15. PRESENT DAY – December #2
Garrison watches me crumple into myself. Head down, fingers grazing the threads of my mustard-yellow sock. “Willow…” My name sounds different in his voice. Almost choked. “Hey, it’s not that I don’t want to get married. It’s just that with everything—I didn’t think that far ahead.”
“I understand,” I say softly.
It’s not like I ever thought about babies with him before now. Or rather, a baby.
His hands rise from my hips to my ribs, as though trying to reach my heart. “I thought you’d break up with me by now,” he admits. “And maybe if I was a stronger person, I’d just have broken up with you last December. You deserve someone else who—”
“I deserve you,” I snap at him. Pain in my chest radiates everywhere, clawing down my skin, but I’m holding onto his waist now, not letting go. “When will you start believing that?”
He shakes his head, eyes bloodshot. “I don’t know.” He removes one of his hands from my body to push away the longer strands of hair that’ve fallen in his eyes. “Maybe I never will, and then what?”
“Then I’ll keep reminding you,” I say, confident about this future.
He laughs. “Every day? Sounds fucking exhausting for you.” He stares me down, straight in the eyes with this raw plea like just let me go. For your own sake.
I won’t let him push me away.
“The only thing that’s exhausting is reading this.” I reach back and lift up my textbook. “Who knew accounting could be this dull?”
“That bad, huh?” He removes the other hand off my frame as he steals the book and then flips through the pages. We draw closer, our knees knocking together.
“I’d rather listen to TV static for an hour than read another sentence,” I mutter under my breath.
His eyes flit up to me, able to hear my quiet voice.
He’d tell me if he couldn’t.
Silence strains as he focuses on the text, flipping more pages. Snowflakes flutter peacefully outside, windowpanes frosted from the cold, and soothing crackling sounds emit from the fireplace. But nothing helps stop the tension that builds around us.
Garrison doesn’t look up from the book when he finally speaks. “Maybe you don’t realize how bad of a boyfriend I am because this has been your only relationship.”
It feels like he yanked out a sword and wedged the blade into my stomach. My face crinkles. So what if my firsts have come later in life?
He’s never taken my innocence as na?veté. I’m not na?ve. I understand that Garrison is my first and only relationship, but I don’t need to date other people to know that this is a complicated relationship. Not a bad one.
I can’t pull words from my lips. They’re stuck in the back of my throat.
He looks up, meeting the hurt in my eyes, but he continues anyway. “I just want to make sure that you get what you’re saying—wanting to marry me someday soon-ish .”
“I obviously don’t want to marry you, if you don’t want to marry me,” I say, those words almost a whisper under my breath, but he’s close enough to hear them.
He shakes his head. “Of course, you’re all I want, Willow, but that doesn’t change things.”
“What things?” I ask, my chest on fire.
“I’m the only guy you’ve ever kissed,” Garrison says. “I’m the only guy you’ve ever slept with. And, fuck, there’s a part of me that feels like I’m stealing you from experiencing…from doing…from…” He can’t finish. Anguish lances his face.
My hands tremble, and I don’t have the book to hold onto, so I hug my arms around myself. Holding on. Hold on.
“You’d want me to kiss other guys? To have sex with them?” The thought brings nothing but sickness and a pressure that compounds on my chest.
“Jesus, no. The thought of you kissing another guy…” He grimaces. “…I can’t even…” His face twists more, and then he reaches for my hand.
I let him take it. He doesn’t mention the trembling. He just laces our fingers together. It calms me for a second.
Garrison inhales. “All I’m saying is that I know you think I’m special because I understood that you didn’t like to be touched, and I waited…and was patient. But there are other guys who’d do the same. I’m not special. I’m not the only guy who’d fall in love with you.”
“Do you honestly believe I could fall in love with someone else?” My brows pinch, confused. So fucking confused. “You are special to me, Garrison. How can you not see that? It’s not just the touching. It’s who you are. Every part of you, even the parts you hate. I love those, too.”
He runs his thumb back and forth atop my hand. His eyes pin to mine, carrying more worries. “I can try to see it,” he tells me. “But I need to hear you say the other words, out loud. I just need to hear it, Willow.”
“Which ones?” I wonder.
“That you’re fine never knowing what it’ll be like to kiss another man.
To have him touch you here.” He slides his free hand up my thigh, my leggings feeling thin under his palm.
I breathe in, welcoming his touch, only his touch.
His fingers are millimeters from my heat, but he stops short.
“You’ll never know what it’s like to have another man’s fingers in you.
Another man’s dick.” He says those words without shying, without breaking my gaze.
“Good,” I say in response.
“I need to hear you say it,” Garrison says. “Please.”
“I don’t want to know what someone else’s lips feel like,” I tell him. “I’m happy never knowing what another dick feels like. Looks like. Smells like—”
His lips lift with mine.
I continue, “I don’t want someone else’s fingers in me. I don’t want another set of eyes on my naked body. It literally makes my skin crawl even imagining these things. I only want you, and you’re worthy of me. Do you understand that?”
A tear slips down out of his eye, but he brushes it away as quickly as it came. “I’m sor—”
“And you can’t be sorry because I’m glad you’re making me do this. I’m glad this is happening, okay? We need to remain honest with each other. Always.”
His chest rises and falls heavily, and this is where we should reunite.
Kiss.
But tension still strains.
“What do you need from me?” Garrison asks, knowing he’s wedged an invisible force between us.
“I need you to tell me that you won’t leave me because you think you’re not good enough,” I say. “I need you to believe that you are. And maybe you can’t give me that now, but one day.”
“I won’t ever fucking leave you,” he tells me like those words are already cemented down.
But he’ll push me away, force me to be the one to leave him. I know this—it’s why the second part is so important.
“Do you believe that you’re good enough for me?”
“Have I ever believed that?” he counters.
No, I don’t think so.
I say, “Maybe you’re just forgetting that I’m not as great as you think.” I lower my voice. “Not only did I take money from my dad—which I said I’d never do—but I’m lying to Ryke and Lo about it. That’s not exactly Girl Scout levels of good.”
His lips lift into a big smile.
I pale. “What?”
“You’re cute,” he tells me. “You think lying to Ryke and Lo is this enormous crime against humanity, but it’s fucking normal. People lie. I’ve done a lot worse. You wanna compare?” He winds an arm around my shoulder, and his eyes ask, can I?
I nod.
And he tugs me onto his lap, my legs naturally spreading open and weaving around his waist. I hang onto his shoulders and ask, “How do you know I’ve never spray painted someone’s house? I could’ve had a rebellious streak back in Maine.”
His brows rise. “I would have definitely already heard all about that.” He tucks a loose strand of my braid behind my ear. “There’s no way you wouldn’t have gushed about spray painting houses and streaking down the roads.”
“I never said anything about streaking.” I blush just imagining doing something that brazen.
“I embellished your embellishment.”
The fact that we’re so different—his past muddled with bad deeds and mine relatively spotless—is what causes most of our friction. Whoever said opposites attract, well, they were right, but they forgot to mention how many strings are weaved and knotted between that attraction.
We’re complicated, but as long as we’re together, I don’t care what we are.
I reroute to the earlier point. “It is a big lie, though,” I say softly. Keeping this from Ryke and Lo is difficult, and I don’t know what’s worse: them finding out Jonathan gave me money to bury the footage of the fight or them finding out I kept it a secret in the first place.
“I know,” Garrison nods, not downplaying the situation. “It’s a big deal.”