I shook my head quickly. “No. I mean, yes.” I blew out a frustrated breath. “Look. I’m just going to say it.”
He nodded and crossed his arms over his chest in a gesture that was the physical embodiment of his internal need to protect his heart. Oliver might know me, but I knew him too, which meant I also knew I wasn’t the only one freaking out right now. I’d scared him with my outburst, but he was trying to keep his cool for the both of us.
“The last man I brought home told me he was ready to settle down—that he wanted all the same things out of life that I do. Six weeks later, he was fucking someone else in the bed we shared.”
Oliver’s jaw ticked with quiet fury. “I would never—”
“No,” I rushed to assure him. “I know you wouldn’t do that to me. I know, Oliver. But …” I glanced away, afraid to look him in the eye as I shared the doubts I thought I’d exorcised when I’d burned all of Jeremiah’s belongings. I’d legitimately, honestly believed I was over these fears, but watching Oliver stand here with a suitcase in his hand had brought them all rushing back. “What if a couple months from now you decide this isn’t what you want after all? You once told me you’d always pictured a life that included a wife and a couple of kids. What if you wake up one day and decide I’m not enough?” My voice shook, and my eyes welled with unshed tears. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to go through that, and I’d really hate to have to move out because every surface of this place reminded me of you.”
He dropped his arms and took a tentative step forward as I sniffled and brushed the tears from my cheeks. “Elijah …”
I nodded at the question in his eyes, and he folded me into his embrace, pressing me into his chest. “Fuck,” he bit out before I felt him kiss the top of my head. “First of all, I don’t want a wife and kids. That’s what I thought I was supposed to want, but like so much of my life, that was a role I was expected to play, not the thing I actually needed to be happy.” He took hold of my biceps and leaned back, locking his eyes with mine. “You’re what makes me happy. You’re who and what I want. But if my being here scares you, I can go.” He spun away, running his hands through his hair before turning back to me. “Every step of the way, you’ve put so much effort into making sure that I was comfortable with how our relationship was progressing that I wonder if maybe you haven’t thought nearly enough about what you need.”
I huffed out a laugh. “Trust me. I’ve thought long and hard about it, and that’s what scares me so much.”
“So why don’t you tell me?”
I moved across the room to the bed and sat down on its edge, pressing my face into my palms and saying a brief prayer for courage. It was early days of our time together in real life, outside the bubble where we we’d met, but I knew in my gut—better, I knew in my heart—that this man was the love of my life, and I didn’t want a part-time relationship made up of weekends and holidays only. I wanted to see his face every morning for the rest of my days and fall asleep with the taste of him on my tongue. I wanted to spend the next fifty years making new memories with him. But how did you say that to someone you’d only known for a couple of months? To someone who had his own life and his own responsibilities an entire state away? How did you make the leap when every molecule of your body was telling you it was dangerous to even think you should?
I blew out another breath and dropped my hands away from my face, my palms resting lightly on my thighs. My index finger bounced against the denim. The truth was, you did it because to not do it was unthinkable. You did it because living a life without him by your side was to live only half a life. I did it knowing Oliver had taken an equally terrifying leap to be with me. He’d just spent the last three days telling a crowd of TV cameras all about it, after all. We were still in the NDA bubble, so we had no idea how our dual scandal would be received by viewers, but the production team had scrambled to put together interviews and promotional shots, and Oliver had gamely explained far more about our relationship and how it had come about than I’d expected him to.
“The truth is, Oliver, I want to wake up next to you every day, not a random Saturday every three weeks or whenever our schedules sync up. I want to go out to dinner at our favorite restaurant because it’s a Tuesday and we can. I want to argue over who gets to eat the last bite of ice cream or who has to run to the bakery for bagels on a Sunday afternoon because we’ve slept in all morning and missed brunch with our friends. I want you every day, and I know that’s selfish of me to ask, but … it’s what I need, Oliver. I just … that’s what I need.”
He took a few steps forward to stand in front of me and then dropped into a crouch so that our eyes lined up. He took hold of my hands and raised each of them up, one after the other, to kiss the bridge of my knuckles. “Then I’m going to find a way to give you what you need.”
21
Oliver
Elijah squeezed my hand. “No matter what happens, I’m right here.”
“Yeah,” I said, staring out the windshield of his car and toward the front of my dad’s little white house, my brother’s massive truck parked next to us. “I know. I’m only freaking out a little bit.”
When I’d called the other day to tell them I was coming home at the end of the week and wanted to talk to them about something important, Ben had automatically assumed I was bringing Allie home to meet the family. He’d whooped and congratulated me loudly, only dropping silent once I’d told him that Allie had chosen someone else. His mood had immediately sobered, and much to my amazement, he’d simply said, “Well, you did your best.” Not, “Did you try your best?” or, “What happened?” His unwavering faith in me—despite knowing I’d been skeptical of the success of his plan from the outset and the unexpected (and thus far unexplained) elimination of hometown visits from this season—made me feel better about what I was about to do.
Still, a small part of me was concerned that I was walking into a situation that wasn’t going to turn out the way I hoped.
My dad was a traditionalist in the sense that he had a somewhat antiquated view about what constituted a proper family. He wasn’t religious by any stretch of the imagination, and I’d never heard him say anything even remotely homophobic. Still, he very much existed in a state of mind where a husband worked, and the wife stayed home to care for the kids, and divorce was for quitters. Your marriage was over when one of you died, and not before.
To put it bluntly, while I’d been skeptical about finding love on a reality dating show, he’d called the idea “fucking ridiculous.” Of course, neither Ben nor I had told him why I was doing it, so I’d had to really lean into the whole “I’m looking for love” spiel I’d practiced at least twenty times in the mirror before filling him in on my plans for the summer. His first response had been to call me a fool for not asking the local kindergarten teacher out on a date instead of going on TV to meet some woman who was only interested in becoming famous.