“Not into anything you’re not ready for,” I added. “Just into admitting you don’t want to keep pushing me away.”
“I don’t want you to leave. And I don’t want to do this alone,” she said. The words fell soft, brave, trembling at the edges.
Something deep inside me unclenched. “And for the record,” I murmured, “you were never too much. You were just mine. Always, Becca.”
Her breath caught. “You can’t say that like it’s simple,” she whispered.
“It’s not simple. Nothing about how I feel for you has ever been simple.”
She stepped closer, placing her hand lightly over my heart. Her palm was warm through the cotton of my shirt, and I wondered if she could feel how hard it beat.
“You make it sound like it was obvious,” she said. “How you felt, I mean.”
“It always was to me. But I couldn’t talk about it when you were with him. That wouldn’t have been right. You weren’t free.”
Her gaze drifted to my mouth, then back up. The air between us felt electric.
“I’m free now,” she whispered.
I lifted my hand and brushed a stray lock of hair from her temple. My fingertips grazed her skin, and her eyes fluttered closed.
“I’m not halfway about you,” I repeated.
“Levi…”
I stayed still. Let her choose. She didn’t step back. After a long moment, her hand slid down, but the space between us remained.
She drew a shaky breath. “Now, we have to talk about that proposal…”
I let out a quiet laugh that was half relief, half nerves. “Yeah. That. I was very drunk,” I admitted, rubbing the back of my neck; the skin there felt hot. “Timing was awful. Delivery was worse.”
Her mouth curved into an encouraging smile. “You weren’tthatbad.”
I huffed a laugh. “I was pretty bad.”
“Okay, yeah, you were completely wasted.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, serious now. “You didn’t deserve to have something that big dropped on you like that. Not the way I did it, and not that night.” I held her gaze, wanting her to hear the difference between this and an excuse. “You’d just ended something. You were standing in a parking lot dealing with Travis, and instead of just being there for you, I made it about me. I put something on you that you had no business dealing with on top of everything else you were already going through that night.” I paused. “That wasn’t fair. The timing was wrong, and I knew it was wrong, and I did it anyway, and I’ve thought about that a lot since.”
She glanced away, then back, eyes softer. “You don’t have to apologize for it. Not when you have all these feelings. Not if on some level, you meant it.”
For a second, I didn’t answer.
I could feel how exposed that was… the space between what I’d said before and what I was about to say now. Saying it out loud made it real in a way that thinking it never had. My chest felt tight, not in panic exactly, but in awareness. Like there was no more room to pretend I hadn’t meant every fractured version of it.
Still, there was something steady under it, too. A kind of relief, like I’d finally stopped avoiding it. Becca deserved someone who would love her out loud.
“I did mean it,” I said slowly. “Just not the way it came out. I’m not asking you to marry me tomorrow. We’ve got a friendship to rebuild.” I let out a breath. “I—somewhere along the line, I stopped imagining a future without you in it. I want to be with you. On purpose. One step at a time.”
The quiet that followed felt like safe ground.
“I’m not looking for an answer,” I added. “I just need you to know it wasn’t a joke.”
She studied my face for a long time. “So you’re not asking me for anything right now?”
“I’m asking you to keep talking to me. Keep letting me in. I want my best friend back, and then I want more.”
Her exhale was soft, almost a sigh of relief. “Okay. I want that. I want all of it.”
