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At least she hadn’t run yet.
I love you,Harry thought. He ached to say the words.
Crickets resumed their whirring song all around them. A bumblebee zinged by his nose, its back legs chunky with pollen. Harry picked a dainty white wildflower and stepped closer to her.
Her mouth dropped open like she was going to speak, but no words came.
Harry trailed the petals of the flower across the back of her hand. When she took it from him, relief made his heart pummel his lungs. “Every minute I’m not with you—it’s wasted.”
“Oh god.” Rowan’s head tipped back. “How long do you think that lasts? That intensity? It doesn’t. It’s not sustainable.”
“How do you know? How many lifetimes have you spent with a person?”
She made a dismissivepffsound.
“You want to science it? Give us fifty years to test your hypothesis,” Harry said. “I want to marry you someday, Rowan.”
Her mouth closed with an audible clack of teeth, and she looked at him like he held a hand grenade with the pin pulled.
“I don’t want kids,” she blurted.
“I just want you.”
“That’s a lie, Harry. I’ve seen how you are with Ace and Grey.”
“Fine. I’ve seen howyouare with them too,” he fired back.
Splotches of red flickered along her collarbone and climbed her neck. Harry knew she hated that about herself, but it was one of the things he loved. Her body was a canvas for all the emotion she tried to hide.
“I could turn out to be”—she fidgeted with the flower—“like my mother.”
Realization dawned. Harry jammed the heels of his palms into his temples. “Oh my god, I get it now. You don’t trustyourself. How can you ever trust me if you can’t trust yourself?”
Her fire flared back to life. “Ididtrust you. I trusted you to respect that we had an expiration date. But now I’m finally leaving for interviews, and somehow we’re talking aboutmarriage? What happened to promising this would be enough?”
Harry’s shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “There’s no such thing as ‘enough’ when it comes to you.”
“Don’t,” she snapped, throwing up a warning hand.
“I made that promise to you a long time ago, Rowan. Things changed.Wechanged. I am mentally, emotionally, and physically incapable of having anything less than everything from you.” His voice broke on the words.
The look she gave him was agony and anger and exhaustion. “We’ve never been our real selves here, Harry. It’s been a fantasy. Youhaveto see that. You’re not a sunburned, callused handyman, and I didn’t get a Ph.D. in botany to prune grapevines and tend your dad’s tomatoes.”
Harry squeezed the back of his sweaty neck. So much about her was rapidly coming into sharp focus, he had a hard time keeping up. “I can’t believe I didn’t realize this before. All this time, you expected me to make iteasyfor you to eventually walk away. You put it all on me. Well, fuck that.”
“What happened to not trying to influence my decision?” she said.
“I changed my mind. If you walk away from this, I want it to hurt.”
Muttering to herself, she whirled around to move farther into the meadow, to the point where the path took a sharp turn. She flung up a hand as she turned, and said, “None of this would be the same outside of the insulated little bubble this place has created for us.”
If he followed, he’d lose sight of the path’s entrance. Sweat slicked the crooks of his elbows and behind his knees. Something with tiny legs crawled over his bare foot, and his insides unraveled.
“You have to do this. I can’t carry you.”
He hustled after her.
“Rowan,wecreated this. It goes wherever we go. You’ve told me you can’t stay here. Won’t stay. Fine. What about me going withyou?”
