Page 143 of For Real

I stare at him. Just stunned. “W-what are you doing here?”

Laurie rolls off my bed and stands carefully. My corner of the loft isn’t massively welcoming to the less sizeably challenged gentleman. He looks tired. Worried. Gorgeous. “You know what I’m doing here.”8

“Um…” I’m not ready to start hoping again for nothing. “I might need you to tell me.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the key I threw at him yesterday. Takes my hand and folds my fingers round it. “I think you dropped this.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

I have to look up to meet his eyes. His gaze is so steady, so certain, I almost start crying. I don’t know why being on the brink of—maybe—getting everything I’ve ever wanted should be bad, but my stomach is so fizzy I’m afraid I might be sick.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” he tells me. “I tried to provide solutions when I should have listened. And let things go when I should have fought.”

“‘S’okay.” I shrug. “I didn’t really want you to know what a loser I am.”

“You’re not a loser, Toby. You’re just lost. And it’s okay to be lost.”

I try to laugh, but it comes out shaky and weird. “It doesn’t feel okay. Feels fucking awful.”

He reaches for me, his hand closing over mine where I’m still holding his key. “Then we’ll be lost together, and we’ll figure it out together. Whatever that means. Whatever it takes. I’m with you, and I’ll be with you for as long as you want me.”

God. After everything, he still doesn’t fucking get it. This bullshit isn’t what I want at all. I don’t want to be his project. I don’t want him to take care of me. I want us to take care of each other. “That’s, err, mighty charitable of you, but—”

“I’m not finished.”

I pull on my hand. “Well, I think I am. Like I told you yesterday.”

“For fuck’s sake.” Something flares in his eyes. A kind of savagery that I shouldn’t like. But it reminds me of when I first saw him, so distant and cold and desperate. Like he was waiting to be tamed. To be mine. Not this patient grown-up person who wants to fix my fucked-up life. “This isn’t charity.”

And he goes to his knees.

Hands behind his back like the very first time.

I make this embarrassing choking sound. Because he’s so perfect like that, and—even tired and sad and confused and messed up—I want him so badly it burns. But I don’t know what it means that he’s giving this to me now. Maybe he’s telling me it’s all he can give, and, yeah, I guess the last time he offered, it was all I knew how to want. But I’m done with working with what I’ve got. “Laurie, I—”

“This isn’t submission.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.” He looks up at me, tired as well, but he’s never looked more beautiful to me than in this moment, strong and open and unafraid like when he surrenders his body. “It’s love.”

* * *

It took Toby such a long time to respond. He was naturally such a graceless, restless boy that there was always something a little terrifying in his stillness. No more so than now.

When he’d first arrived—so pale and fragile in the thin morning light—there’d been no time for anything but reaction. But now that I was capable of thought, I was beginning to wonder if everything I’d done had been in any way…sensible. If it was too much. If it was what he wanted. If he would understand. Or if all I had done—running across London, waiting in his room, throwing myself at him like this—was play the fool.

But what did it matter? Some actions were worth their consequences, whatever those consequences might be. And of everything that had ever been spoken or written about love, I couldn’t remember a single occasion on which it had been described as sensible.

I tried again, offering myself to him, without shame or hesitation, in the simplest, purest terms I knew. “I love you.”

Toby drew in a breath so deep and shuddering it made his whole body shake. And then he was in my lap, his wet face pressed against my neck, his arms twined about me as tight as ivy. “Really? Oh my God, really? You love me?”

He was all edges and angles, but I gathered him up and held him close. “Yes. For a long time now. At least since Oxford. Probably before.”

He pulled back a little and managed a faint, teary grin. “From the first moment you saw me, right?”

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