“I want you to stay forever,” he says, bending to kiss me on the forehead. The lightest kiss, the most chaste. But also so full of meaning. “Gabby, I love you.”
That swelling becomes impossible to bear, my chest surely expanding sixteen times just to contain the size of my heart now.
“I love you, too,” I whisper. I close my eyes as he kisses me again, so sweet and gentle, and it feels like the end of the world and the start of it all at once.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Oz
It's only when the two of us finally come down from the highest of highs, the epic joy that seems to cocoon us both now, that we both realize and acknowledge the elephant in the room.
Even if Gabby doesn’t get on her flight, it’s still going to leave. Which means that other people are going to expect her to be on it. And we need to deal with that expectation.
It's all well and good, the two of us staying here together in each other's arms. In our own chrysalis against the rest of the world, protected and preserved for as long as we can manage it. But the thing is, it won't be this way forever. There are other people out there. I have work, which won't wait any longer than I have already made it. She has her family, her friends back home. She has her college applications. All of these things won't come to an end just because we’ve decided to be together.
And there are other considerations, too. Visas. The question of where we would stay. Where we would live. As much as I love my penthouse, it's not exactly set up for family life. All of these questions, and more, need to be addressed, and the simple bubble of our happiness might end up bursting along with them.
But I won't allow that to happen. I have her in my arms now, I know that she’s mine, and there is no way I’m letting her go.
“What do we do now?” Gabby asks, echoing my own thoughts.
“There is only one thing to do,” I say. “Make arrangements.”
“What does that mean?” she asks, frowning slightly.
“It means, my darling,” I say, kissing her forehead again. “We have to talk to other people about this. Starting with canceling your flight, so they aren't waiting for you to arrive. And from there, we can decide whether you are canceling it entirely or just rescheduling it for a later date. And once we've decided that, others need to know. The people who would be picking you up from the airport, for example.”
Gabby lets out a low gasp. “My dad,” she says. “He'll be expecting me.”
She looks at me, and in her eyes, I can read the same thought that haunts me. How are we going to explain this to him?
How am I going to tell my best friend that I’ve fallen in love with his daughter?
It would be bad enough if I was just some random stranger. Someone he had never heard of at all. The age gap between us would make anyone question, as would the speed at which we realized we were meant to be together. It's only been a week, and I can hear all of his objections in my head already.
But above and beyond all of that is the fact that we know each other. That he trusted me to look after his daughter while she was here, to make sure that she was safe and well and had everything she needed. I’m sure he will see this as a betrayal of his trust. Not only that, but all the times I saw her when she was growing up. It's not like I thought anything about her then. I barely even noticed her, just saw her as my friend's daughter. But I don't know if he will believe that.
I have to trust that he knows me well enough to know that my intentions have always been good. To understand that I never saw her as a woman until she was one. But that is a lot of trust to place in a person, even a person who has been your best friend for decades. It was our own college experience that brought us together, and Gabby hasn't even been through that phase of her life yet.
I can see how bad it's going to look. How angry he is going to be. But it doesn't change a thing. How could it change anything about how I feel about her? How could it stop me from loving her?
“We need to talk to him,” I say. “Sooner rather than later. It would be better if we could talk to him in person, sit him down and go through everything, but...”
“But in order to do that we would both have to go back,” Gabby says, finishing my thought. “And if we’re there, he might not allow me to leave again.”