Chapter 36
DARCY
Ilook up from the quiz I'm not grading, and Finn is standing at the edge of my lamplight.
My heart slams once in disbelief, high in my throat. Then it starts to pound.
He came. I didn't tell a soul where I was going, yet he found me anyway.
And the first thing I feel, before anger, before fear, before any of the arguments I built all afternoon, is hope. Stupid, reckless hope. I try to kill it but it doesn't die.
He's out of breath, hair tousled, lean cheeks flushed. He must have run here. To find me? My whole chest goes tight with how much I want that to mean what I want it to mean.
He stops just inside my circle of light and goes still. I know that stillness. I've spent the past weeks learning it. It's the thing he only does when he's looking at me.
"I've been trying to reach you all day," he says. Quiet. Careful, like the wrong volume might end this.
I swallow past the knot of anxiety in my throat. "I know."
Two words. They cost more than they should.
I glance down, away from him. Because I have to.
If I keep looking at him and wanting to believe he ran here to talk to me for any other reason than the only one that makes sense, I'm going to break down.
And I can't do that in front of him. Not now.
Not when he's leaving tomorrow, most likely for good.
"I know about Colorado." My voice stays level and I have no idea how. "Annie told me everything you told Evan." I make myself hold his eyes for the last of it. "I know what you're going to say."
"Do you?" There's no challenge in it. He asks it gently, like he actually wants the answer, and the gentleness is what breaks my grip on staying silent.
"You're flying out in the morning." Saying it out loud makes it feel real, and I hate that it does. "The deal came through. A billion dollars behind it. The land. The partners. The dream that's waiting for you out there in those mountains. I heard about all of it."
He doesn't deny a word of it. My stomach drops another floor.
"I heard about the bet you made with your friends too." The words come out cracked in the middle. "A million dollars each to not fall in love. Last man standing single takes it all. The bet you came up with, Finn." I have to stop and breathe. "As a joke."
The next part is the part I swore I wouldn't say. It comes out anyway, because it's been screaming inside me since three o'clock.
"So the way I see it, either I was just part of the game, or I'm the thing you have to walk away from to win it. Either way, you came here tonight to be kind about it. To say a gentle goodbye, so I can spend the rest of my life knowing you were decent at the end."
He looks like I hit him. Good. No. Not good. I don't know what I want anymore, but this is not it. I don't want to be sitting here pouring out my pain to him without any defenses. I don't want him to see how deeply this hurt has already gone. But it seems my pride has other ideas.
I inhale a fortifying breath so I can say the rest of what's sitting like a lead weight in my chest.
"You want to know why I didn't answer your calls or texts?
Because I already know how it goes. You'll be kind.
You'll be so kind, and I will sit here and take it like an adult, and then I'll get to keep the sound of you being kind for the rest of my life instead of living with the truth that I was never anything more to you than a temporary diversion before you could get on with the rest of your life.
" My voice finally gives. "I'm not brave enough for that, Finn. So I would rather you just not."
The silence that follows is enormous. I've just handed him every fear I own. And he's still here.
He's still here, and I'm still holding on to the smallest flame of hope that refuses to extinguish so long as he's looking at me so earnestly, so nakedly, in the dim light and quiet that surrounds us.
The terrible truth is that even now, wrecked and furious and braced for the worst, I want him. I want him to close the distance between us and take me into his arms. I want to be wrong about tonight so badly that the wanting is shredding me up inside.
He takes everything I've said standing still. No disarming line or excuse queued up and ready to go. Finn without a single joke or persuasive counter-offense anywhere on him is Finn meaning every word he's about to say, and I brace like it's uncharted weather coming.
"The bet is real," he says at last. "It's ugly, and I'll answer for every inch of it.
But you have the bones of it wrong." He takes one step closer.
"Five other rich idiots at a card table, months before you ever raised that paddle.
Not one of them knows your name. Not one of them knows you exist. There was never an audience, Darcy.
Nobody was watching us. Nobody laughed. There's no punchline, because there was never a joke.
You were never part of any game, and you were never the punchline of anything. "
Every word lands somewhere inside me that's been bleeding since this afternoon. I want to believe him. I want to believe him so badly I have to wrap my arms around myself to hold myself in place in my chair.
"Tomorrow is just a meeting in Colorado," he says. "Not a moving van. And I didn't come here to say goodbye. Whatever you think tonight is, it isn't that."
I had a hundred answers ready for a gentle goodbye. I have nothing for this. The hope surges again, bigger, and this time I can't kill it, and it terrifies me. Hoping is how I get left.
And then he runs out of words.
I watch it happen. He shifts his weight.
Pushes a hand through his hair, then doesn't seem to know what to do with the hand.
In these past weeks I have never once seen him reach for what to say next and come up empty, and watching it now does more to me than the whole speech did.
There's no show tonight. There's just us, and the chasm neither of us seems to know how to cross.
"I don't trust myself to do this right," he finally says. "If I wing it, I'll leave something out, and I can't leave anything out. Not tonight. You need to hear every word of what's in me—all of it, in the right order." He swallows. "So give me a minute. Just let me talk. Please."
He reaches into his jacket and takes out a folded sheet of notebook paper. When he unfolds the page against the lamplight, I can see through it before he says a word. Writing on both sides. Lines crossed out and rewritten. Corrections crowded into the margins.
My heart climbs into my throat. I know what a single written sentence costs this man. I've sat beside the fight. Yet every inch of that page is full of his words. Words he wrote for me.
My eyes burn. Not yet. I'm not letting go yet.
"I wrote this earlier today, before I came looking for you," he says, not quite meeting my eyes.
"I didn't know if I'd get the chance to say what needs saying.
I wasn't sure you'd want to hear me out.
So I put it all down here. If everything else failed me tonight, I was going to leave this for you.
" He looks at the paper in his hands. "Even if I lose you tonight, these are the things I want you to know. "
I don't say anything. I wait for him to hand the letter to me to read, but he holds onto it instead. He's going to read it. For me. In front of me.
He takes a halting breath, then he begins.
"Darcy. If you're reading this..." He stops right there.
His jaw works. Because I'm not reading it.
I'm sitting six feet away, watching him hold a page he wrote for a version of tonight where he never got to look at me while I heard it.
When he starts again, his voice has dropped low.
"If you're reading this, I didn't get the chance to say any of this to your face.
" His eyes come up to mine for a second.
Then he finds his place again with his thumb.
He reads far more slowly than he talks, giving every word its own moment, and his voice has gone softer than I've ever heard it, all of his usual volume traded away for focus. This is what reading costs him.
"I have to start with the bet, because it's the ugliest thing and you deserve an explanation.
It's real. The man who invented that stupid bet thought love was a game for losers, because losing was all he'd ever seen it do.
That bet was started by a man I stopped being somewhere around the first week of being back home with you. "
The words go through me and keep going. Somewhere in my chest, the oldest, meanest voice I own goes quiet. Not gone. Quiet. Listening.
"And even that isn't the whole truth." He stumbles on the next line, loses a word, backs up and takes it again.
I don't breathe while he fights his way through.
He wins. "The whole truth is that how I feel about you started way before any bet.
It started back in school. I knew it then, and I refused to look at it for what it really was. "
He turns the page over. His hands aren't steady. His hands are rarely unsteady, and they're shaking now, holding a page with my name at the top of it, and my tears stop waiting to fall. I let them roll down my cheeks and I don't wipe them away. I don't want him to stop.
"I'm sorry for what I did to you in school.
I'm sorry for the years after, all of them.
And I'm sorry you learned about the bet and about Colorado form...
" He catches it and stops. "From," he corrects himself quietly.
"From anyone's mouth but mine. You should have heard every word of it from me first. That one I'm going to be sorry about for a long time. "
He doesn't explain. He doesn't excuse. He doesn't ask me to make it easier for him. I'm crying without any sound at all, and it's already enough. I didn't know an apology could be enough.
He pauses there like he's bracing, and I understand why with the next line.
"You're the only person I'm real with. Everybody else gets the show. You never bought the act from me once in your life, not even when you were thirteen. Being looked at is my whole job, Darcy. It never felt like being seen until it was you doing the looking."
Being seen is the thing I've guarded against my whole life. And here he is, telling me the seeing was the point.
"You found out the weakest thing about me and you made me bigger instead of smaller.
I spent my life building a man nobody would ever doubt.
You found the thing I buried and you didn't blink.
You just taught me how to navigate though it...
" A small pause while he stares the word down.
"Through it. Like it was any other day. Like I was worth teaching.
I didn't know grace like that existed until you. "
A sound comes out of me, small and wet, not quite a word. He doesn't look up. If he looks up, I think we both know he won't finish. He keeps going instead, slow and deliberate, hesitating in front of the longer words, gathering each one before he says it. He gets every single one.
"You're brave in ways I never will be. You fight for kids nobody else fights for. You built a dream out of a teacher's salary and pure stubbornness. You tell the truth even when your voice shakes. I jump out of airplanes for fun, but you are the bravest person I have ever known."
A few hours ago, alone in my apartment, I called myself a coward.
Now this. The bravest person he has ever known. Me. In his handwriting. In his voice. While he's doing the truly brave thing.
I press my fingers over my mouth and keep listening.
"I loved things about you back in school that I never told anyone.
I loved how you argued with teachers when you knew you were right.
I loved that you'd rather sit alone with a book the size of a toolbox than pretend to be less than you are.
I loved the way your lips would sound out the big words to yourself while you read, quite...
" He hesitates over it, then lands it. "Quiet.
Like you were the only person in the room.
I loved how watching your mouth made me want to pull you behind the library stacks and kiss you. "
He glances up then, and the first glimmer of the famous Finn Bardot humor sparks in his eyes. "I still want to do that, by the way."
I allow myself the smallest smile, while heat rolls through me, sudden and inappropriate and absolutely real. Wanting him in the middle of all this should feel wrong. It doesn't. Whatever tonight decides, my body already knows its answer, and its answer is him. It has been him for weeks.
"There's still more to go," he says, and his eyes go back down to the page.
His fingertip settles beneath the next line and stays there, holding his place while he reads.
"I've spent my whole life leaving early.
Leaving school, leaving town, leaving every room right before it could decide what I was.
Leaving on my terms always felt like winning to me.
It wasn't. I wasn't winning anything. I was just gone. "
He hits a snag on the next line, gets a word wrong, shakes his head once and takes the whole sentence again from the top.
"I've been everywhere, Darcy. I've stood on mountains most people will only ever see in photographs.
And the best part of my life is any day with you in it.
I want your mouth opening under mine and the weight of you settling beneath me in the dark, the way I had you last night, back when I was stupid enough to think we had time.
I want all my mornings with you. I want your hair on my pillow and your cold feet against my shins and I want your unique ability to call me out on all my bullshit.
I want forty years of losing arguments to you and another forty years of just being the man worthy of standing at your side. "
He stops reading abruptly and presses the back of his wrist to his mouth. When he reads again his voice has gone rough and quiet.
"I love you, Darcy. I've never said that to another living soul. You're the first. I wanted you to have it in ink, so that no matter what you think you know about me, you can hold the proof in your hands. I love you, and every version of my life I can picture is smaller without you in it."
The air has gone quiet, unmoving. My lungs can only accept shallow breaths, my heart swelling so intensely there's no room for anything else.
He loves me. I swallow hard, unable to find my voice.
"So, now you know," he reads, slower now, one word at a time. "Whatever happens after you put this letter down, you were never a bet to me. You were never a joke. You are the whole point of everything."
Slowly, he lowers the page. For a moment he just stands there in my lamplight, the letter still open in his hand, and then he raises his eyes to mine.
"Tell me I haven't screwed everything up between us, Darcy. Please."