T. S. Eliot was wrong: April wasn’t the cruelest month. It was January. Gray, dreary and impossibly long—almost supernaturally long, if you thought about it. Which I was, at length, stretched out on my deck, staring at the sky. Maybe there was a scientific explanation—maybe every year, during the month of January, Earth experienced a flux in the space-time continuum that threw each second into excruciating slow motion, something humans experienced as an impossibly long stretch of cosmic horror. Maybe that was why the three days that had passed since I’d last seen Ben—even the one day since he’d left my text on “read”—felt like a lifetime.
It could also be because my phone hadn’t stopped ringing since the vote went through. It turned out work on the Green Machine was far from over once Governor Mane signed the bill into law. There was this tricky thing called implementation, where the government had to actually figure out how to do what it had promised. And there werelotsof hurdles when it came to changing corporate taxes to pay for the electric vehicle infrastructure. I had plenty of ideas to address both issues, so I’d become a popular person.
Ironic, to be flooded with calls when all I wanted was a single phone call from the one person who wasn’t dialing. Or was that more of an Alanis Morissette irony—the not-really-ironic kind? Who even knew if words had meaning anymore. As a communications professional, I found myself alarmingly beyond caring. The only thing I cared about was knowing where in the world Ben was.
In lieu of my normal stress-relief activities, such as drinking wine, I’d caved and started practicing yoga. Or “yoga,” as I liked to think of it. It turned out child’s pose and cow pose were really quite relaxing, and I could hold both for an entire hour-long session without breaking a sweat, which I assumed was the point of yoga. Truly, I had found a form of exercise uniquely suited to me. My favorite position by far was Savasana, or corpse pose. Not only was lying flat on my back on my deck with my arms and legs splayed an ideal workout, but it also allowed me to listen to Frank Ocean at full volume and cry, otherwise known as emotional reflection time. Thanks to my newfound maturity, I knew that even though the worst might have happened—Ben might have disappeared again—the important thing was, I was going to survive. Annie had told me the only way to be in control of my heart was to trust myself to be okay no matter what, and here I was, doing exactly that. Getting through it.
I felt footsteps depress the wooden planks of the deck. A presence towered over me, blocking the weak January sun. I cracked an eye, saw my-once-again-roomie Alexis peering and paused Frank’s crooning.
“What’s up, Lex? I love you, but I’m exercising.”
She grinned. “I can see that. And I loveyou, so I’m going to tell you to wipe your eyes and sit up real quick.”
I sat up. “What? Why?”
She squeezed me in a tight hug. “I’m going out for the night,” she whispered. “Call me later.” Then she pulled back, winked and disappeared through the sliding glass door into my house.
What the hell? I stood and wiped my eyes. And when I blinked again, Ben was standing in the open back door, gripping the glass, body tense with anticipation, eyes pinning me.
He wasn’t a mirage because the sight of him did something to my body only flesh-and-blood Ben could do. He was painfully beautiful, frozen in the door frame. That thick black hair curling over his forehead, his square jaw clenched, blue eyes serious. A sense of gravity filled my chest, my body knowing something a step before my mind. I’d only felt it once before—the night I first met Ben, when we finally made it back to his apartment and he’d shut the door, and then it was just the two of us, nothing to hide behind, no jokes or competitions or other people. It had hit me, in that moment, that I was standing on the precipice of something important, something that would shape my life, and I’d slid with my back to the wall all the way to his apartment floor. Now the same feeling rooted me in place on my deck.
“Hi, Lee.” His voice was careful. I wanted to crack through his shield and get to the heart of him.
“What are you doing here?” I was proud of my steady voice.
Ben’s Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed, like he was nervous, but his eyes remained locked on me. “I came to ask you something.”
“You missed the vote yesterday.”
He searched my face, still standing straight and rigid. “The bill was yours to see over the finish line. It always was. I knew you’d win.”
“You didn’t call.” I folded my arms over my stomach, feeling suddenly naked and exposed. “Or text, or come see me. Nothing.” I kicked my toe against the deck. “You disappeared again, without telling me what was so important you had to hit the road.”
At this, Ben stepped through the door and onto the deck. Tension flared inside me—by coming closer, he was tugging some invisible string between us, and now my body was tense, at attention, fighting the pull of him. I dug my fingers into my arms to hold myself in place.
He stopped in front of me. “I was planning.”
When, exactly, had my body switched allegiances? He was a magnet, and it was becoming physically impossible not to reach for him.
“I was putting the pieces together,” he said slowly. “Talking to people. I didn’t want to speak with you or get your hopes up until I knew my plan was solid.”
I obeyed my aching body and stepped closer. “What are you talking about?”
He reached out and took my hand, cradling it between his. “I’m talking about this.” He dropped to one knee.
“Ben—what?” My heart was beating a dizzying staccato—it was going to burst from my chest and float into the gray January sky.
He gazed up at me. “Lee, we’ve both grown up and changed. But the one thing that never has is how deeply I love you. I am going to love you forever. I know that in my heart—there’s no use pretending it would stop, even if we went our separate ways.” He put a hand over his heart. “You have me, always.”
I could hardly breathe.
Ben took a deep breath to steady himself and looked up at me through his lashes. “I fell in love with you when I was twenty-four and there has never been another path. I need you to know that I’m going to love you wherever you go, whatever you do, no matter how many years or miles pass between us. Nothing is ever going to change that.”
Ben was talking about the kind of love I’d convinced myself didn’t exist: relentless, sturdy, impossible to tarnish or quell. The kind my secret, tender heart had wanted so badly it had been less painful to write it off than try for it and fail. Here he was, kneeling in front of me, giving me what I hadn’t even been able to say I needed.
He squeezed my hand. “But the thing is, I more than love you, Lee. I believe in you.” His nervousness radiated in the way his shoulders tensed. “So I’m here to tell you my wildest dream, and to ask you to say yes to it.”
Ben dropped my hand and slowly unzipped his jacket, glancing up at me for a second, before he unhooked the zipper and pulled the jacket off, revealing the hard, defined muscles of his arms flexing beneath his T-shirt. His white, short-sleeved T-shirt. HiscampaignT-shirt.
