The knot unties a little more, and a chuckle slips out of me. My hands tighten on her bare thighs, beneath the hem of her skirt. “You’ll never let me live that down.”
She shakes her head, smiling a little, although it still looks wobbly. “I don’t intend to.”
“I love you, Fin,” I say again. Now that it’s out, I can’t hold it back. I need her to hear it as much as I need to say it. I think she needs it too, because the lines of her body soften, and she dissolves into me, pulling my face to hers for a kiss. It’s slow, tender, and achingly familiar. We haven’t kissed like this in two weeks. It’s like there’s been something holding the both of us back, and I realize it’s been our insecurities nagging at us from the inside out.
But this feels right, and I can’t help the way my hands drag up, knotting in the fabric covering her waist, wanting to pull it off and feel her skin beneath, show her with my lips and hands and body what I can’t with words.
She doesn’t say she loves me back, but I think she’s doing the same thing. Telling me the only way she thinks she can right now. She knows me too well. If she told me she loved me right now, she knows there’s no way I’d consider leaving.
She sighs into the kiss, and I tug her bottom lip between my teeth, loving the way she moans into my mouth, the way her palms land on my shoulders and tug me into the V of her legs.
If she thinks withholding words is going to make me consider leaving her for Maine, she’s dead wrong. Nothing, and I mean nothing, could pull me away from this. From her. I’ll go to Maine for the weekend, but I’ll be coming home to her at the end of it, and I don’t plan on going anywhere without her ever again.
I show up atNora’s house the next morning crying. I’ve been doing a lot of that over the last two weeks, especially yesterday morning with Grey. I hope he will give Maine a chance, and when I told him that this morning, he just smiled, kissed my forehead, and told me he loved me again.
Everything inside me quaked to say it back, but I held myself in check. I couldn’t tell him as I was sending him off to Maine to check out a new job. I need him to feel free to leave if that’s what he wants. Even if it breaks me.
Which I think is what’s happening when Nora opens the door and finds me sobbing on her doorstep. She ushers me inside without even asking what’s going on. She’s heard all my internal thoughts for the last two weeks, and she thinks they’re bullshit, but she’s the best kind of friend and is supportive anyway.
“It’s french toast day,” she says, her small, warm hand on my back as she leads me into the kitchen. I imagine this is what she’s like with her kids, how she’s a natural caretaker. Nora was made to be a mom, and every time I’m around her, I wonder if I can ever hope to do it half as well as she does.
When I walk into the kitchen, tears staining my cheeks, Veer and Devina just stare at me from where they’re seated in highchairs at the kitchen table, their hands and faces sticky with syrup and stained from berries.
“Did you get your period?” Veer asks me in his little voice, completely serious, and my head swings to face Nora.
She shrugs, falling back into the seat I imagine she was in before I pounded on her door. “It’s never too early to learn about women’s health.”
She’s right, of course, so I take a seat in the one opposite hers and nod solemnly at Veer, because really, waking up to my period had been the icing on the cake this morning. Now I’ll have to sit alone on my couch all weekend, eating tubs of ice cream with a heating pad cooking my reproductive organs while my boyfriend is a thousand miles up the coast, deciding whether he wants to leave here for good.
I’m so tired of this feeling, of giving away pieces of myself and waiting to see if someone will like them enough to keep them. Or if they’ll return them, broken and shattered, and try to find someone or something that doesn’t require quite so much work. I want to believe that Grey will still choose me after examining every option, but the truth is, I’m not so sure. And the waiting is going to kill me.
Nora watches me, her face contorted in a concerned expression. “Are you okay?”
I shrug, but I know she can tell the answer.
I think I expect her to say something encouraging, but I’m wrong. She only sighs and says, “I still don’t understand why you told him to consider the job.”
This isn’t the first time she’s said this. For the last two weeks, as I was working through what I should do, she’s been telling me to get my head out of my ass and tell him I love him. I almost did so many times, but every time, I backed out.
I want him to know his options and still choose me, or else I’ll always be waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to regret staying here in this town with his toxic parents who make him feel like shit and in a job he probably won’t be able to advance in as a newer hire, where the person he considers a father figure is no longer here to make the word seem brighter for him.
Staying here means giving up so much, and I want him to know what he’s getting himself into.
I shake my head, not having the energy to explain all this again. Instead, I just say, “I want him to pick me. Is that so bad?”
She holds my gaze. “But does he know you’re picking him? From what you’ve told me, it doesn’t seem like many people have chosenhim, and you sent him off to Maine without telling him you’d pick him.”
Her words slice through me, cutting me to the core. I don’t know how to respond. My stomach knots, nausea roiling through me, my heart stopping and starting again, beating faster than it should.
I can see last night in my mind’s eye, Grey telling me over and over again that he loves me, and me not saying it back. Not giving him the words that so few people have in his life, the words he needs to hear more than anything else. That he’s loved exactly as he is. That he doesn’t have to be anyone but himself, and he’s still worthy of love.
Nora watches me process what she said, then pushes out of her seat, moving behind the kitchen counter. She loads up a plate with french toast, drizzling it with syrup and powdered sugar, adds a scoop of scrambled eggs and a handful of berries that she’s mixed into one big container.
She sets the plate in front of me with a fork and napkin before sitting back down across from me. “All I’m saying is that you love him, and I think he deserves to know that. Being loved by you is something special.Youare something special, Finley, andI think if he knew you loved him the way he loves you, there wouldn’t even be another option for him.”
Book club intrudes on my weekend plans to rot on my couch with ice cream and a heating pad. I try to beg out of it, saying my cramps are too bad, but Nora shows up at my door and tells me to get up and come on.
It’s Saturday, and I haven’t been able to get her words from yesterday morning out of my head. I thought I was doing Grey a favor by sending him off without telling him my feelings, but now I’m wondering if I sent him away not knowing if he’s wanted, just like he’s always feared. It kept me up all night, staring at my ceiling, wishing he was beside me instead of cold, empty sheets, so I could tell him.
