Chapter 22
Gerald's Wedding
Jax, riding the high of the reconciliation like it was his own personal victory, declared the following Sunday "Gerald's Wedding," on the grounds that the campus's most famous one-eared stray cat deserved a proper ceremony now that Priscilla had made things official.
"This is the dumbest thing I have ever agreed to," Tessa said, holding a paper crown someone had made out of a pizza box, watching Jax attempt to coax both cats into the same general vicinity with a can of tuna.
"You love it," Beck said, arm around her, equally invested in the ceremony despite himself. "You made a playlist."
"I made one (1) playlist. That's not the same as loving it."
"You're wearing the crown."
"The crown is for structural reasons. It's very windy."
Gerald, for his part, wanted absolutely nothing to do with the proceedings, hissed at Jax's makeshift altar, and fled into the bushes the second the tuna ran out, leaving Priscilla sitting alone looking mildly betrayed.
Jax declared it a successful wedding regardless, on the basis that "half of all human weddings end this dramatically too," and the whole group collapsed into laughter on the quad, Nina recording the entire disaster for posterity, Tessa laughing so hard she had to sit down in the grass.
"I needed this," she admitted later, walking home with Beck's hand in hers, the whole ridiculous afternoon still making her smile. "After everything the last two weeks. I needed something stupid and small and completely unimportant."
"I know." He squeezed her hand. "That's why I let Jax talk me into it. Sometimes the best thing you can do after something hard is officiate a wedding for a cat who wants nothing to do with you."
"That's surprisingly wise for a man who once fell off a dock sober."
"I contain multitudes, Tessa. I've told you this."
? ? ?
The weeks after the championship should have been easy -- the fight over the email resolved, the relationship steadier than it had ever been -- but Tessa watched Beck disappear a little more each week into a silence that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with a decision he still hadn't made.
He'd gotten the offer in early April. A real one, an entry-level contract with a minor-league affiliate a full state away, the kind of opportunity his agent said wouldn't come around twice if he let it pass.
He hadn't said yes. He also hadn't said no.
He'd just gone quiet, canceling plans, staring at his phone for long stretches without explaining why, leaving Tessa to fill in the silence with her own escalating fear.
"You have to actually decide something," she finally said, sitting across from him in his apartment while he turned his phone over and over in his hands without looking at her.
"Not for me. For yourself. I've watched you disappear into this for a month, Beck, and I don't know if you're trying to protect me from the decision or if you're just too scared to make it at all. "
"I don't know how to make it. Every version I run through in my head ends with someone getting hurt. You, if I go. Me, if I don't, resenting a choice I made for someone else's comfort for the rest of my life. There's no version where nobody pays for this."
"Then stop trying to find the version where nobody pays, and just tell me the truth of what you actually want, instead of running the math in circles where I'm not even allowed to see the numbers."
He didn't answer right away, and something about the silence -- not thoughtful this time, just avoidant, the same silence he'd been hiding behind for a month -- made something in Tessa finally, quietly, break.
"You know what the actual problem is?" she said, standing up, her voice steadier than she expected.
"You're not protecting me by staying quiet.
You're deciding my future for me without ever once asking what I'd choose, if you'd just let me be part of the conversation instead of something you're managing from a distance.
You're making this decision alone, in your head, over and over, and calling it consideration, when really it's just you avoiding the one thing that would actually fix this -- talking to me like I'm a partner instead of a variable in your risk assessment. "
"That's not fair."
"Maybe not. But it's true, and I need you to hear it.
" She grabbed her jacket, hands shaking.
"I can't keep loving a version of you that's already halfway gone, spending every night deciding my future in a silence I'm not invited into.
When you actually figure out what you want -- not what you think will hurt me least, not what you think is noble, but what you actually want -- you know where to find me. Until then, I can't keep doing this."
She left before he could find an answer, walking out into the cold spring evening with tears she refused to let fall until she was three blocks away, and behind her, Beck sat frozen on his own couch, phone still in his hand, the silence he'd built around himself suddenly feeling less like protection and more like exactly what she'd called it.