Page 58 of You, Only You

"I don't know! That's the point." My voice climbed and I let it, because controlling it hadn't gotten me anywhere. "I don't know what we are because you kissed me and then bricked yourself inside a wall and I've been standing outside it for four days trying to figure out if I should knock or just walk away, and I'm not... I don't..." The words got tangled and I pressed my handsagainst my face and breathed once, hard, through my fingers. "I'm not good at this. I've never been good at this. I'm good at numbers. Numbers make sense. People don't, and you especially don't."

The silence lasted long enough for me to become profoundly aware that I'd just unraveled in front of a man who handled emotion with the dexterity of someone wearing oven mitts.

When he spoke, his voice was lower. Closer to the ground. "I've been telling myself it was the right call. Walking away."

"And?"

"And the arguments keep getting thinner." He moved to the railing, leaned against it, and for once he wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the skyline and I could see his profile in the amber light and the tension in his jaw and the way his hands gripped the railing like he needed something solid to hold onto. "I run the logic every night. The case. Your career. The tactical exposure. And every night the logic makes perfect sense and I still can't sleep because the logic doesn't..." He stopped. "It doesn't account for the part where not being near you feels like a problem I can't solve."

My heart did something that I would describe clinically as an arrhythmic event and emotionally as a catastrophe.

"So your solution is to just... suffer in silence? Let both of us be miserable because the spreadsheet says it's optimal?"

"I don't have a spreadsheet."

"You absolutely have a spreadsheet. It's just in your head. You've got a whole cost-benefit analysis running, and the benefits column is full and the costs column is full and you keep staring at both of them and choosing the one that hurts more because you think pain means you're being responsible."

He turned his head and looked at me, and the expression on his face was one I hadn't seen from him before. Not the mask. Not the cracks in the mask. Something underneath both of thosethings, something exposed and uncertain, like a man who'd been navigating by map and just realized he was holding it upside down.

"How do you do that?" he said quietly.

"Do what?"

"See... all of it. The parts I don't say." He shook his head slowly. "I have spent years making sure nobody can read me. You do it like you're reading a menu."

"You're not as opaque as you think," I said, and my voice had gone soft without my permission. "You think the mask works because most people don't push past it. But I grew up watching someone perform normalcy every day for twenty-four years. I know what the performance looks like from inside. And Will..." I stepped closer. Not much. Enough. "You're performing right now. Right this second. You're standing there wanting to reach for me and deciding not to, and I can see the decision happening, and it's the same decision you've been making for four days, and I need you to stop making it."

"If I stop making it..." He looked at me, and the want in his eyes was so naked and so raw that my breath caught. "Lindsey, if I stop holding this back, I don't know how to do it halfway. I don't know how to..." His hand came off the railing and moved toward me, then stopped, suspended in the air between us like a question he couldn't finish asking. "I do everything at full volume. You know that. The hunting. The control. The way I... if I let myself want this, I will want it with everything I have, and everything I have is a lot, and it's not all good."

"I know."

"It will be suffocating sometimes. I'll make decisions I shouldn't. I'll try to protect you from things you don't need protecting from."

"I know that too."

"And when I get scared, and I will get scared, my instinct is going to be to grab tighter, not let go. That's not a tendency I've fixed. It's a tendency I've managed, badly, and I'll probably keep managing it badly, and you deserve someone who..."

"Stop." I closed the last of the distance between us. His hand was still hanging in the air. I took it. His fingers were freezing. "Stop telling me what I deserve. I've been hearing that my whole life. You deserve better than a father who's a criminal. You deserve better than a life defined by someone else's mistakes. Everyone has an opinion on what I deserve except me." I held his hand between both of mine, warming his cold fingers, and looked up at him. "I want this. I want you. The messy, overwhelming, probably-going-to-drive-me-crazy version. Not because I think it'll be easy. Because I think it'll be real. And I have been so tired of things that aren't real."

His breath left him in a rush that might have been a laugh or a surrender or both.

"I'm going to mess this up," he said.

"Obviously."

"Multiple times."

"I'd be disappointed if you didn't. What kind of boring relationship never has a catastrophic argument?" I squeezed his hand. "You mess up, I call you out. I mess up, you tell me. We fight about it like adults and then eat takeout and figure it out. That's the deal."

"That's the deal?"

"That's the deal."

He looked at our joined hands. Then at my face. And the thing that happened to his expression was something I wanted to describe precisely, because precision was what I did, but the truth was that it defied my vocabulary. The mask didn't so much fall as dissolve, and what was underneath wasn't any single emotion but a whole landscape of them, relief and fear and wantand something achingly tender that made the backs of my eyes sting.

"Okay," he said.

One word. But he said it the way people say things that are changing their lives. Quietly. With their whole self.