don’t make this dramatic.”
I laughed. “You ordered shared dessert.”
“I’ll survive.”
The first bite was absurdly good. Coffee, cream, soft cake, bitter chocolate.
I closed my eyes for one second.
When I opened them, he was watching me, like my pleasure mattered in its own right and not as prelude to something else.
“Okay,” I admitted. “This was an excellent call.”
“I know.”
“You cannot say I know every time you’re right.”
“Why not?”
“Because it makes you insufferable.”
“You seem to be suffering just fine.”
“That is the worst sentence you’ve ever said to me and I’ve heard you say many terrible sentences.”
He looked entirely too pleased with himself.
I pointed my spoon at him. “That.”
“What.”
“That version of you.”
He tilted his head. “Competent.”
“No. Smug because you were right about dessert.”
“That sounds earned.”
I laughed again.
And because the night had gone soft around us and because wine and candlelight and this impossible, ordinary happiness had lowered my guard to almost nothing, I heard myself ask, “When did you know?”
His gaze held mine. “Know what.”
“That you loved me.”
He didn’t answer right away.
That too was intimate.
Finally he said, “You want the first moment or the one I couldn’t argue with?”
My heart did something stupid and girlish and entirely against my wishes.
“Both.”
Something moved in his face. “The first moment was probably the Pictionary game. You captured my attention the first night we met but a week later, we were all at my parents and that was the first glimpse.”
I blinked.
The whole room seemed to get warmer. “Why?”
He leaned back slightly, one hand around his wine glass. “Because you were terrible at drawing and so angry about it.”
I stared at him. “That does sound like me.”
I was still laughing when I took another sip of wine. “And the one you couldn’t argue with.”
He watched my face and said, “You were angry about it like it still mattered to you even though you’d already accepted that no one was going to save it.
” His gaze dropped briefly to the spoon in my hand and then came back up.
“You looked like someone who kept loving things even after the world failed them.”
The breath left me slowly.
“That,” I said, voice softer now, “is a very unfair answer.”
“It’s also true.”
I looked down because I felt too open under the candlelight. Too seen.
And because if he had told me Pictionary and the zoo, then I owed him the truth too.
“The first moment for me,” I said, “was probably before I wanted it to be.”
He watched me closely now.
I smiled a little at my own wine glass. “I think I started liking you the first time you looked at me like my mouth was as reckless as the rest of me.”
I kept going because bravery tonight in ways that had become hard to stop once I started.
“And the one I couldn’t argue with ” I looked up. “When you poured my tea at breakfast at your parents.”
His brows lifted slightly. “That seems new.”
“I had built up everything before that as a crush.” I shook my head. “And I was not going to pursue.” I leaned one elbow on the table. “But then you go and do something that seems so caring and made me feel like I belonged.”
We finished dessert slowly, neither of us rushing the end of the night because the end would force movement and movement meant choices and choices meant eventually going back to a world with rooms and other people and ordinary time in it.
Still, eventually he paid, quietly, and we stepped back out into the evening.
We walked instead of going straight to the car. His hand found mine halfway to the water without discussion.
I wanted the world to see we were an us and that thought stopped me cold.
Xerses looked over immediately. “What.”
I smiled at him in the harbor light. “I was thinking that I like being seen with you now.”
His expression shifted. Deepened. “How now.”
I looked out toward the water, then back at him. “Before, it felt like an accident. Like something reckless and impossible and maybe a little humiliating because everyone else could see it before I wanted to admit it.” I lifted one shoulder. “Now it feels like a choice.”
He held my gaze. “Good.”
I laughed softly. “You are committed to that word.”
“Yes.”
“I’m starting to think you use it instead of saying other things.”
That got his attention in full.
He stopped walking completely.
The harbor lights moved behind him. Reflected in his eyes a little. The wind lifted the hair off my shoulders and sent it across my mouth.
He reached up and tucked it back with the backs of his fingers. Slow and ruinous.
“You’re right,” he said.
I went still. “What things.”
He looked at me the way he always did when he was deciding not whether to tell the truth, but how nakedly to do it. Then he said, “I use it when I mean I’m happy.”
I stepped closer until my free hand could flatten lightly against his chest and I felt the steady beat there under my palm.
“You should probably say that,” I whispered.
“Which part.”
“The part where you’re happy.”
“I’m happy.”
My chest cracked open. “Say it again.”
He laughed softly. “Kelly.”
“What. I’m collecting evidence.”
“Evidence of what.”
“That this is real.”
His eyes dropped to my mouth. He smiled then.
And because all the most treacherous things in my life came from honesty and moonlight and this man’s mouth, he said, “Yes.”
We had been moving toward this before either of us could say the word and that should have scared me more. Instead it made me feel impossibly, stupidly lucky.
He bent and kissed me there by the water, not with the hunger of the beach, not with the demolished urgency of the cave, not even with the emotional intensity of the library or the sidewalk.
His hand came to the side of my face. Mine stayed on his chest. The harbor lights glittered. Someone in the distance laughed. A boat bell clinked once somewhere out in the dark.
The world looked like the kind of place two people in love might belong, and for the first time, I let myself believe we did.
I hoped you enjoyed this story. Only one brother to go now but if you want to read the review please grab it now.