Page 108 of Level Up for Love

The way his face has gone slack, I wonder if he needs a hard reset. “What?” The word cracks like a whip. “What are you talking about? What else have we been working on these last couple months? You don’t think that speaks enough for you and what you’re capable of?”

I set my jaw and look away.

“I thought you’d be excited,” he says.

“When have I ever given you the idea that I want to go anywhere? That I’m anything but happy exactly where I am?”

“I thought maybe this was something we could do together! I thought things had…changed.”

It’s a warped echo of my own thought—but his perspective is all wrong.

“That was never the plan, Wesley.”

He seems to realize something then—like he’s let something slip that he didn’t mean to. But then his eyes go hard, and his jaw tightens resolutely. “There was never any plan at all, Reagan. You won’t let me make any.”

“From the very start, we agreed to keep things simple—until the competition.” My tone is as icy as the freezing air around us. “Quitting my job and moving across the country to join some risky studio startup is the opposite of simple.”

Specks of snow begin to drift down from the sky, and everything goes quiet, the way it always does when it snows. Wesley doesn’t even glance away from my face to look at it; his eyes are like twin coals burning into mine.

“Simple.” He laughs once, without humor. “I don’t think you’re being honest with me, saying you still want that. Not after last night.”

We could find out, he’d said. I wonder if this is what he imagined when he whispered those words into my skin.

Things might have been easier if he hadn’t acknowledged it. If he hadn’t said it out loud. But now I feel the need to pick the scab off the wound.

“You said your feelings changed after college. You said you don’t feel the same way.” My voice is small, but it sounds so loud in the silence.

Wesley looks like I’ve speared him through with Brightmorn: shocked, and a touch exasperated. “Of course I don’t feel the same way. The way I felt about you in college can’t even begin to compare to the way I feel about you now.”

My breath freezes in my lungs. I can’t remember how to inhale. My heart beats thunderously against my ribs in a frantic march.

“After finding you again, after all that we’ve battled and built…I l—”

“Stop.”

I won’t let him say it. I can’t hear it, I won’t.

I don’t feel the cold anymore. Even as the snow falls around us, sticking to my hair and drifting into the empty deck chairs, I feel none of it. The heat in my chest makes me sweat.

I can barely look at him. I can’t stand to watch as his expression shutters closed again—as his look of unabashed hope and vulnerability melts in the face of uncertainty.

Very quietly, he asks, “Tell me, then. Have your feelings changed since college? Tell me I haven’t imagined how things have shifted.” He lowers his head to meet my eyes. His voice goes whisper-soft. “Tell me this wasn’t all a game to you.”

It’s a perfect echo of Owen’s words to him—the words that had caused him to run in the first place.

I reel back like he physically pushed me. Cold dread washes over me, followed inexplicably by an eerie calm.

Wesley’s eyelids flicker and then open wide. “No, wait. That wasn’t—”

“You still believe that.”

He’s stumbling over his words now. “That wasn’t fair, I just—I’m trying to talk to you about this, and you keep avoiding—”

“I’m not avoiding anything! You’ve made all these assumptions about what I want to do, and where I want to go, and how I feel—but you won’t listen to me. You have no idea what I might have done back then, Wes; you didn’t know me. Maybe I would have kicked you to the curb, or maybe I would have given things a try, but you didn’t stay long enough to find out. You didn’t know the whole me then, and you clearly don’t now.”

“I’m trying, Reagan! I keep trying to get to know you better, but you won’t let me.” He audibly swallows. “Please. I swear, this whole time, I’ve been trying to tell you I—”

“No, you don’t. Loving someone isn’t leaving them.” It’s not running in the middle of the night on the word of some loser you barely know. It’s not sending dozens of gifts from across the country to make yourself feel better about never being at home. It’s not inviting your daughters to all of your new family functions but never making time to see them alone. “It’s not something you do from far away, where no one else feels it but you. Loving is staying.”