Page 76 of Tied Over

After the longest moment ever, he said, “I know.”

“You do?”

“Of course I do.”

I looked away and then back. “I love you, and it’s selfish because seriously, Hayden is the perfect guy for you, but I can’t help it, and everything’s been upside down since you told me you were gettin’ married, and only since I woke up in the hospital has everything felt normal again.”

“I feel the exact same way.”

“You do?”

“How could I not? We fit. We’ve always fit.”

And we had. It was like I met him and that was it. He was home. He’d always felt like home.

“When I told you I was going to get married, I thought it would feel right, that I’d feel this weight lift and you’d have no more hold on me, but all I’ve felt since then is a steadily increasing sense of dread.”

I grinned. I couldn’t help it. “That’s really fucked up.”

“I know!” he yelled. “Don’t you think I know?”

“Dread?”

“I—it’s like I couldn’t get my bearings for so long because I couldn’t wrap my brain around us not being…us.”

“Yeah,” I whispered.

“This is a mess.”

“It is, and I don’t want you to break up with Hayden to be with me because what if I blow up your life? But I do want you to break up with him because I know I love you more than he does because there’s no one who could ever love you more than me.”

Trace of a smile then, I could see it in the barely there curl of his lip.

“Nobody knows you better than me.”

“That’s true,” he whispered.

“And when you’re with me, that’s who you really are.”

“Yes.”

“And you wouldn’t have to be a marshal if you were with me—”

His face crumpled. “Why do you always—”

I leaned forward and grabbed hold of his hand tight. “I see you clearly. You love to help. You live for it. But the toll on your heart is greater than mine because you give more of yourself, and so a part of you breaks every single time we lose someone.”

He squeezed my hand back.

“But see,” I said, smiling at him, “if it was us, together, and you could come home every night and have me there with you, then you could stop being a marshal and instead teach art to high school students or criminal justice to ones in college because then you’d be educating and making a difference but it wouldn’t suck out your soul.”

“Jed, there’s no—who could I ever trust to protect you better than me?”

“If I stayed with Miro in Custodial WITSEC, would there be that worry?”

He jolted before covering my hand with his other. “You’ve thought about—you…you…”

“Have I thought about what I could do if I had a chance to live a life with you? Of course I have. You’re all I think about.”