“My head’s just fine,” I said. I had to admit it. I couldn’t keep playing it down. If he thought it was too crazy, too wild, too big, and too much after such a short time, so be it. I couldn’t keep not being myself for everyone else’s sake. I couldn’t keep pretending I didn’t feel things so deeply if the alternative was to feel nothing at all.
I would rather love a thousand times and never be loved in turn than never love at all.
“And I meant it,” I said. “I know it’s soon, and it’s serious, and maybe it all falls apart for a million reasons I can’t predict, but dammit, you make me feel good.”
“Well,” Bennet said, licking his lips. “I’m happy I make you feel good.” He shifted his feet a little, looked down between us, then caught my gaze again. He caught it and held it. “You make me feel good, too. And that’s not all. You make me feel better than I thought I could feel. I didn’t let myself see it becauseI couldn’t imagine a guy like you falling in love with a guy like me. Settling. That’s the word I kept thinking of. I didn’t think you’d settle for me. But that’s my fault. I worked from a faulty assumption and ignored the evidence of my own heart. I convinced myself that you were too cool to even like me very much.”
“Even when we had wild, bed-wrecking sex?” I whispered.
“Especially then,” Bennet said. “Because I convinced myself it was just fun. That was the only way I could keep seeing you without…well…without admitting that I’m so hopelessly in love with you, Jason. Because I am. And not just in love. I love you in a way that I want to come home to you. I love you in a way that I want to tell you about my day, hear about yours, and sit quietly on the same sofa next to you, and lean on you, and inhale, and have every tension drain out of me because I feel so good when you’re just there. That’s…how I feel.”
I closed my mouth because it had dropped open sometimes during his speech. “You love me,” I whispered.
Bennet tilted his head a little. “And I don’t know how to say it. Or didn’t know. Because loving you and being loved by you never crossed my mind. I never thought it was possible.”
“You love me,” I said again, tasting the words, testing their shape on my lips. They fit. They were the perfect size and shape and flavor. They were thewords that completed me, making everything else click together and fall in place. “You really do.”
Bennet nodded. “And I have the courage to say so, too. You make me brave.”
I didn’t trust my voice at first.
My chest felt too full, like every breath might spill something important if I wasn’t careful. I looked at him standing there in the sunlight, hands shoved into his pockets like he didn’t quite know what to do with them yet, like loving me hadn’t suddenly made him a different person, but it had made him braver. That thought alone nearly knocked me over.
“Bennet,” I said, and it came out rougher than I meant it to. I cleared my throat and tried again. “I spent weeks convincing myself I’d ruin everything if I opened my mouth.”
He shook his head immediately. “You didn’t.”
“I know that now,” I said, a soft laugh breaking loose because the relief was finally catching up with the fear. “But I’ve done that before. I kept waiting for the moment you’d realize I was…a lot.”
His brows knit together, not angry, just intent. “You are a lot.”
I smiled despite myself. “Yeah. I am.”
“And I like that,” he said. “I like that you feel things all the way instead of halfway. I like that you don’t ration yourself out in polite doses.”
That landed somewhere deep. Somewhere tender.
“I thought you were settling for me,” he went on, quieter now, repeating that terrible world.
I stepped closer before I consciously decided to, closing the space until it felt right. “I don’t settle,” I said. “I never have. I just…fall. And when I fall, I fall all the way. That scares people.”
“It scared me,” he admitted. “Because I didn’t know how to match it.”
“You don’t have to match it,” I said quickly. “You just have to be here.”
He looked up at me then, really looked, and something softened in his face like he’d been holding tension in his jaw for days and had finally let it go.
“I am here,” he said. “I want to be here.”
I exhaled, slow and careful, like I was afraid to move too fast and break the moment. “I don’t need you to be anything other than you are,” I said. “You’re already funnier, hotter, and cuter than you know. I love the way you think. I love the way you show up. And I’ll make sure you know this and believe this, even if it takes a lifetime to prove it.”
A lifetime. There I go again, big and relentless and unstoppable.I didn’t just love him for who he was now. I loved him for who he was before and for all he could be in the future.
His eyes went glassy, but he didn’t look away.
“And I love you,” he said again, quieter but surer than before. “Not because you’re a football star or because you make rooms light up. I love you because you see me and don’t try to sand me down.”
I laughed softly, overwhelmed and a little dazed. “We’re really bad at underestimating ourselves, huh?”