Page 45 of Crushes to WHAT

I reach the end of a chapter and decide that, surely, I am also allowed a moment or two of pining. For balance.

My eyes behold three beautiful seconds of his sharp, strong side profile hunched over a piece of wood on the floor before his gaze flicks to me, admonishing. “The man is the one who’s supposed to yearn,” he informs me. “It’s what makes us just pathetic enough to be lovable.”

He says it lightheartedly, but a current of something bitter lies just under the words, not quite hidden by his tilted smile.

“You’re lovable for a million reasons,” I assert. “And not a single one of them has anything to do with being pathetic, because you aren’t pathetic. You’re play-acting pathetic for the benefit of our own fun, and it is fun, but not for a second would I ever think of you yearning for me as something pathetic. That you like me at all is beyond my wildest dreams. That you would want to be with me is unfathomable to such a degree that I literally did not fathom it. That you let me have my tropes, and even encourage them, is a precious gift. The very fact that you are playing with me makes me feel… I feel like…”

Tears spring to my eyes. “It’s too early in this relationship for me to say how it makes me feel. Entirely and completely way too early. We both know that. We’ve only really been together a few hours. But I feel it anyway, and I have for a long time, because you’re amazing, Emerson Wright. I don’t know a better man, or one more deserving of every good feeling. And I know a lot of really, really good men. I’m related to a lot of really, really good men.” Air drags shakily into my lungs, and I sniff, blinking against the wetness on my eyelashes. “I’d still say you’re the best of them all, and I hate hearing you insinuate that you might be anything less than everything a girl could ever dream of having.”

He sits back on his heels and looks at me, jaw tensing beneath the scruff of his beard.

I stare back, breathing heavily through my nose as my own jaw clenches to stop me from blurting out any more of my heart.

Eventually, right before I think I’m going to burst, he speaks, low and rough and full of so much of an emotion we both know it’s too early to have. “Almond Alison Wright sounds pretty nice to me.”

My heart trips over itself, then races fast enough that I clutch my hands to my breast to keep it from escaping. “I haven’t even met your family,” I remind him. “We’ve been together for three minutes,” I remind him. “We can’t feel this way yet,” I remind him.

“You can meet them tomorrow,” he counters. “We’re together now, but our hearts have been tangling themselves together for years,” he counters. “Feelings don’t care about time, and I don’t care to waste any more on foolish social rules that would claim to know better than I do when it comes to matters of my own heart, and life, and goals, and future,” he counters.

He rises to approach, then falls to his knees beside the couch. “Almond, screw what’s ‘normal’ or expected or anything that makes you think you can’t have what you want—what you’ve been wanting for a while. I’m right here. I’m telling you that you can have me. I’m begging you to take me. I’ll give you anything you want, and everything you need, and all of the things you don’t want or need, but that I know will make you think of me so I’ll hand them to you anyway. You want a library? You’ll have one I built. You want a better studio? I’ll build it for you. You want the life you’ve been dreaming of with the man you’ve been dreaming of having it with?” He cups my face in his hands and tilts my chin up until I can’t do anything but meet his gaze. “I’m right here. I’m a professional builder. I can build that life you want. I will build that life you want, with you. I’m just asking you not to make us wait for it. I’ve tried being patient, but I’m just not cut out for it. I can’t do it anymore. I need you, Almond, and I need you now. Today, tonight, right this moment. If I could get an officiant in this room, you’d be my wife by my next heartbeat. I don’t care what anyone else thinks.

“If you want, we can keep dragging it out, but I want you to know that I don’t need or want that. We can play our game married just as surely as we can play our game dating. Marriage of convenience is a wonderful trope. Fake fiancé is twelve times more fun than fake dating. I’ll play any trope you want, any way you want, as long as you want. But I want you to know that if I had my preference, I’d be playing those tropes without ever having to leave your side. When I go to work, I’d leave it to come home to you, and I wouldn’t have to walk out the front door when the sun goes down.”

Tears roll down my cheeks and over Emerson’s fingers, leaving salty tracks. I open my mouth to reply with something—anything—but the only sound that comes out is a high, keening whimper.

He moves instantly, pushing up until he’s over me on the couch. He twists, putting his back to the cushions and settling me on his chest. Through this, I gasp and sob. Disbelief and hope roil in my gut, warring with one another and leaving me a quivering mess. I’ve imagined Emerson saying so many romantic things to me, and not a single imagination has ever come close to the reality of the sort of romance he just gave me. My dreams pale in comparison to the reality to such an extent it would be laughable if I weren’t so busy being absolutely wrecked by the situation.

“Take a minute,” he murmurs into my hair, smoothing his hands through the pink locks. “We have a lifetime, if you need.”

Obviously, I cry harder.

Eventually, Emerson’s hands calm me. My breaths slow in time with the soft pressure of his calloused fingers in my hair and on my back, running soothingly up and down in tandem with the rise and fall of his chest. His heart thumps strong and calm, a contrast to the rapid, tangled mess behind my rib cage.

“Sorry,” I croak with a grimace. “That was just so beautiful, and I…” Am incapable of processing getting everything I’ve ever wanted handed to me on a silver platter, apparently.

“Hush,” he rumbles. “You don’t have to apologize to me for anything, least of all this. I’m throwing a lot at you all at once—stuff I’ve already had the time to think about and process. Stuff I’ve spent months thinking about and processing, and those months have been spent doing little else but thinking and processing and considering and hoping that I haven’t been deluding myself. That I really have been seeing what I’ve been seeing from you.

“And I won’t lie, for a minute, I had convinced myself that you weren’t blushing and dodging because you felt about me the same way I’ve felt about you. I’d told myself that I was bothering you, and I should just let you be. Give up and resign myself to growing old alone, because if I can’t do it with you, I don’t want to do it at all. Then Poem told me not to give up, so I didn’t.

“Then I was sitting at home, sketching out blueprints for houses with libraries and kids’ rooms and a detached building where a pretty woman with talent and passion could share that with the town that she loves—trying to make a studio so amazing, it would be worth leaving the one you’ve built. Then you called me, and you were so perfectly you, and so perfectly mine.” He sighs, and his arms tighten around me. I tip my head up to catch his gaze and am rewarded with the visage of a man so gone, not a single one of the romance books I’ve ever read could have wished to capture the expression with words. “I have tried to be patient. Really, I have, but it turns out I’m just not that patient a man in the end.” His eyes grow heavy, and his lips tilt with mischief I don’t expect. “Being hot, however, I think I’m rather excelling at.”

He catches me so off guard, I bark a laugh before I realize he’s even made a joke. If it was a joke. “Are you fishing for a performance review?” I ask through a semi-hysterical giggle. “After professing your Feelings That Shall Not Yet Be Named, you want confirmation of your hotness?”

He smirks and shrugs, shifting us both with the movement. “I’m not not fishing for confirmation,” he says.

I laugh harder.

When his body relaxes further into the sofa, it occurs to me that this is exactly what he wanted—to add some levity and help ease me back into a space that feels a little easier to manage.

My laughter subsides as a surge of gratefulness rises within me. Every moment I spend with him, Emerson shows me that he is every bit of the man I’ve always thought he was and more. He is exactly who I want by my side forever.

He is exactly the type of man worth telling conventional wisdom that unconventional situations exist, and they’re just as valid as any other sort of lo—

Well. Maybe I’ll say that word to him before I say it to anyone else.

“Emerson,” I call softly, despite his attention having never faltered.

“Yeah, baby?” he asks, dragging his hand from my hair to lay it gently against my jawline. His thumb strokes my cheek.