Thank You for Listening(98)

“Yes?”

“Some super-stealth sex weapon that could go rogue at any moment,” she blurted.

Nick belted out a laugh. “What?”

“You’re like the Jason Bourne of Romance. You know things no man should know. A military-grade weapon just walking around in broad daylight.” She widened her eye, leaned into how absurd her fears were, especially as she was now saying them aloud. “How can I know you won’t use your powers for ill?”

Nick answered honestly. “You can’t.”

In for a penny, in for a pound, she supposed. “How can I know you’ll always want me?”

“You can’t.” Again, with a tone of sincerity. His refusal to engage in false reassurances or empty flattery tugged a disconcerted chuckle out of her. “I’m serious. How can you know you’ll always want me? What if I gain a hundred pounds? Lose my hair? My mind. What if, what if, what if?”

“I’d still want you,” she answered seriously.

They stopped dancing, but remained close. He shook his head. “You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“Feelings aren’t constant, they’re transient. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. You can believe in them, but you can’t know them. How can you know what something is before it becomes it? It’s like . . .” His voice faded. “Like a caterpillar and a butterfly.”

“What?”

Nick shook his head. “Nothing. Riffing.” He reached up, pushed her hair off her face. “You just got done telling me you can’t know an HEA until it’s been lived, but now you want a guarantee of getting there?”

“Not a guarantee, no, but some assurance that–”

“I can assure you I won’t cheat on you, because that is in my control. I can only control my actions, I can’t control . . . life.” Nick started dancing again. “Why do you automatically assume the worst?”

His tone was remarkably void of judgment. He was curious. She sighed. Her accident? Her father? Her insecurity? Pick one. “Because . . . because . . .” Ah-ha. “Because we don’t feel real to me. It feels like we fell out of a Romance tree and hit every trope on the way down.”

He laughed. “Snowed In.”

“Just One Night.”

“Epistolary.”

“Mistaken Identity.”

“Love Triangle.”

She chuckled. “For a minute.”

“I think that means we’re on to Second Chance, no?” She didn’t answer. His hand widened, fingers spanning more of her waist, her back. The hand holding hers interlaced their fingers and he brought it to his chest. “This isn’t real enough for you? What do you need? Some deus ex machina? Some contrived fight over a pointless misunderstanding to make you realize what you had and almost lost?”

Sewanee shook her head. This wasn’t a June French novel. They didn’t need to dramatically blow apart in order to come back together. They were just two people doing their best to not step on the other’s toes while figuring out how to dance.

The cellist had ended the song. They parted for a moment and clapped appreciatively. She began playing again.

Before reengaging, though, Sewanee said, “I want to know we aren’t mistaking this for some Romance novel.”

“We’re not. We can write our own book. Day by day, page by page.”

She saw the slightest flicker of doubt in his eyes. Not doubt in what he believed to be true, but in whether she could believe it, too. In her capacity to believe something that couldn’t be known. Sure, she could accept the concept of HEA in the philosophical abstract, but here, in the practicality of an intimate moment, in having to make a choice and live with its consequences . . . he wasn’t sure she could do that.

She saw him fully, then. The pieces of himself that he’d disparately shared with her and which she’d diligently collected, but couldn’t assemble: a child who grew up never having the security of believing he’d been wanted; a man who’d lost his dream and was learning how to believe in it again. She saw failure and success, weakness and strength, and most of all, the longing for someone to love all of it. To love him.

“Ask me again what I want,” she murmured.

“What do you want, love?”

“I don’t want to be in any book with you anymore. I want to be in real life with you.”

“However it may end?”

“Yes.”

“Happily or not?”

She was surprised to find the answer so easy to say. “Yes.” Then, “Absolute-mente.”

The kiss they shared this time was not chaste.

She heard clapping, a couple of catcalls, and was transported back in time to a Las Vegas blizzard, Nick pushing her against a wall, a roving pack of unchaperoned boys hooting. The difference this time was she had nothing holding her upright, they were unmoored in the middle of a cobblestone piazza, and she felt her head swim and her knees liquify. She clung to him tighter until he muttered, “We need to go.”

“Please,” she panted.

“I’m legitimately terrified something’s going to ruin this.”

She guffawed. “We’re tempting fate.”

He grabbed her waist. “Did you feel that?!” He met her eye. “That wasn’t an earthquake, was it?” Then he tickled her.