Chapter 12 #2
Beck hung up and sat there for a long moment, turning the conversation over, some instinct telling him this wasn't as harmless as it sounded.
He thought about mentioning it to Tessa that night, actually opened the text thread to do it, and then thought better of it — she'd had a good week, the first easy one in a while, and this felt like exactly the kind of thing that would ruin it over what was probably nothing.
A guy fishing for a marketing lead. He'd just ignore it.
It would go away on its own. He didn't mention it.
He told himself, the way he'd tell himself several more times over the following weeks, that it wasn't worth bringing up yet.
She got sick in early December, a real fever, the kind that flattened her for three straight days, and made the mistake of mentioning it to Beck in a half-delirious text before immediately regretting it, certain he'd politely disappear for the duration the way people always seemed to when she was inconvenient rather than fun.
He showed up twenty minutes later with a grocery bag full of soup, ginger ale, and a thermometer, because apparently he didn't trust her word on how high her fever actually was, and let himself in when she didn't have the strength to get up and answer the door.
"You didn't have to do this," she croaked, from underneath a mountain of blankets, hair stuck to her face, feeling about as far from beautiful as she'd ever felt in front of him.
"I know I didn't have to. I wanted to." He pressed the back of his hand to her forehead, frowning at whatever he found there, and then got to work with an efficiency that surprised her — soup on the stove, a cool washcloth folded and pressed to her forehead, her water glass refilled without being asked.
"I look disgusting right now," she mumbled, turning her face into the pillow.
"You look sick. Those are different things. I'm not going anywhere because you have a fever, Tessa. If anything this is making me like you more, which I did not expect going into today."
"How does me being disgusting and feverish make you like me more."
"Because you let me see it," he said, simply, sitting on the edge of her bed and smoothing her hair back from her damp forehead with more tenderness than she'd ever been shown by anyone, sick or otherwise.
"You didn't try to hide this from me, or cancel on me, or pretend you were fine so I wouldn't see you like this.
You just told me the truth. That's rarer than you think, and I'm not going to waste it by acting like it's a chore to show up for. "
He stayed the whole night, dozing upright against her headboard so he could keep checking her temperature, feeding her soup a spoonful at a time when her fever spiked too high for her to manage it herself, and somewhere around three in the morning, half-asleep, she heard him murmur something into her hair she wasn't sure he meant for her to hear at all.
"I don't know how I'm supposed to survive loving someone this much," he said, quiet, mostly to himself. "Nobody warns you it feels like this."
She fell back asleep smiling despite the fever, because somewhere in the fog of it she understood, with total clarity, that this — a boy staying up all night with a damp washcloth and terrible soup-heating skills — was worth more than every grand gesture in every movie she'd ever watched.
She woke up the next morning to find he'd already done her laundry.
She didn't know men did that. She was learning a lot of things about him lately.
? ? ?
It happened without warning, well before the bad week that would come later for entirely different reasons — Beck went quiet for two full days, short answers, canceled plans, a version of distance Tessa recognized instantly and dreaded.
She found out why by accident, overhearing Jax mention it to another teammate in the dining hall.
"He's freaking out," Jax said, not realizing Tessa was close enough to hear. "Told me last night he's never felt like this about anyone and it's scaring the hell out of him. Thinks he's going to mess it up somehow, prove some old fear right."
She confronted him that evening, sitting on the edge of his bed while he avoided her eyes, running a hand through his hair the way he did when he was working up to something difficult.
"You've been pulling away," she said, simple and direct, refusing to let him deflect the way he'd been deflecting for two days. "I need you to tell me why instead of just going quiet on me."
He was silent for a long moment, and when he finally spoke, his voice had none of its usual ease.
"I'm scared," he admitted, the words costing him something visible.
"I've never let myself feel this much for anyone, and some part of me keeps waiting for the moment I ruin it.
I think it goes back further than I usually let myself admit.
Somebody gave me up once, Tessa, before I was old enough to have a single memory of it, and some part of me has spent my whole life quietly convinced that if it happened once, without explanation, it could happen again, that I might just be someone people eventually decide not to keep.
So I got close to people just enough to enjoy it, and then left before they got the chance to leave first. I don't know how to be sure I'm not going to do the exact same thing to you, now that it actually matters this much. "
"So your solution was to just start doing it preemptively? Pulling away before I even had the chance to see if you would?"
"When you say it like that it sounds insane."
"It is insane, Beck. You're punishing me for a mistake you haven't even made yet, based on a mistake someone else made a long time ago.
" She reached for his hand, gentler now, understanding arriving alongside the frustration.
"I know what it's like to be so scared of history repeating itself that you sabotage the good thing right in front of you instead of waiting to find out if it's actually going to hurt you.
I did that to you too, remember. I ran from you more than once for the exact same reason. "
"How did you stop?"