SERENITY
I’d never been to an e-sports tournament before. Never even watched one. As I watched Bart compete in this one, the electricity of the atmosphere fused itself to my soul and I already knew I’d be back. If not to this tournament, then to another. I’d also almost certainly start watching the livestreams when I could.
It’s no wonder he loves this so much. While I’d always supported his passion for it, I’d never quite understood it until now. I’d also always known that he was good, but watching him compete made me realize that he wasn’t just good. He was one of the greats.
These people cheered for him like they did for any of the legends in traditional sports, and it filled my heart with joy to see him in his element. I didn’t even know if he knew it, but he was grinning from ear to ear all the way through the game, seeming so confident that it would’ve unnerved me if I’d been going up against him.
When he won, the roar was so deafening that I smiled.Yep, they sure love him. Maybe even almost as much as I do.
With that thought, my nerves crept back in. I’d revealed my feelings to him and all these other people here, and I still had no idea how he felt about me. All I wanted to do once the game ended was to go to him, but I hung back a bit until the fanfare faded and then I made my way to the stage.
When the crowd between us suddenly parted and my gaze met his as he approached me, my heart almost stood still. Those green eyes were so bright, filled with a happiness so pure that I knew in that moment my admission hadn’t been unwelcome.
A slow smile spread on his face as we kept looking at each other, and then he was coming to me, striding across the space between us so confidently that it was like none of these other people were even here. Like he knew no one would get in his way and didn’t care if they did.
When he reached me, I smiled up at him shyly, not knowing how he felt about me revealing my feelings for him to his whole world even if I didn’t think the feelings were unwelcome anymore.
“Can we talk?” I asked.
He nodded. “Sure, there’s nowhere private around here, though.”
“Actually, there is.” I waggled my brows at him. “I’m kind of a big deal around here tonight. They even gave me my own dressing room. Would you like to see it?”
“Absolutely.” He grinned, taking my hand and willingly following after me as I dragged him to the dressing room.
Several people tried to stop us on the way to speak to him, but he politely declined all interviews and quickly made his excuses when others congratulated him or tried talking to him about the game. As soon as the door to the small room shut behind us, I turned the lock to make sure we wouldn’t be interrupted. Then I took a deep breath and dug the paper out of my back pocket.
Bart was standing in the middle of the room, arms loosely at his sides as he took a look around. There wasn’t much in here, just a sofa, a side table, and all the stools my team had brought in to use, but it had been more than enough for me and it was perfect for the privacy we needed now.
As he noticed me looking at him, he opened his mouth to speak but I beat him to it, taking the couple of steps between us and holding out the check. “This is for the exact amount you gave me. I don’t want there to be anything between us or any doubts, so before we talk about anything, I’m going to need you to take it.”
He frowned. “I can’t do that. The money is yours. You more than earned it.”
Having been prepared for this response, I took his hand and gently placed the check in his palm. “I only used a portion of the money you gave me to record my first song, and that one was enough to get me a deal that covers this and more. I would’ve gone on that trip without the money in a heartbeat. Maybe not at the beginning, but even then, my main motivation for agreeing was to spend time with you and to experience all those things with you. The money just made it impossible to turn down the offer.”
Eyes moving from one of mine to the other, he stared at me intently. He finally broke eye contact when he pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “I heard you that day in Hawaii when you were on the phone to Leah. I do believe that you wanted to come with me, but I also know that the money meant a lot to you.”
“If you were going to eavesdrop, you should’ve stayed for the whole conversation,” I said, not surprised when I finally found out what had gone wrong. “All the time we’ve been apart, I’ve been trying to come up with an explanation for what happened that day. The only thing that made sense was that you must’ve heard me talking to her, but if you’d stayed for the whole conversation, you’d have heard me tell her that I didn’t care about the money anymore.”
His brows inched up. “That’s not how it sounded to me.”
Since I was still holding the check to his palm, his fingers not having closed around it yet, I squeezed his hand for a moment before withdrawing to set the paper down on the armrest of the sofa we were standing next to. Once that was done, I took both of his hands in both of mine and looked up into his eyes.
“Before we left for Iceland, I told Leah that I was thinking about telling you that I didn’t want the money. I didn’t want it coming between us, even then. She told me that I couldn’t. She pointed out that you’d offered it to me to help me with my career and that turning it down under the circumstances would’ve been stupid. She also told me how lucky I was to have someone like you who still cared about me and my career enough to have come up with a way to give me the money that didn’t involve making me feel like a charity case.”
I took a breath, hoping he heard the honesty in my voice and saw the truth of what I was saying in my eyes. “At the time, I was also worried that things would be awkward and that we wouldn’t get along as well as we used to once it was just us, on the road and alone for days on end. She reminded me that even if it was awkward and we didn’t get along, you’d still offered to help me because you believed in me. She said that my career had to come first and it made me realize that you wouldn’t have offered if you didn’t want to help me get my big break. Then you arrived in that limo and I realized I was silly to be so nervous about how things were going to go between us.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because what you overheard in Hawaii was me referencing that conversation she and I had way back at the beginning. I never spoke to her about turning down the money again, but as soon as I realized that it had been silly to be so nervous and that I was really just looking forward to spending the time with you, the thought was back to being front and center in my mind.”
“Leah is super career oriented,” I said. “So that day when I spoke to her in Hawaii, I started the conversation with everything we’d spoken about before you and I had left, but I ended it by telling her that I was in love with you again and that I’d have done it all without the money.”
“You also said that you were looking forward to getting back and recording now that you could afford it.”
I smiled. “Of course I was. You can’t tell me that there was no part of you that was looking forward to getting back to practice. To this tournament. In the back of my mind, I knew even then that I would use only the barest minimum of the money and that I would pay you back as soon as I could. I was never going to keep it all.”
“You weren’t?”