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“And I couldn’t bear to get on the flight and come home,” I say, looking at him now and only him, my dad, almost forgotten on the screen. “I just can’t. I can’t be apart from him. The way I feel, it’s… it’s like my heart grew fifteen sizes overnight. And the thought of leaving would be like ripping it out from my chest and stomping on it. And that hole inside me would be even bigger now that I know what it’s like to be with him.”
“I can’t let that happen,” Oz says fiercely. “I won’t let you get hurt. Not by anyone, and most of all not by me. You’re too important to me.” He brushes a strand of hair away from my face and tucks it behind my ear the way he does sometimes, his eyes searching mine, conveying so much more than our words can.
“I couldn’t go if I wanted to,” I say. “And I don’t want to. I never want to. I can’t imagine my life without you, now.”
“Neither can I,” Oz says. “I don’t even remember what my life was like a week ago. I can’t picture it. It’s just wrong.”
From the speakers, I hear the sound of my dad clearing his throat loudly, and I look back at him with a flinch. I almost forgot that he was even watching us. I was so wrapped up in Oz that nothing else existed for a moment.
“Are you sure this isn’t a joke?” he says, looking at us. “If it is, I’m about to reach out to the Oscars, because I think that might have been the best performance of all time.”
Oz frowns. I see it in the corner of the screen, the pair of us in miniature. “It’s not a joke,” he says. “I don’t know what we have to do to convince you that…”
My dad raises a hand, making Oz trail off. “I’m convinced,” he says. “At least, I’m convinced that the two of you are convinced. But this is all so intense. It’s been too short a time. You should get some distance, see this from a different perspective.”
I understand what he’s saying. It does make sense. It’s rational and mature. A way to prove that the way we feel about each other is real.
But I don’t need to prove it. I know it deep in my bones. This isn’t just some kind of vacation fling, or me getting carried away because I’ve never been with a man before. This is so much more than that.
“I hear what you’re saying,” Oz says, and my heart sinks just a little, wondering if he’s going to agree. “But the thing is, Dean – I don’t need perspective. I knew it from the moment I saw her again, saw who she’s become. She’s the one for me. All these years I’ve been single and waiting, and I didn’t know what for. But when I saw her, I knew. I’ve been waiting for her.”
My heart clenches inside of me with a kind of joyous pain, like someone is squeezing it tightly in their fist. I don’t know how much more happiness a person can take.
I look at him with tears in my eyes, and he kisses them away, gentle and practically chaste compared to our usual kisses. Then he kisses the back of my hand, holding it to his mouth like he can’t bear for his lips not to be in contact with my skin.
I look back at my dad, all the way on the other side of a big ocean. He could try to keep us apart. But I don’t see how he would manage it. Not with the force of what we feel.
But still, he’s frowning.
“How do you expect all of this to work?” he asks, at length, his eyes fixed on us. “A college student and a grown man with much more than a full-time job – when do you think you’re even going to see each other?”
And for the first time, desperation claws its way up my throat as I see something begin to flicker in Oz’s eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Oz
He’s got a good point. The thing is, he doesn’t realize that I’ve thought about all of this already.
There were nights when I was so exhausted that I fell asleep immediately, my whole body satiated and hers wrapped in my arms. But there were other nights, nights when I held her and let her sleep in that cocoon while I thought. And thought. And thought.
And I thought enough to figure all of this out – at least, to a standard that satisfied my own questions.
“It’s not going to be like that anymore,” I tell him. “I spent my life working hard so that I would be ready if I ever needed to be. I’ve acquired wealth, enough to see me through to the end of my days if it needed to. But even if I step down just a little, cut my hours to a normal working day, then it’s enough. We’ll be able to spend much more time together. And I’m willing to do that.”
