Page 152 of What You Wish For

Duncan just stared, like he was trying to figure me out.

“You stayed,” I said, “and that really matters. You stayed, and I’m so grateful to you.”

He shook his head. “Of course I stayed.”

Then, not sure if this was a statement or a question, I said, “The seizure didn’t… change how you felt about me.”

He shook his head even more. “Of course it didn’t.”

This time, the words—the fact of them, and what they meant—hit me differently. This time, I didn’t deflect them. This time, I let them in.

They swirled in my chest in a way that almost made me dizzy.

I closed my eyes.

Duncan took a step closer. “Actually, if I’m honest, it did change how I feel about you.”

I opened my eyes to find his.

And then he said it almost sadly. “I think it made me love you more.”

“You love me,” I said.

He nodded. “Hope that’s okay.”

And so I reached up around his neck, pulled him to me, and kissed him.

The cops, still waiting to take Duncan back wherever they were going, all honked their horns.

When Duncan pulled back, he looked intensely into my eyes. “So it’s okay, then?”

And then, because joy is fleeing, and nothing lasts, and even what you get, you don’t get to keep, I didn’t waste any more time. “I love you, Duncan,” I said. “I’ve loved you for a long, long time.” I said it to be brave. I said it to be better.

But more than anything, I said it because it was true.

And then Duncan leaned down again, and I stretched up, and even though the cops were waiting, we let ourselves have a simple, easy, perfect kiss.

But we sure had earned it.

Halfway through, Duncan broke away, held a finger out to me like,one second,and then trotted over to tap on the passenger window of the closest cop car. The window rolled down, and Duncan poked his head in.

When he stepped back, the cop cars all pulled away.

“What did you say?” I called.

He shrugged. “I just asked if we could finish up the paperwork later.”

And so he walked me back to my place, and we slept together.

Actually slept.

Because man, oh, man, were we tired. And man, oh, man, what a hell of a day-slash-night. But it was okay. Better than okay, even.

It was, in fact, the most better-than-okay either one of us had been in a very long time.

epilogue

Tina really went through with it. She did divorce Kent Buckley. We’d all worried that the momentum of her old life might make her chicken out, but she did it. And while in theory, a divorce is a sad thing—the real sad thing was the marriage that came before it. The divorce itself turned out to be a happy solution.

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