I open my mouth to thank everyone for coming, but before I can get a sound out, Judith interrupts me from the edge of the stage with her own microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it appears we have time for one last question. Go ahead, young man.”
Everyone in the auditorium shifts to look at the aisle on my right.
I do too, inwardly groaning because I want to go home and take a nap. Once again, the lighting prevents me from seeing the questioner clearly.
That doesn’t stop a full-body shiver from racing from my scalp to my toes at his outline though.
And when he speaks—oh my god.
“What advice would you give a mate who let the best thing that’s ever happened to him walk away because he was too afraid to tell her that he loves her?”
Fletcher.
Fletcher.
He’s here. Standing in the aisle. At my Saturday morning motivational talk.
Asking what I’d tell him to do.
I don’t know what my face is doing, but I know what my body’s doing.
It’s completely frozen in place in absolute shock.
It’s Saturday.
He has a match.
He has a match.In the States.Thousands of miles away.
“It’s not her fault,” he continues. “She did everything right. She made me feel like I deserved to be loved for the first time in a long, long time, but all of my own insecurities kept me from believing that she could ever be the one who would love me. Because I’m a fucked-up mess, but I can do better. I can be better. If there’s anyone in this world who can make me believe in me, it’s you.”
“Oh my word, is that Fletcher Huxley?” someone says in the front row.
“Come back to Nottingshire!” someone else calls with far less restraint.
“Shut your trap and let the man propose,” someone hisses back.
My feet suddenly remember how to move again. I drop my microphone, sending a deafeningthudthroughout the auditorium while I stride quickly toward the stairs off the stage.
Fletcher.
My heart.
“I quit rugby,” he says into the microphone while class participants start to lift their phones and aim them at him. “I’m done. I don’t want to play. I want to be here, with you. I want to be by your side no matter where you go next. I want to prove to you that I can be everything you deserve and more. If you—if you’ll still have me.”
His voice cracks as I race up the aisle.
“If I’ve fucked this up too much, just—just tell me, and I’ll go, but I?—”
I grab his mic and shove it to the floor, drowning out whatever else he was saying with another deafeningthump.
And then I do the only sensible, logical, rational thing that a woman can do when the man she’s missed desperately shows up in the most unexpected of places to tell her that he loves her, toshowher that he loves her, and I throw myself at him.
He catches me while gasps and cheers go up around us, but the ragged breath that he sucks in as he pulls me closer and closer and tighter and tighter makes my heart swell with the desperate need to assure him that he’s worthy. That he’s lovable. That he’smine.
“I’ll do anything, Goldie,” he whispers to me. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
