Page 125 of That Reunited Feeling

And on the fifth line:

LA:Too much traffic

Everywhere Else:Not enough Hannah

I could cry. I could drop my head to the desk and sob giant sobby sobs with the joy at what he’s done and with sadness at all the time we’ve lost.

Look at the effort he’s made to make this, to fly all the way out here to tell me he loves me, to get me to unstick his stickies, and to try to convince me this time it’s possible.

I love him. I fucking love him. I loved him when I was sixteen and I love him now. There will never be a day when I don’t love Tom Dashwood.

“Don’t forget the totals at the bottom,” he urges, pointing to the two final sticky notes on a row labeled “Rank of Awesomeness.”

I remove the one at the bottom of the LA column to reveal “5/5.” And at the bottom of the Everywhere Else column, “0/5.”

My life has just turned on a dime.

I grab the pile of gray, movie camera-shaped stickie notes on my desk, rip off four, and plonk them down the middle of the scorecard.

Tom steps toward me. “What are you doing?”

“Give me a moment,” I say, my brain racing.

Twenty seconds later, I put down my pen and hold up the scorecard to face Tom.

He focuses on the note at the top and reads it out loud. “‘Paying for school library fire repairs, ten out of ten.’” His smile has a hint of relief along with amusement, as if he’d worried I might have written something terrible.

He moves on to the next one down. “‘Katie’s French honeymoon, one hundred out of ten.’” His eyes flick from the card to me. “Yeah, I saw she’d CCed you on that.”

“Doesn’t matter. Carry on.”

He reads the third. “‘Traveling all the way across the country and telling my awful boss to fuck off, five hundred out of ten.’” He looks at me again. “That might be my favorite.”

Then he reads the sticky at the bottom. “Total = I love you.”

This time his eyes move more slowly from the card before they meet mine. “That’s not a score.”

I drop the card onto my desk. “Seriously? You’d prefer I rate you out of ten than tell you I love you?”

“Oh, I’ll definitely take an ‘I love you.’” He moves around the end of my desk toward me. “I don’t want to be anywhere you’re not, Hannah.” His voice is as warm and smooth as melted chocolate, his words real.

My throat seizes up, constricting around a hot rock. I might have told him how I feel, but can I really let myself give in to this? Let Tom love me back? Even if I am terrified it might end in heartbreak all over again?

“You have to be here in LA because it’s the most important thing for Dylan.” He rests his butt on the edge of the desk next to me, takes my hand and wraps it in both of his. “And that makes it the most important thing for me too.”

And that’s where I crumble. Right here. Right when he says he won’t be in it just for me, but for Dylan too.

“Oh, God, Tom,” I just about manage to squeeze the words out between the fingers of my other hand, which has flown to my mouth. The beautiful vision of him standing next to me blurs as my eyes fill with thick tears.

“It would make me the happiest man alive to move here and be with you. To watch you both grow and bloom. Watch you have the life you deserve. Watch Dylan grow into an amazing young man.”

He lifts my hand to his lips. A shiver runs down my arm and into the very core of my being at the merest brush of his mouth.

Then he presses my hand flat against his chest, right over his heartbeat. “I want to be by your side, helping, as much as you want or as little as you want, with the bumps in the road. And, Lord knows, I know there’ll be bumps with a teenaged boy.”

I smile through the rivers rolling down my cheeks as he continues. “I want to celebrate the wins with you, commiserate the losses and annoyances with you. And I want to love you. And be loved by you.”

Good God, I love him. With all my heart. With every part of every part of me.

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