Page 38 of One Lovely Lie

“Please, don’t say anymore.”

“Why are you acting like this? Why are you—”

“Because I love you!”

“I love you too!”

He rips himself away from me and leans against the sink, his chest rising and falling with hurried and frantic breaths. “Not the way I love you, you fucking idiot. I’min lovewith you.”

What?

No, I must not have heard him right.

“You’re…you’re what?”

“I’m in love with you,” he confirms, his fingers trembling as he wraps them around my own. “I have been for so long. I thought…”

I’m hanging on every single one of his words. I need to hear more. I need to know. I need to understand how I missed this, how I never saw it, and how I could have been so dumb all this time.

“I was so stupid. I thought maybe one day you’d realize it and so waited…and then you proposed this crazy arrangement and I just couldn’t say no,” he mumbles and I visibly see how much it’s costing him to confess this. I just want to wrap him in a hug and never let him go, but I hold myself back. “I had to have you, even if it broke me in the process.”

“Daniel,” I whisper, trapping him in between me and the sink as I press my forehead against his. “I love…”

His hand flies up and covers my mouth. He shakes his head furiously and I can see that tears are building in his beautiful blue eyes. “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it the way I do.”

“I-I don’t think I feel the same way,” I say and it breaks my heart. Of course, I love him, but I’m not too sure if I’min lovewith him.

I’ve never allowed myself to see him in that kind of way. I obviously don’t think of him as a brother, but when I imagined spending the rest of my life with him, it was as friends.

I can’t be without him and that means something, right? It means something that my gut tightens and flutters when he’s around. It means something that he’s my favorite human being. It means something that I value his opinion even more than my own.

I can’t lose him.

I press a kiss to his cheek, brushing away the tears with my lips, pained that I’m the cause of them. “But I can try.”

“What?” he asks, pulling back and blinking at me repeatedly. “What do you meanyou can try?”

“I mean I can try to feel that way,” I say as if it’s the simplest thing on the planet and to me it is.

He sneers at me and I can tell he’s actually getting offended. “You’re making this worse.”

“No, I’m serious. Listen, I know I mess around and I joke, but I would never joke about this. You are, by far, the best thing in my life. I’ve never looked at you that way, but what if we tried? What if we…” I trail off because the word on the tip of my tongue feels too unusual. “…dated?”

“Oh my god,” he chuckles humorlessly. “You can’t even say it without looking like you want to throw up.”

“That’s what people that are into each other do, right?” I ask, convincing myself more and more with each word that this is what I want. “People date. I’m into you, you’re into me, and we can date.”

“Don’t push this,” he whispers, sounding as dejected as he did before. “It’s not the same if you’re forcing it.”

I’m not forcing it, or at least I don’t think I am. Daniel is all I’ve ever wanted and I know I can want him this way. The years of conditioning myself to believe I’m just a fucked-up mess are instilled in me, the fear of monogamy, and the fear of not being good enough, but I can do this for him.

I kiss his lips gently, not wanting to scare him away, but enough that he can taste the conviction on my lips. “Please.”

I can see the moment his resolve breaks. His blue eyes were guarded, but they’re softening now, turning my little raging hurricane into a clear blue sky. “Okay.”

Crap, I’m going to be in a monogamous relationship. I never thought I’d see the day.

Daniel timidly loops his finger around my belt, tugging me to him and looking up at me shyly through those thick eyelashes. “So, are we boyfriends now or…?”

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