I’m so happy I can’t help from smiling. “How’d you know?”
“I saw you in there. And I knew.”
This is the first self-sculpture I’ve ever done. I’ve always wanted to try, but I never had the courage.
“What do you see?” I ask Dylan.
The head of the sculpture is covered in a mess of hair. The woman’s eyes are alive, and so is her smile. But one of her hands covers most of her mouth, and she has an arm crossed over her heart.
“I see a woman afraid to admit that she has what it takes to live in this world,” he says as he looks at it with me. “Someone who’s far braver than she realizes, someone I wish I was as strong as.”
“Dylan.” I wrap my arms around his waist. “That’s…you’re the bravest person I know.”
I want to ask him to never walk away from me, and as long as he promises me that, I’ll never walk away, either. But something stops me. Almost like the hand that covers the mouth on my self-sculpture. I’ve always censored my feelings in order to protect myself, and I haven’t figured out yet how to do it any other way. So instead, I focus on him.
“It’s no different from what you do on the football field.”
“I guess so,” he says uncertainly.
“What you do is artistic, too. You know—the way you threw the ball in the final game—you spotted Colton running the perfect route. He was open for just a split second, and you timed it perfectly and delivered the ball to him so he didn’t even have to break stride as he caught it, broke a tackle, and ran it in for a touchdown.”
I sit, almost in a reverie as I remember the one time I watched Dylan play.
“So you saw the game.” Dylan’s eyes brighten. “I had no idea.”
“I’d never seen an entire game before. Lilla and I were getting everything ready for the party, and the television was on. You caught my attention as you always do.”
He lies down on his back on the bed. “Jasalie, I have to be honest with you about something. What do you want to happen between us when this week is over?”
I lie down next to him. “I’m not sure.”
“Me neither,” he says. “But here’s the thing—I’ve been falling for you since we met. I wouldn’t have necessarily called what I felt the first moment I saw you love—I would have called it something more like ‘I have to see this woman and be with her as soon and as much as possible.’ And I didn’t want anything to stand in the way of finding out more about you. I want to believe you felt it, too. That even on that first day you wanted me.”
I remember when I first laid eyes on Dylan and when he first spoke to me. I don’t think I’d have known love if it had slapped me in the face. But I can’t disagree with him.
“I definitely wanted you,” I confess with his face now inches from mine. “But that doesn’t change the fact that we promised this would end in Tucson.”
“No, it doesn’t.” His voice is low but filled with raw emotion. “But it can change the end result. If we want it to that is.”
I pull back from him. “This is getting heavy for the first day of our week off.”
“It is.” He shakes his head as if at himself. “I didn’t mean to say all of that right now, especially after the way I handled things earlier.”
When I don’t say anything, he says, “What’s going on in your head?”
Everything. Craziness. I stare up at the ceiling, half-wishing it would swallow me up. When I finally turn back to face him, I’m choked up. “I don’t know if I can take things past what we’ve agreed to.”
“Even if that decision is binding you to unhappiness?”
“It’s binding me to safety,” I argue. “Our affair is supposed to be for a finite amount of time in a certain geographical location. It was never meant to signify more than that, like some sort of permanent commitment.”
A promise of permanency is not only risky; it sounds downright dangerous.
“But…” he starts to argue, but I cut him off.
“Dylan,” I say without taking the time to rehearse anything first. “This was supposed to be a fake romance for the press. And even though it’s turned into so much more…”
I pull away from him and carefully cover up my sculpture, keeping my back to him. “The truth is I want to let you in, Dylan. But I need to fill you in on why I’m the way I am. Can we go for a walk, somewhere outside of the hotel but still private, and talk?”
