Page 133 of Honeysuckle
“Just shut up for a second, Dean.” The begging sound in his voice was unfamiliar, but it ignited some hope that maybe I hadn’t completely bombarded him with these feelings. Maybe he was feeling them too.
Each second felt like someone was tugging a cord around my heart—each moment of silence tightening it further, and the tighter it got, the more my heartbeat thudded in my chest. I wanted to open my mouth to say something to fill the quiet, but Josh had asked me so nicely that I had to obey his request.
It was just going to kill me.
My hand gripped his nape, careful not to hurt him, but my muscles were so taut that I had started to tremble.
“What do you mean?” Josh asked, and I could feel his nervousness. It rolled off him in waves alongside his confusion.
“I uh—” I cleared my throat. "I’m not ashamed to love you. I don’t feel guilty doing it,” I said. “It doesn’t hurt anyone to do it, but it’s killing me trying to pretend I don’t.”
Josh nodded, listening to everything I was saying and paused on the last bit. The muscle in his jaw ticked, and his eyebrows flickered up like he was having a conversation I couldn’t hear.
“You’re killing me,” I said in a grumbly tone. “If you don’t feel the same, it's fine, you don’t have to love me back, Josh. You don’t even have to like me, but I…after today, after feeling this scared. I needed you to know, I—”
“Slow down, Tuck,” he said, his tongue darting out over his bottom lip. “I get it.”
“But you don’t feel the same,” I groaned. I was an absolute idiot.
“Dean,” he said in a short breath and let go of me finally. I lost my balance without his touch and stepped back into the doorframe.
“It’s okay.” I raised my hands to stop him from talking.
“Don’t be dramatic. Let me finish,” he warned, that sharp tone I knew so well returning to his voice.
I rubbed the back of my neck and sank into the distant ache of my scalp from his fingers. A foolish idiot who missed a man’s painful touch, a man who didn’t even love me back.
“I don’t know how to love someone,” Josh said and looked up at me with a foreign look in his eyes. It wasn’t pain or anger. It was a neutral expression that felt so far away and disconnected.
“What?” I asked, leaning forward and moving back toward him in the bathroom, keeping the distance between us so the tension in his jaw would soften and he would stop flexing the muscles in his arms and shoulders. “You’re born knowing how to love, Josh.”
“I might have been born knowing how to love, but I had it stripped from me, Dean… beaten out of me,” he said to me. “I’m not capable of loving someone, certainly not you.”
“You’re going to want to hit me,” I said, squaring my shoulders and bracing for his rage, god knows he had a reason to be angry today. “But that’s bullshit.”
But it never came.
“It’s not,” he quietly said.
I shook my head at him in disagreement. The sweater I wore tugged tightly across my chest and showed off every ragged breath I took. “I was hiding behind what people expected me to be, the golden boy,” I huffed. “You pushed me to be better. Called me out when I was wandering around with blinders on. You were the only person who called my bluff; well, I’m calling yours.”
“It’s the truth,” Josh said.
“It’s what you believe to protect yourself, I would know,” my voice had fallen into a frustrated territory that came out of nowhere. “I believed that if I just kept those parts of me hidden, that I could make everyone happy and that eventually one day I could live with it. Forget how shitty it felt to be alone, to never have someone to celebrate with, to watch all my friends fall in love, get married and die old with their soul mates. Ibelievedthat all of that just wasn’t in my cards, but I was playing with the wrong deck, Josh!”
“That has nothing to do with this,” he argued, and I could see where he was coming from, understanding that one thing couldn’t lead to another. We were standing in the middle of filth, surrounded by his dead mother's garbage, and I was pouring out my soul just to elicit a reaction out of him. I didn’t blame him for pushing back. He believed that he didn’t have the capacity to love me back, but he was wrong.
“You believe you aren’t capable of loving me because it’s difficult totouch me, but I don’t care about that,” I said with conviction, there was not a hint of hesitation or confusion in my voice. “You prove yourself wrong with every look, every laugh, every insult. Your love isn’t conventional, Josh. It’s barely recognizable. But I see it, Ifeelit.” I pounded my hand against my chest. “You know how to love someone because you figured out how to love me against all odds.”
“That’s—” Josh shook his head.
“You said whatever comes next,wedeal with it,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, I meant about your parents, your career, hell even this mess but…” Josh shrugged. “I hadn’t meant aboutus,our…relationship…”
“You said ‘we,’” I snapped. “That means you’re not going anywhere. It means we do this together. And I’m holding you to that,” I threatened. “I don’t care if you don’t think you can love me back, or if you never say it. I don’t need to hear it, I don’t need to feel your touch to know it’s there.”
“Dean, that's weak, it's pitiful,” Josh clenched his jaw, hissing through his teeth. “You look like an idiot,” he snapped.
