Chapter 37
FINN
Darcy hasn't said a word.
The only sound I can hear is the pounding of my own heartbeat, which is louder than it has any right to be. I stand there with the letter open in my hand and I wait, telling myself I can take a no.
It's the biggest lie I've ever told.
I've waited on big answers before. Field tests.
International patents. A billion-dollar project partner deciding whether my dream is worth backing.
None of it ever made my hands sweat. My hands are sweating like hell now.
The letter is going damp where I'm gripping it, and Darcy is looking at me through tears and saying nothing at all.
"Darce, say something. Please."
If it's no, it doesn't change one damn word I said. I love her. I'll always love her. She can take all the time she needs hating me from across town. I just need her to say something, anything, because the silence is eating me alive one second at a time.
Then she gets up from the table. Wordlessly, she crosses to me, tears still shining on her face, and instead of reaching for my hands or my face, she reaches for the letter.
She takes it out of my fingers, and for one bottomless second I think that's my answer.
She's taking the evidence and showing me the door.
Instead, she folds it. Carefully, along the creases I already put there, like it's precious. A treasure worth keeping. Then she holds it against her chest with both hands. Her fingers are trembling.
"You haven't screwed anything up, Finn." Her voice is wrecked and certain at the same time. "I love you. So much. I spent all day trying to talk myself out of the feeling and I couldn't do it. I love you."
She said it twice. As though once wasn't going to be enough for either of us.
I thought it would feel warm, hearing her say those words to me. It doesn't feel warm. It feels so much bigger than that. It feels structural. Like something a man could build the rest of his life on.
I have nothing smooth to offer in reply. No quips. No wry comebacks. My eyes burn and I let them.
Then I close the small distance in a single stride and take her face in my hands and kiss her. She makes a sound against my mouth, low and broken and joyful. Her fists close in the fabric of my shirt and she pulls me against her, and the kiss stops being gentle.
One endless day of almost losing her goes into the kiss from my side. I kiss her until there's nothing left in the world but her mouth on mine and her hands and the heat coming off her, until the shake in my chest finally quits.
When we finally break apart, her forehead stays resting against mine.
We're both breathing like we finished something hard.
Her hands stay fisted in my shirt as if letting go is a next-week problem.
I clear the tears from her cheeks with my thumbs, and for a little while the library is just the soft lamplight and the two of us and nobody keeping score for the first time in seventeen years.
Having her back in my arms after one afternoon of believing I'd lost the right is its own kind of miracle. I could stand here all night doing nothing but holding her and breathing her in, and it would beat every summit I've ever stood on.
"Did I say enough?" I ask. She's still got the letter pressed between us, both hands, guarding it. "You really think you can love me?"
"Forever." She leans back just enough to look at me. Then she glances down at the wrinkled paper in her hands. "You wrote me a love letter."
I nod. "It's got corrections all over it. I should've rewritten it so it was perfect."
"It is perfect. It's the best letter that's ever been written."
I've been paid a lot of compliments by a lot of people who wanted things from me. Not one of them ever landed the way Darcy's praise does. It goes through my ribs and stays there, where it's going to live for the rest of my life.
She takes a quiet breath, then I watch her square up for something. Her shoulders set, her chin comes up. There's a question in her gold-flecked, hazel eyes.
"Your meeting is tomorrow," she says. "Colorado."
"Darcy, the meeting can wait."
"No. Let me say this while I've got the nerve.
" She pulls in another breath. "I'm coming with you.
Not just for the trip, Finn. For good, if that's what it takes.
I'll pack up my classroom. There are schools in Colorado.
There are kids everywhere who need somebody to fight for them.
" Her chin stays up but her voice shakes underneath it.
She keeps going anyway. "I saw what that dream means to you.
I stood in that barn and watched your whole face change when you talked about it.
I am not going to be the reason you lose it. So I'm coming with you."
For one long moment, I let myself see it.
Darcy in the crisp mountain light in Breckenridge. A classroom with huge, white-capped peaks out the window. Her cold feet under a new timber roof, her laugh in a house we picked together, the two of us building the biggest thing I've ever taken on. It would be a good life. A beautiful life.
I could reach out and take it, and she would let me. For one breath I want it so much I can taste snow.
Nobody in my whole life has ever offered to give up one single thing for me. This woman just offered me everything she has, unhedged, with her voice shaking.
It levels me. I have stood on ledges that didn't move me like this.
"No," I say, shaking my head. "No way. Not happening, Darce."
Her face starts to shut down. I take her hand before it can finish, the letter caught between our palms.
"Not because that offer isn't the best thing anyone has ever laid in my hands.
It is. I'm going to be thinking about you saying it when I'm ninety.
" I hold her eyes. "It's a no from me because of what I truly want.
And I finally know what that is. I've known since I stood outside that window tonight and watched you grade papers alone in the dark. "
She goes still and listens.
"I'm done leaving. I'm done being gone."
The words come out quiet. I've been carrying them my whole life without knowing it.
Her lips part. She heard the letter. She knows exactly what those words are made of.
"The dream was never the mountain, Darcy.
I thought it was. I've had it backwards for years.
The dream was building something, and having someone to share it with.
Somewhere between a bachelor auction and the stairs leading up to your apartment I realized I've already found the thing I've been trying to build my way into.
Your classroom is here. Your mom is here.
Your students, your reading program that you're going to launch, your town.
I don't want to move that life to Colorado.
I want to be in it. Here. With you." I shake my head slowly.
"Everything I ever went looking for turned out to be right here in my hometown. "
She doesn't move while I say it. She takes it the way she takes everything that matters, with her eyes steady and her whole attention aimed at me, and I understand that being listened to like this is one more thing I'm never giving up.
"Finn." Her eyes are filling again, but her spine is teacher-straight. "The resort. The deal of your life. I can't be the reason you lose it. I couldn't live with that. What if you wake up one day and regret this?"
There it is. Her oldest fear still holding her hostage. The worry of not being enough. Of eventually being left behind because someone she loved wanted something different. I'm not letting it stand for even one full breath.
"I'll never regret choosing you. Choosing us.
" I say it plainly, because it's the simplest truth I know.
"And I'm not afraid of losing the deal. I'll keep the meeting.
But I'm not going there to say yes on their terms. I'm going to tell them how it's going to work.
I run it from here. I fly out and back if needed.
The mountain isn't going to care where my mail goes. "
"And if they walk away?"
"Then a room full of investors walked away over geography, and I build it anyway, without them." I shrug, grinning now. "Worst case, I know five good men seated around a poker table in the city who aren't above some well-calculated risk. There'll be another deal if I need one."
She laughs. It's small and wet and it stutters in the middle. Her laughter is the best sound I have ever heard in my life, because it's the sound of us coming back stronger than before.
"You'd really do that? Walk away from a billion dollars."
"Watch me." I bring her hand up, the one holding the letter, and press my mouth to her knuckles. "The deal of my life isn't in Colorado, Darcy. It's standing right here in front of me."
She looks at me for a long moment, tears and lamplight and that sharp mind of hers working behind her eyes. Her expression carries a playful edge that wakes up everything male in me.
"What time do you fly out in the morning?" she asks quietly.
"Early. First thing."
"Then we have all night." Her voice changes on the last word. Drops.
She sets the letter down on the table, next to the red pen and the quizzes she hasn't finished grading. Then she takes my hand and walks backward, out of the lamplight, drawing me after her into the darkened rows of the library bookshelves.
It takes me three steps to understand where she's taking me.
And why.
My heart survived the letter, the silence after it, and her offer of her whole life. I'm not sure it survives this.
Her eyes stay on mine the whole way, walking backward through a building she knows by heart. Past the biography section. Into the rows, where the lamplight gives out and where a thirteen-year-old with a secret crush used to watch a girl read.
She stops in the shadow between two tall shelves and turns to face me, close enough that I can feel her breath. "Still want to kiss me here in the stacks?"
"What do you think?" I draw her further into my arms, then pivot us so that her back is against the spines of all those books. Framing her face in my palms, I hold her there for a moment, losing myself in the desire, and the love, I see shining in her eyes.
"Kissing you is only the beginning of what I want to do, my beautiful Darcy."
She laughs softly, and I capture the sound with my mouth.
A row of old books shifts somewhere above us as her breath goes ragged against my lips and my hands move to caress her breasts.
Her hands slide up under my shirt and grip me like a claim, and the last thing I know for certain is that I'm the luckiest idiot alive.
Because Darcy Gable loves me.