Chapter Twenty-Four
SAWYER LET ME get all the way through a large coffee and half a muffin before he set his cup down and said, “So. When were you planning to tell your fake boyfriend you’re in love with the murder monk? ”
I choked.
He handed me a napkin without any change in his expression, patient as a man who’s been waiting a long time to be right about something and is finally getting to be.
“I’m not — ” I got my airway back. “I’m not in love with anybody.”
“Okay.” He nodded. “Sure. Cool.” He took a sip of his coffee.
“It’s just that you’ve had color in your face for a month, you stopped looking like a Victorian child with a wasting disease, the biker who used to sit across the street like some kind of tattooed watchtower, now looks at you when you’re not looking like somebody’s reading him his last rites.
” He set the cup down. “But no. You’re right. Probably nothing.”
I stared at the table.
“Amy.” His voice changed. Dropped the bit.
“I’m not trying to catch you. I’ve known something was going on since your biker shadow started parking across the street.
I just figured you’d tell me when you were ready, so I’ve been over here being extremely patient, which is not my natural state, and I’d like some credit for it.
” He tilted his head to get in my eyeline. “Talk to me. What is it. Who is he?”
“He’s the one.”
“The one what?”
“The one I told you about.”
Sawyer went very still. “No.”
“Yeah.”
“No, Ames.”
“Sawyer.”
He looked out the window at Rune across the street, then back at me. “That biker?”
“How many bikers do you think I have?”
“The man who sits outside my classes every day looking like he’d personally fight weather for inconveniencing you is that guy?”
So I told him enough. The garden. The kiss.
The club woman and the lie Rune built because he’d decided hurting me was safer than wanting me.
I told him Rune had finally admitted the truth, and then, with my face getting hotter by the word, I told him about the cabin.
The floor. The bed. The fact that somewhere along the way I’d started sleeping wrapped around the same man I’d spent months swearing I hated, while Rune apparently planned to die of restraint before he’d be the one to cross the last few inches between us.
Sawyer listened to all of it without one single joke, which is how I knew he understood it was real.
“Okay,” he said when I finished. “I have several thoughts and at least one of them is violent.”
“Sawyer.”
“I’m processing.” He held up a finger. “First: the club-woman stunt was garbage. Cinematic garbage, but garbage. I reserve the right to hate him for that until one of us dies.”
“Fine.”
“Second.” Another finger. “You sleep in his bed.”
I stared at him.
“Every night.”
“That’s not—”
“And you cuddle him.”
“I do not cuddle Rune.”
“Ames, you just told me you sleep with your face in his neck.”
“Because I can’t sleep.”
“Yes. I’m aware. Apparently your central nervous system has a boyfriend.” He looked back out the window at Rune. “You know what’s weird?”
“Everything about this conversation?”
“Before.” He leaned forward. “When you talk about him before he pulled that stupid club-woman stunt, you weren’t scared.”
I looked down.
“You weren’t, Ames. You kissed him back. You wanted him. You let yourself want him, which, knowing you, is basically running through fire.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m serious.” The smile left him. “You weren’t afraid of him. You’re afraid of doing that again.”
My fingers stopped on the cup.
Sawyer saw it.
“Oh,” he said softly. “That’s it.”
“Don’t.”
“That’s actually it.” He sat back, looking almost sad now. “You’re not scared he’s going to hurt you. You’re allowed to want him, Ames.”
I looked at him.
He shrugged, but it wasn’t his normal shrug.
“That’s all I’m saying. You’re allowed. Even if it goes bad.
Even if somebody doesn’t understand. Even if every person on this damn earth has opinions about it.
” His eyes dropped to his coffee. “Wanting to have sex isn’t something you should have to apologize for. ”
“It IS about — I can’t sleep without him, Sawyer, it’s not — ”
“I KNOW you can’t sleep without him! That’s the most romantic and alarming thing I’ve ever heard and you’re saying it like it’s a symptom!
” He sat back. “You realize most people would kill for the thing you’re describing as a problem?
There is a man who makes the nightmares stop.
That’s — Amy, people write songs. People write entire genres of song. ”
I laughed, and it came out wet.
“I hate him,” I said. It sounded thin even to me.
“No, you don’t.” Gentle now. “You hated him. Past tense. I was there for the hating, I got texts, it was an entire era, I have receipts. This isn’t that.” He looked at me. “This is you being scared. Which is different, and which I understand better than anybody you will ever meet.”
And it was the truth, the thing under Sawyer, the thing that made the coffee shop go silent even though nobody else could hear it.
Because he did understand. He’s spent his life wanting something he’s been told he’s not allowed to have, hiding it under a fake girlfriend and an easy laugh, watching other people get to just reach out and take it.
He wasn’t going to let me do the thing to myself that the world has spent his entire life doing to him.
“Can I tell you what I think?” he said. “As your fake boyfriend, a position that gives me unique standing here?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
He smiled, but it didn’t quite get all the way there. “One of us should get to have it, Ames.”
And that one hurt.