Page 70 of You, Only You

"I've been..." He stopped. Started over. "I sat in that gallery and I watched you and I..." Another stop. His jaw worked. He looked at the floor, then at the wall, then at me. "I've been an idiot."

Something between a laugh and a sob escaped me. "Yes. You have."

He nodded. Accepted it the way you'd accept a medical diagnosis. "I pushed you away because I thought..." He ran a hand over his face. "I don't know. I had all these reasons. They made sense at the time. In the dark. At three in the morning, they sounded like logic." He dropped his hand. "They don't sound like anything right now."

"What changed?"

"I sat in a chair." He said it like it was the most important thing he'd ever done, which, knowing him, it might have been. "I just sat there. I didn't plan anything. I didn't run scenarios. I didn't try to control what would happen when you walked in. I just..." He made a gesture that was trying to describe something he didn't have language for. "I showed up. Nicole told me to just show up. So I did."

"Nicole told you." I was half-crying and half-smiling and fully aware that I looked like a disaster. "Of course Nicole told you."

"She has a therapist. And a basil plant. She's very wise."

"The basil plant?"

"Apparently it's having a growth crisis. Weird-colored leaves. She thinks it's projecting."

I laughed. A real one this time, wet and messy and completely involuntary, and something shifted in his face when he heard it. The uncertainty didn't vanish, but it moved over. Made room for something else. Something that looked like a man deciding to stop standing in the doorway and walk through.

"I don't want to do this," he said, then winced. "Wait. That came out wrong. I mean the distance. The pretending. I don't want to do that. Any of it." He was talking faster now, the way he never talked, the words falling over each other. "I want the messy version. The one where you call me an overbearing ass and I tell you your lo mein habit is a health hazard and we argue about stupid things and figure out the real things and I stop trying to control whether I lose you by making sure I never actually have you, which is, I'm told, both my signature move and deeply idiotic."

"It is deeply idiotic."

"I'm aware." He took a step closer. Not a calculated step. An awkward one, like his body moved before his brain gave permission. "You just told a federal courtroom about us. Under oath. You..."

"Torpedoed my professional reputation? Yes. I noticed."

"You chose the truth over your career."

"I chose the truth over a lie." I wiped my face with the back of my hand, which was not elegant and I didn't care. "There's a difference. The career might survive. The lie would have eaten me alive."

He was close enough now to touch. I could see the circles under his eyes, darker than mine, which was an achievement. I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands were hovering at his sides like they wanted to reach for me but weren't sure they were allowed.

"Stop hovering your hands," I said.

"I'm not..."

"You are. You're doing the thing where you want to touch me but you're running some kind of permission algorithm. Just..." I reached out and took his hands. They were cold, the way they always were when he was nervous, which was information I hadn't known a month ago and now filed under essential. "There. See? Easy."

His fingers closed around mine immediately, tight, like I'd thrown him a rope. We stood there in a courthouse hallway, holding hands like two people at a school dance who didn't know what came next.

"This doesn't fix everything," I said.

"I know."

"We have the trial. The case. Your testimony. My probably-ruined career. The fact that we're both terrible at feelings and communicate primarily through arguments about food hygiene."

"I know all of that."

"And you still want this."

"I want you." He said it simply. Without strategy. Without the careful construction I'd come to associate with his words. Just the fact, plain and undecorated, like a number on a balance sheet. "I don't know how to do the rest of it. But I want you. That's the one thing I'm sure about."

My throat tightened. Not with sadness. With the specific ache of hearing someone say something true when you've been bracing for another performance.

"Then stop walking away from me," I said quietly. "That's the one thing I need. Everything else we can figure out. The control stuff, the fear, the three AM spiral. All of it. But you have to stay in the room. You have to stay in the argument. You have to stay even when it's terrifying, because I can handle terrifying, I've been handling terrifying my whole life, but I can't handle being left."

His grip on my hands tightened. I saw something move through his expression, fast and complicated, the understanding of what I was really saying. Not just about him. About my father, who'd left in a different way. About every person who'd looked at me and decided the cost of staying was too high.