Chapter 23
What I Was Doing
They didn't speak for six days. It wasn't the same silence as before, not the clean, total radio silence of the eleven days months earlier.
This was something smaller and stranger -- a stray text here, a like on an old photo there, neither of them quite able to fully let go, neither of them ready to reach all the way back either.
Beck: hope your exam went okay he texted on day three, and she stared at it for twenty minutes before not responding.
Beck: saw this and thought of you he sent on day four, a photo of a golden retriever on the quad, an echo of the very first text he'd ever sent her, and that one she almost answered, thumb hovering over the keyboard for a long time before she set the phone down instead.
Nina and Toni orbited her carefully that week, neither of them pushing, both of them present in the specific, patient way they'd perfected over the last year of watching her survive things.
"You did the right thing," Toni told her, on day five, both of them curled up on Tessa's bed. "Walking away from someone stuck in indecision isn't cruelty, Tessa. Sometimes it's the only thing that actually forces a real decision instead of an infinite, comfortable stall."
"What if he decides the answer is the contract? What if I just handed him permission to leave?"
"Then you'll survive that too, the same way you've survived everything else this year.
But I don't think that's what's actually happening in that apartment right now.
I think a boy who spent two years running from anything real is currently sitting somewhere realizing exactly what he's about to lose. "
Toni was more right than either of them knew. Beck spent those six days in a fog he didn't have language for, going through the motions of practice and classes with a hollowness that Jax noticed immediately and didn't bother pretending not to.
"You look like garbage," Jax told him, bluntly, on day four. "Worse than after the eleven days. What happened?"
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do. The contract's real. It's everything I've wanted since I was seven. And I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to want it without losing her, and I can't find the math that makes both things true at once."
"Have you asked her what she wants? Actually asked, instead of deciding you already know?"
Beck didn't have an answer for that. He hadn't.
Not once, in an entire month of careful, silent deliberation, had he actually asked Tessa what she wanted the answer to be.
He'd been so busy trying to protect her from a decision that he'd never once let her weigh in on it, exactly the thing she'd accused him of the night she left, and hearing it reflected back now, plainly, from his own roommate, it finally landed with its full weight.
? ? ?
It happened at two in the morning on the sixth night, Beck lying in the dark unable to sleep, running the same exhausted loop through his head -- the contract, the distance, the fear, the silence -- when a single, sudden, complete thought cut through all of it, so clear it felt like being doused in cold water.
What the hell am I doing.
He sat straight up in bed, heart pounding, a version of clarity arriving all at once after a month of fog.
He was lying here, alone, at two in the morning, running risk assessments on a life that didn't have Tessa Marchetti in it, and every single version of that life felt grey and unbearable the second he actually let himself picture it in detail -- not the contract, not the scouts, not the timeline, but her, specifically, someone else's hands on her, someone else learning her laugh, someone else being the one she called during a bad week, someone else getting to watch her climb her first rock wall or cry over a dog video or fall asleep mid-sentence during a movie.
He couldn't finish the thought. He physically could not sit there and finish picturing a version of his own future that didn't have her in it, and something about the sheer impossibility of that image made every excuse he'd been building for a month collapse at once.
He was out of bed and pulling on shoes before he'd fully decided to move, not bothering with a jacket despite the cold, and then he was running -- actually running, full speed, across a dark, silent campus at two in the morning, past the rink, past the dining hall, past the library, three miles of sprinting with his heart pounding harder than it ever had during an actual game, fueled by nothing but the single, overwhelming certainty that he could not spend one more night without fixing this.
He arrived at her dorm breathless, drenched in sweat despite the cold, and didn't care, pounding on the door until Nina opened it, took one look at his face, and silently stepped aside to let him in without a word, having watched enough of the last six days unfold in real time to know exactly what this was.
Tessa sat up in bed, blinking against the hallway light, disoriented and half-asleep, and then went completely still when she saw him standing in her doorway at two in the morning, chest heaving, eyes wild with something she'd never seen from him before.
"Beck? What are you doing here, it's the middle of the—"
"I'm not taking the contract." The words came out in a rush, breathless, before she'd even fully processed he was in the room.
"I mean, I don't know yet, actually, that's not even the point, I haven't fully decided the logistics.
But I know I'm not choosing anything without you in the room for the decision, ever again, starting right now.
I was lying in bed and I tried to picture my life without you in it and I couldn't do it, Tessa, I physically could not finish the thought, and I realized I've spent a month treating this like a math problem when it was never a math problem, it was just fear, the same fear I've been running from my whole life, and I am done running from it. "
"Beck—"
"Let me finish, please, I ran three miles to say this and I need to actually say all of it.
" He crossed the room, dropping to his knees beside her bed so they were level, taking both her hands in his shaking ones.
"I don't know exactly how we make it work yet.
Maybe it's a few hours apart and a lot of long drives.
Maybe it's video calls at midnight and counting down to weekends.
Maybe it's harder than either of us wants it to be some days.
But I know, completely and finally, that I would rather have a complicated, difficult, long-distance version of you than an easy, uncomplicated life without you in it at all.
You were right. I was deciding your future without you in the room.
I'm done doing that. I want you in every single room where decisions about us get made, from now on, for as long as you'll let me. "
Tears streamed down her face, and she found herself laughing and crying at the same time, both hands still held tight in his. "You ran three miles. In the middle of the night. Without a jacket."
"I would have run thirty. I didn't think about the jacket. I didn't think about anything except getting here before I lost my nerve or you fell asleep and I had to wait until morning to say any of this."
"I love you," she said, simple and complete, pulling him up onto the bed beside her.
"I love you, and I want you to take the contract if it's what you actually want, and I want us to figure out the logistics together, the way we're supposed to, and I want you to never again spend a month deciding my future in a silence I'm not invited into. "
"Deal," he said, pulling her into him, both of them tangled together on her narrow dorm bed, his heart still hammering from the run, hers hammering from something else entirely. "We'll make it work. Whatever it takes. I promise you that, completely, starting tonight."