Page 73 of Past Tents

“Knew what?”

“How long I’ve fucking loved you. It wasn’t some crush all these years. I loved you,” I choked out, hating myself for having waited so long to tell her.

Her eyes went round in disbelief. “Clay . . . what?”

I knew I needed to do better than uttering confusing proclamations without anything to back them up. If one of my students turned in an English paper with only a topic sentence and no supporting details, I’d hand over an F without even reading the thing.

“Years. You’ve captivated me since the day I walked into the kitchen with your brother and saw you baking a cake when you were fifteen. You had flour on your hands and a stripe of it along one cheek, and you didn’t notice it. I had to ball my hands into fists to keep from reaching over and wiping it away. Then it was all I dreamed about for months—touching your skin. It was an obsession and I had to tamp it down.”

“How did I not know this at all? You were at our house all the time and you basically ignored my existence.”

I wiped a bead of sweat from my cheek with my forearm. “It doesn’t matter now. All the missed opportunities I had don’t matter.”

She wrapped her hand around my arm and nodded. “Exactly. We’re where we’re supposed to be now. So forget about what Pin Dick said. I shouldn’t have even mentioned it, but he just gets me so riled up.”

And therein lies the problem. “But you believed him.”

“No, I didn’t,” she protested.

The icy feeling of panic was spreading in my chest. I could see where my logic would take us, but I didn’t have another option but to pursue it. “Can you tell me there wasn’t a small part of you that wondered if he was telling the truth? Wondered about me and my intentions toward you?” I asked.

The dawning on her face told me my answer. “Clay...that’s not fair.”

“Maybe not, but I saw it. I saw how ready you were to believe the worst and lock yourself back down. Self-sufficiency above all else?”

“Come on, Clay. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m not running away.”

“Not today, but you can’t guarantee me that you won’t in the future.”

She came at me and grasped my arms with both hands. “Clay, listen to what you’re saying. Of course, I can’t guarantee that. You can’t guarantee that you won’t get hit by a bus tomorrow. No one can guarantee anything. So we try. We do the best we can and we try.”

I looked up at the sky as though some skywriter would have written instructions for what to do when you feel your heart breaking. I wanted to trust her. I wanted to believe that I could be vulnerable and it wouldn’t blow up in my face. But all I knew was the fear—fear of ending up back where I’d been with that pill bottle in my hand.

When I looked at Ally, she was shaking her head. “You’re going to sabotage this, aren’t you? Because of something Pin Dick probably made up. He’s getting exactly what he wants—do you realize that? And for what?”

I couldn’t come up with an answer. The feeling of defeat roared in my head and drowned out all rational thought. Even on meds, the depressive thoughts still had a stronghold.

“I don’t want to give up, but maybe I need to take a beat and get my head in order. Make sure I’m on the right dosage of meds. You deserve someone who’s ready to be vulnerable.”

She nodded. “I do. I do deserve that. And you’re the one who made me believe it. You’re the one who convinced me I could hold out for the knight. And now I want to convince you to hold out for me.”

“I want to . . . but right now, I can’t.”

“Try harder.”

I felt like a child being reprimanded by a teacher for adding two plus two on my fingers and somehow getting five. Right now, five seemed like the only answer. My brain couldn’t get on the same page as hers.

It was unwilling, too afraid of falling more in love than I already was, too afraid to make myself that vulnerable. It felt like too big a risk.

“I want to trust you. I want to be all in. I just don’t know how to get there,” I admitted.

“You do it by asking for what you want, regardless of the baggage your family has laid on you or your misguided perceptions of yourself, and making something of whatever you’ve got.”

I wanted to take her words at face value and believe she was correct. It sounded simple enough. But maybe I was too far gone to be rescued by words. I’d spent most of my life feeling broken and maybe even love couldn’t fix me.

“You were ready to give me my fairy tale, Clay. Why can’t you let me do that for you?”

I shrugged. “Because it terrifies me.”

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