Page 57 of How to Say I Do
Wyatt
Why that room?Out of all the rooms in the house, and the yard and the porch and the ranch itself, did Noël go there?
I dithered as long as I could, not following him. Cork the bottle, dump the unfinished wine, rinse, wash, dry. Wipe down the counter. Fold and refold the washcloth over the faucet. Stare at the fields, and at Peanut grazing in the shade.
Noël had always been deeply layered, complex and contradictory. Haughty, confident, and charming, and then fragile, brittle, and fiercely protective of an inner vulnerability he rarely let anyone know existed. I’d met him inside out, when he’d been bleeding from those tender spaces, and I’d watched him rebuild his strength and his walls over the next six days. I’d thought those walls included me on the inside, all the way up until he walked out on me.
I gathered up my slivers of courage and strode down the hall, to the room I avoided.Why there, Noël?
Why did he have such a talent for wounding me?
Noël was perched on the wicker couch inside the sunroom, facing the long wall of windows and the spectacularly perfect view of block 1, my father’s first plantings. Lord, it was an exquisite sight, and every time I saw it, it ripped my heart clear out of me.
I turned my eyes down to avoid the wonder of it all and slipped across the room, sitting beside Noël with my chin bowed and my eyes fixed on a nail head.
We needed to talk, but I had no more idea now, after six weeks and dozens of sleepless nights, how to explain to Noël all the multi-hued and corrosive ways that I ached. I didn’t know how to feel, either. I’d fallen so hard for him and imagined only the best. And now? If I tried to talk to him? I could only imagine the worst. I was frozen, too scared to be hurt again and too paralyzed to take a risk.
And the truth was, I needed to do a little soul excavation of my own. I was realizing, slowly, my own part in all this. If I stepped back and looked at the situation from a different perspective, I could see my own fumbles and failings. When I’d finally explained everything to Liam and laid out all the tragic steps from “Howdy” to that empty hotel room, he’d been rightly incredulous.You fell in love with a guy on his honeymoon? He was supposed to get married the day before you met him? Jesus, Wyatt, what did you expect?
Noël was burning a hole through the windows with his stare, his foot bouncing as he savagely picked at one of his nails. I cleared my throat and folded my hands together, hanging them between my spread knees.
Noël inhaled, and didn’t exhale.
“I’m sorry that you’re struggling, Noël,” I said. “It hurts to read how much pain you’re in.”
“So you did read my emails.”
“Some. I know they’re private.”
Noël’s chin yanked left as he shot a withering glare to the corner.
“I stopped once I realized—”
Every word I spoke seemed to gather more thunderclouds over his head. Damn it, it hadn’t been this hard to talk to him before. I had unburdened my soul to him, bared my past ghosts and my little-boy insides and shown him the contours of my heart. Now I fought for a handful of stubborn words, and I was, abruptly, sick of this shit.
“I’m sorry you’re hurting, Noël, but so am I.” My voice came out hard and sharp, and my knuckles went white as I glowered at the floor. “You left thelastday. Everyone was asking about you. ‘Where’s Noël?’ ‘Is he coming down to the beach?’ ‘Is he joining us for lunch?’ ‘Is he coming to dinner?’ Jason wanted to show you how he’d learned to boogie board. He was so damn proud, and all he wanted was to show off for you. Liam wanted the three of us to do something together, a guy’s afternoon on our last day. Everyone wanted to see you, but you’dleft. And that was Liam and Savannah’s wedding, so how could I tell them that you were gone, that you’d vanished in the middle of the night? That would have colored up the whole week, forever shaded their memories of all the great times we’d had. I had to hold myself together so no one else would know.”
At least, I’d held myself together as long as I could until Liam, who knew me better than my own shadow, pinned me down about where Noël was and why I looked like I was dying.
“And I get it. I know I went too far. I know what I was hoping for wasn’t what you wanted.”
Liam’s voice in my mind, torn between astonishment at my brokenhearted audacity and wild fury at Noël.Wyatt, he just wanted a hookup. He didn’t want anything else. How did you let yourself fall in love with him?
How do younotfall in love, though? Once we met, once I said “Howdy” and Noël looked me up and down like I was a cartoon character and disparaged me and my state and my hat, there was no stopping me.
“I wish you’d said something.” My voice dropped, rough edges and rumbling pain. “I wish you’d let me know what we really were.” Hadn’t he said almost the same damn thing about Jenna? These words felt like refrains.
I had wanted to make it work with him, however that looked and whatever it entailed. Long-distance love, and sending each other a million texts, and calling every night so we could fall asleep on the phone to the sound of each other’s snores. Emails that were love notes on purpose, eagerly sent, not mistakenly. Flying to New York and being lost in a strange land, out of place and out of time, but who cared, because Noël was there. I’d wanted thechanceat that future with him.
“I wish you’d been clearer that I was something else for you.” Time to kill, sensations to feel. Something wild and otherworldly after getting dumped, a fling he could forget, and a walk on the gay side no one would ever need to know about.
My first time making love to a man had lit my heart on fire, and I’d bought him a ring and imagined a day where I could whisperI doto him. What had Noël felt after his first time with a man? Or with me?
I hadn’t looked at him since I’d started speaking. I was locked up tight, my eyes down and muscles rigid, because if I glanced his way, and if I saw him just once flicker with disbelief, I was going to fall apart and blow away. I wasn’t a strong enough man to see Noël swat down my love. It was shameful and despairing enough to feel his dismissal secondhand and be the man he’d left behind. My pain was as raw and as real as it had been the morning he’d left, and it seemed like no time had passed.
I heard a sniffle, and then a hissed, broken breath. I twisted—
Noël was very, very still. Both his hands covered his face. Unbroken tracks of tears skipped through his clenched fingers and ran down the backs of his wrists. I thought of the condensation on the windows the morning he’d left me and how cold and alone the world had felt.
