“I thought you meant it when you said always,” he sobs. “I really believed it. Nothing has ever hurt me like that last text from you.”
My phone is still in his hand, his fingers limp, curled around it just enough to stop it from falling. I slide my thumb up and wake the screen.
I click on photos.
Then, I open a folder.
An unnamed folder.
A folder with one thousand six hundred and twenty-seven photographs in it.
His head jerks and his hand clenches tightly around my phone when he realizes what I’m showing him.
Photographs of windows. Apartment windows. Windows at work. Windows in restaurants and bars. Hotels. Lexi’s house. My parents’ place in Florida, and many more.
In every picture, the window is open.
When he stops scrolling, I do it for him, scrolling and scrolling all the way to the first photograph in the folder.
A photograph I took at the Lakeview Motel less than two hours after I sent him that message.
“I’m sorry,” I sob, crushing him to me, knotting my fingers into his hair, and holding him as tightly as I can. “I didn’t mean it. I was mad and hurt, but I didn’t mean it. I could never mean it. For you, Romeo, my window isalwaysopen. Always. No matter what.”
He strokes my hair out of my face and wipes my tears away with the pads of his thumbs. His eyes are bright red and his face is puffy and blotchy. It’s not his best look, but he’s still easily the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
His expression softens and his head tilts to the side. When he speaks, there’s fear in his voice. And hope.
“Do you still love me, Tiger?”
“Oh, Romeo.” My shoulders drop, releasing tension I didn’t know I was holding. All the air leaves my lungs. I take his hands in mine and hold them against my chest as I breathe in. “Love isn’t the word. You’re my…”
I take my time to find the perfect words, the right words, words that will explain to him once and for all that my heart beats his name. His name only. His name always.
“To me, you’re the night. The moon and the stars. You’re the night. My knight. You’re my best and worst nights. My first day and my last day. And if I have any choice in the matter, you’ll be all my days and nights fromnow till I die.” I lean in and kiss him, moaning and murmuring into the soft warmth of his mouth. “There has never been anyone else for me, Romeo. There won’teverbe anyone else.”
He goes limp against me, his head finding the hollow where my neck and shoulder meet and making its home there. “I love you,” he says, lips and hot breath dancing on my skin. My heart feels like it’s going to explode. Like it’s going to burst. Like it’s beating out of my chest. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
We lie down together and pull the covers over ourselves, and for a long time, all we do is repeat the same words back to each other.
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
Each time we do it I feel like I’m floating up, getting closer and closer to the surface.
“I love you,” he says, and my lungs fill with air.
“I can breathe again,” I say. “I was drowning, but now I can breathe.”
“I was drowning too.” He kisses me and presses his face into my chest. His arms are around me, legs too.
“Never again.”
“No, never again.”
We talk in fits and starts about everything and nothing. We talk about big, heavy things that make us both grow somber and serious, and we talk about things that happened last week. What music I’ve been listening to, and what he’s been reading. He tells me about the kids he teaches. Apparently, they call him The Mad Professor, and that makes me cackle. I tell him how Lexi and my parents are without leaving anything out, and I tell him about New York. I tell him everything. Important things, unimportant things.
“So, let me get this right, you’re saying you have onion bagels withpeanut butterfor breakfast, Tiger?”
