“She sure didn’t seem fond of the idea when I talked to her.”
She laughed thinly. “I guess she just has to take some time to come around on things.” She looked down. “She invited me around for cinnamon rolls she made.”
“Oh. That’s… decent of her.”
“We never… had cinnamon rolls except for Christmas morning,” she said quietly, her voice barely there. “Never.”
I looked over at her, my heart beating faster. I wasn’t claiming to be a great genius, but… I could tell there was more to this than just wanting to have cinnamon rolls. “What… did she say?”
She took a long breath. “That she loved me.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t know what your problem is, Bridget,” she laughed wetly, turning to face me with the first buds of tears on her cheeks, eyes crinkling through a breathless smile. “I do all of this—I swear I do everything wrong, and I hurt you like this, I let you down, and I won’t even give it to you straight, and what do you do?”
“C-cry, mostly.”
“You go around to my family and you stand your ground against them in the way I’ve needed to for the past thirty years. You go and face everything I’m too scared to, and just like that,you’re fixing rifts between my mother and Sam that just flared up and fixing rifts between my mother and me that have been there for… for… since before I was born. And you don’t even tell me. Not trying to claim credit, not doing it to try to get me back. Was it just because you wanted me to be happy?”
“Well—” I hugged myself, my face prickling now. It wasn’t fair of her to say things like that while she was already crying, she was making me cry too. “It was just… the right thing to do.”
“Why—” she laughed, sniffled, wiping her cheeks. “Whyon earth doyouof all people wantme?I swear you’re just… so much more perfect than I know how to describe.”
I stared at her for what felt like eternity, my heart pounding, before, hazily, like this was a dream, I shrugged. “I want you because I like you. I care about you. Because… because my life is richer and fuller with you in it. Because I like long drives to the mountains with you in the passenger seat, I like how I can be myself with you and you want to see it, I like dinners with you and seeing the way you light up talking about your work like it’s the greatest thing and like you’re so excited to get back to your projects the next day. I mean, dammit, you’re just reallyreallyspecial. And I hate that you were hurt and couldn’t see that.”
She wiped her eyes, turning to square her shoulders with me, and she took a half-step closer to me that had my heart drop out. “Hurt… it’s… it’s not like that,” she said. “I’m tired of doing this. Of hiding behind the fact that I was hurt. I’m happy for the past to be the past. I want to change the future. I—I don’t know—what I’m doing. But I’m talking to my mother again, and I’m not scared of her like I was. It’ll take time, but I think it’s… changing. We just had dinner with Kevin and Sam, and I can see her making an effort to make it work. All of that changed because somebody was brave and stepped forward to say something, todosomething. I…” She swallowed hard. “I’m going to be honest.I don’t know why you would choose this, after everything it’s been so far. But, god, Bridget, I’m going to keep missing you forever if I just go like this and we don’t… and if I don’t at least try. The last time I came to you with an audacious request I thought I had no right to make, it got me this home that turned my life around. So I guess maybe I can try again.”
“Victoria…” I swallowed, my mind going a mile a minute. She put a hand on my arm, and I’d missed it so badly I wanted to cry just from that.
“I know I’ve screwed this up every step of the way. But if you give me another chance… I promise I’ll do everything I can. I’m scared to death to admit it, but I want to be with you. I want to see what we can be and what we can do together.”
“Oh my god, Victoria, you’re going to make me cry,” I said, already crying. She laughed, looking down.
“I know this is terrible timing. If you need time… I don’t know. We can go like this and I’ll go back to Seattle and we can have a long-distance relationship. I’d be okay with that, if you wanted. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to have a chance with you.”
“Victoria—”
“Or if you want, we can just take time—”
“Victoria!”
She stood up taller, eyes wide. “Yes?”
I put a finger over her lips. “I don’t want time,” I said softly. “I just want you to want me like I want you.”
“Bridget…” I saw her breath catch.
“I know I’m probably a lot!” I said. “I know it’s a little weird. I’ve got online friends who are going to keep telling you about their… sexploits, if they’re nothavingthose sexploits while talking to you. There’s a million people out there who have seen just about every part of me there is to see, and I’m going to keep moaning into a computer microphone so that a bunchof strangers can come while listening to it. You’ve got all these stuck-up proper family members who are going to have opinions on my, uh,multimedia content creation.I know it’s not the best girlfriend pitch in the world, but oh, my god, I just like yousomuch and I want to be with you, and I don’twantyou to go to Seattle. I want you to stay right here, and I want to keep having dinner together after our workdays, want to keep taking you for surprise trips out, want to keep talking to my friends about you, and I want to keep kissing you and, I mean, yeah, I’ll be honest, a lot more than kissing. I just want… I mean, if you want to take a chance on me, I want to take a chance on us.”
She let out a soft breath, looking at me like I was the whole world, and I thought I’d cry, she was so beautiful. Took a step closer to me, put her hand on my cheek, and I felt my pulse racing, faster and faster, enough I thought I’d pass out. “I mean… what can I say?” she whispered. “You won me over on Christmas.”
“I didn’t even like Christmas,” I laughed.
“I know,” she laughed, too. “That’s what makes it even more impressive. Is it really okay…?”
“I didn’t sign on another lease yet. We can renew here. You can apply back to the old office, or you could just stay here and keep looking for other jobs. And if you want to go somewhere else—if you want to go see all the things you can do and all the things you can be—then you can do that, too. And I’ll support you. I mean, I can be anywhere I want to. I can take my work with me anywhere. The only place I care about is what’s closest to you. I’m… rambling, because I’m very nervous. You’re so beautiful. Did you know that?”
She laughed, shaking her head, a light gleaming in her eyes. “No,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t believe I ever did.”
