“It’s okay. I’m fine here,” she says primly, “since I’m apologizing.”
I laugh nervously while my heart skitters around in my chest like a puppy on hardwood floors. Stop that. It’s not what you think. “You don’t need to do that, Cel. I’m sorry I…you know.” I force the words out because I am a reasonable person, goddammit. “I’m sorry you had to watch me storm off and fall down a hill. I shouldn’t have done that. We always…agreed it wasn’t serious.” The words taste like ash, but I need to say them. “Get up,” I tell her. “We’re good.”
“We’re not,” she says steadily, her voice so strangely serious. I haven’t been looking at her head-on because it hurts, but now I do and there’s something vulnerable and solemn in her face that I don’t recognize. I swallow hard. My stomach flips.
“First,” she says, sliding a hand in her pocket, “here’s your phone.”
Of course she picked it up. The low-level panic I’ve carried around since losing it eases away. “Thanks. Thanks.” I squeeze the cool plastic against my palm a few times to make sure it’s there. I have a lot of notifications.
I have notifications from Celine?
“Second,” she says, snatching back my attention, “I got you something.” She releases the notebook shield and puts it beside me on the bed. I pick it up. A good-weight ring-bound notebook, which is nice, because the feeling of cracking a spine makes me want to throw up. The front cover is a symmetrical pattern of dark green leaves against black, interspersed with splashes of gold foil. It’s pretty. It’s very Celine, and I don’t want to like that, but I do. Only, there’s a name printed right in the center of the cover, and it doesn’t say Celine. It says Bradley.
“You can’t use screens for a while, right?” she says. “Because you’re concussed. But I know you’ve been working on your book so I thought you could maybe keep going—and then I thought, you know, if you handwrite it, you probably won’t read it back as much. And you can’t just throw it away if it’s not perfect. So maybe that could…help?” She makes an awkward I-don’t-know expression that I find adorable. “Or maybe it’s the exact opposite, I don’t know, sorry.”
I don’t know either, and frankly I don’t care, because my mind is just stuck on the fact that she got me this. She thought of me. Of what I’d want and what I’d need, and then she went and had it made for me because of course she did, and how the hell am I supposed to fall out of love with her if she keeps being this thoughtful?
“Brad?” she whispers.
“I…need you to stop,” I grit out.
She flinches. “Okay. Sorry, I—”
God, she looks like a wounded puppy, and she doesn’t understand. “I know you wanted to end it, but I can’t just…suddenly change how I feel about you,” I blurt out. “I’m trying. All right? Friends first. I promise. But I can’t have you doing things like this or it’s not going to work, so I need you to stop.”
The breath rushes out of her like a crashing waterfall. “But, Brad, I don’t want you to…I shouldn’t have said…” She inhales through her nose and shakes her head. “God, this is so awkward—”
“Yeah, you’re telling me.”
She purses her pink pillowy lips, then lets them part, and words flood out. “I’m sorry I pushed you away when you didn’t deserve it. I didn’t even mean it. I lied. I didn’t want to end things. I thought you did, which was probably paranoia because I was worried you’d notice how much I wanted to be with you, for real, and I should’ve just agreed when you asked me the first time, only I couldn’t because I was so scared you would…we would…that it wouldn’t last,” she finishes, the words sputtering out like sparks from a malfunctioning machine.
My heart sags into a pile of disbelief and relief. Disrelief. “Celine.”
“I’m sorry!”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m sorry!”
“I FELL OFF A CLIFF!”
She winces. “It was a hill. And that wasn’t technically my—”
“CELINE!”
“Okay, yes, sorry!”
God, I love her. “You…you…” I think I feel another headache coming on. “Do you think you’re the only one who’s scared of things?”
“No,” she murmurs, eyes lowered. “No.”
“I don’t want us to break up either! I don’t want you to go to Cambridge and tutor some hot millionaire who rows and has amazing lats and fall in love with him and come home for Christmas and tell me it’s just not gonna work but we can still be friends and then marry him and travel the world together saving people from capitalism!”
Celine is now staring at me, wide-eyed. “Um. Have you thought about this a lot?”
I am breathing heavily. “No,” I say, pulling the blankets around me. “No. Just a normal amount. The point is, I want to take the risk because I want you. And I trust you. And you’re worth it! Do you get that? You’re worth it to me.” And I really did not intend to essentially pour my heart all over her like this. Let’s blame my concussion. At least I haven’t mentioned the L word.
Celine’s hand finds my clenched fist on top of the duvet. She eases my fingers apart and laces hers between them. And she looks me in the eye when she says, “You’re worth it to me too.”
I feel like the world’s biggest arsehole. “No, I understand why you worry about these things, Cel. And I don’t want to pressure you. So if we can’t do this right now, it’s—”
“Brad,” she interrupts, “I told you once that I’d stop avoiding my feelings. I lied then. But I mean it now. You’re worth it to me. And I…um…” Her mouth moves, but her voice dips too low for me to hear.
I blink. “What?”
“I—” She cuts out again, like she’s traveling through a tunnel on the other end of a phone instead of kneeling right in front of me.
“Celine, I can’t hear you.”
“Darn,” she says brightly. “Maybe next time. Want to make out?”
“Yes.” I put a hand on her shoulder when she moves forward. “After you speak up.”
Her glower is catastrophic. “Oh my God. Fine. I LOVE YOU, okay?”
The breath whips right out of my lungs. I stare at her in shock. In the plan for our future that I developed literally two seconds ago, I didn’t foresee Celine saying she loved me until a super-emotional moment such as the birth of our first child in about fifteen years. This is way ahead of schedule. I am astounded. She stares me down with a hard jaw and narrowed eyes as if daring me to say something about it. I’m about to do just that—specifically, something along the lines of That is ideal, you absolute donkey, because I love you too—when someone clears their throat and knocks on my open bedroom door.
We both look around to see Dad standing there with a tray in his arms, biting down very hard on a smile you could nevertheless see from space. “Er, hello,” he says. “I made muffins.” He raises the tray. “Anyone fancy…”