“I’m nervous,” I blurt.
Nathan’s eyebrows rise, and then he lets out a long breath and a tiny smile. “Same.”
“Really? Okay, good. Because logically, I know it’s me and you.” I sputter a humorless laugh. “It’s a dream come true, in fact! I shouldn’t be nervous—I should be tackling you.”
“It’s harder to accomplish than you think,” he says, cracking a joke that instantly eases the prickling in my lungs.
“But what I’m nervous about—or afraid of, really, is that I said I love you back there and you said it too only to humor me.” I have big cartoon eyes now—I can feel it.
Nathan smiles in a way that
shows barely contained amusement. “Humor you?” He takes a nervous step away and runs an awkward hand through his hair. “You thought I could have been humoring you by telling you I love you?”
“Yes. You don’t have to keep repeating it.”
“I do. Because if you were in my head, you’d see how difficult the concept is to comprehend. Bree, I…” His voice trails off and then he freezes. He deflates with a sharp breath. “Sit down,” he commands, and then he disappears into his giant walk-in closet.
I perch on the bed and bounce my knee. Then I realize I’m sitting on Nathan’s bed—something I’ve never done before—and I jump up like it just burned my butt cheeks. I force myself to sit back down and process this like an adult. I’m in Nathan’s bed. In his room. He loves me. Nope, see? None of these abstract ideas will permeate. I’ve spent too long believing he has not a care in the world for me outside of friendship. It’s all I’ve known. How am I supposed to retrain my thoughts?
Nathan steps back into the room, and if he notices that I’m barely letting my cheeks rest on his mattress, he doesn’t show it. His attention is fixed on the shoe box in his hands. He looks nervous, maybe even a little sick as he extends it toward me. When I try to take it, it doesn’t budge. He’s white-knuckling this thing so hard.
I grunt. “Nathan, do you want me to look in here or not?”
“Not,” he says, dead serious. “I mean, yes. But no.”
I shift back a little. “Well now I’m terrified. What do you have in here? Bones? Endless pictures of earlobes? Am I going to be scared of you after I lift that lid?”
“Probably.” He winces lightly and then relinquishes the box.
I set it down on the bed carefully (because who knows what’s in here or how fragile thousand-year-old bones are) and gingerly lift the lid. I steel my spine for something to jump out, because he’s prepared me zero percent for what’s actually in here. Lizards? Maybe he keeps a box of moths in his closet and when I open it, they’ll rush out and choke my airway.
It’s neither.
After the lid is off, it takes me a second to realize what I’m looking at. Nathan paces away from me with a tight hand on the back of his neck. I dip my fingers inside and pull out…my scrunchie. The sunshine yellow scrunchie I thought I lost after Tequila-gate several weeks ago. I look up and make eye contact with Nathan. He looks like he’s going to barf. His fist is pressed to his mouth, and his eyes are crinkled. Poor thing is really going through the vulnerability wringer tonight.
“This is my scrunchie,” I say, holding it up for his confirmation that what I think I’m seeing is actually true.
He gives me a tight nod. “You took it off and left it on the table that night. I kept it.” He gestures toward the box with his eyes. “Keep going.”
Nathan resumes pacing, looking at me every so often like someone might watch a surgical operation they have been forced to attend. Next, I find a cocktail napkin with my lipstick imprint from the epic poster-ripping night. Then the orange Starburst I threw at him on the couch.
The deeper I go into the box, the more I recognize things I haven’t seen in years. A concert ticket from a Bruno Mars show he took me to for my birthday (and got us backstage passes to, which he pretended to randomly find on the sidewalk because I never allow him to buy me extravagant things). Toward the bottom, I find a gum wrapper with my phone number scribbled on it from high school. I remember this day like it was yesterday. We had run together for the first time that morning before classes. That afternoon in homeroom, he asked me if I’d want to run together again sometime. Of course I said yes, and we exchanged numbers. I didn’t save the slip of paper he gave me with his number, though, and now I feel like a horribly unromantic monster!
Once I’ve gone through every single item in this box and spread it all out on the bed around me, I meet his gaze. He finally comes near me and plucks the scrunchie I’m clutching like it’s a million-dollar bill out of my hands. “This smelled exactly like your hair. Coconut. I should have given it back to you, but I couldn’t.” He tosses it in the box. I’m never getting that scrunchie back. Next, he grabs my hands to tug me up to stand with him. “Do you see now? You’re always giving me things that remind you of me, but I’m over here stealing things that remind me of you. I’m not humoring you, Bree. I’m not taking this lightly. I’m so devastatingly in love with you, it hurts sometimes—and I have been since high school.”
Hope, hope, hope. I hear it beating in my ears.
“I’ve been dying for you to love me back—but I never thought you would. Remember when you found out I’m celibate and I told you it was to help my game? That was a complete lie. I’ve been celibate because I am so gone for you I couldn’t even stomach the thought of another woman anywhere near my bed. She would never be you.” He cradles my face. “I love you with everything I am, and that’s never going to change for me. I think I should be the one making sure you’re not just humoring me.”
I can’t take the space between us anymore. I rise up on my toes to lay one soft kiss on his lips, feeling like this has to be a dream and I can do anything I want in my dreams. “I’ve loved you since the day you tied my shoe on the track. You didn’t tell me it was untied, you just tied it.”
The muscles in his jaw jump like he’s swallowing back tears. “Bree, that was the first day we met.” His tone says, Don’t toy with me, woman.
“I know. That’s the day it all started for me.”
His massive shoulders rise and fall in one huge breath, and then his eyes shut like he’s in pain. “Do you mean to tell me…we’ve both loved each other all this time and never said anything?”
I laugh even though it’s not funny at all. I run a finger over one of his eyebrows. “Yes. I think so.”