I gasp and pick the noodle from my cheek. “What about table manners?” I say.
“What about them?”
Without taking my eyes off him, I fling a forkful of spaghetti his way. Sauce slips down both our faces. Ollie looks ridiculous. I must look just as wild, maybe even more so if my makeup is running. We’re laughing so hard we can barely speak.
When we finally catch our breath, Ollie leans back in his chair with a sigh, and I try not to giggle at the spaghetti noodle caught in his hair.
“Two food fights in one day is over the top, even for us,” I say, picking a piece of eggplant that’s been breaded in Cap’n Crunch from my dress and flicking it onto my plate. We’re a mess, but that’s nothing new. Ollie shakes his head as he watches me. “What?” I say. “Bored of me already?”
“Never,” Ollie says. The sincerity in his voice has my heart beating double time.
One moment I’m smiling, and the next I’m crying. I don’t understand what’s happening. Ollie must not either, because he sits up and reaches across the table to grab my hand. “What did I say? I didn’t mean it, whatever it was.”
I shake my head, trying to sort through the wave of emotion that’s sucked me out like a riptide. With sauce dripping down my cheek and Ollie’sNeverringing in my ears, I realize that even with the people I love and trust the most, I haven’t been able to articulate my darkest of fears. What if I told them everything I keep to myself? All that fear, and loneliness, and hurt, and they decide it’s too much. The voice in my head always has something to say, but this is the worst:No one cares about your problems. Your problems are boring. You are boring.
But with Ollie’s hand in mine, I know that these are lies. I know he cares. He’s always cared. And somehow that terrifies me more than anything else. I know we’re good together. I know there will never be anyone for me but Oliver Dunne. I have no real reasonnotto be with him. But whenever I think about it,reallythink about it, I’m reminded of the first time I stepped on a balance beam after my injury. IknewI was physically capable of doing beam again, but my brain wouldn’t cooperate.
Ollie has always feared that something in him is broken, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. He isn’t the broken one.Iam. What other explanation is there for why I’ve spent the last ten years afraid to love him? For why the thought of having him is just as terrifying as the thought of losing him? Why else would I deny myself what I want so desperately when he’s right here in front of me, begging me to take him?
What I don’t know is how to convey all this to Ollie. I’m not so sure I fully understand it myself. I squeeze his hand, unable to hold back the small sob that escapes me, and he lets go. He gets to his feet, steps around the table, and kneels beside me on the floor.
“Let’s get you cleaned up, yeah?” He takes a napkin and holds my trembling chin in his hand, wearing a look of utter concentration as he tilts my face this way and that, wiping away all my mess so gently it hurts.
“Ollie,” I say as he pulls a stray spinach leaf from my hair.
“Hmm?”
“I’m... scared,” I say. I feel the tears coming again. I lean into him and bury my face in his neck. I don’t know what’s happening to me. It’s disorienting. Overwhelming.
“Oh, darling,” he says. He wraps his arms around me. He doesn’t say anything else for a minute, simply holds me there as he kneels on the floor. Finally, he gently pulls back to wipe away the tears on my cheeks.
“What are you scared of, kitten?”
My throat tightens, and I look away, worried I’ll start sobbing if he keeps looking at me like that. “Everything,” I say, hardly able to get the words out. “Of what I can have... and lose.”Of losing you, I don’t say.
But Ollie knows what I really mean. His eyes leave mine as he sweeps my bangs to the side, then nudges one of my unicorn earrings with a finger. “You don’t have to lose me,” he says.
“I don’t know why I’m crying.” I dab my eyes with a napkin. “You know I’m not normally so emotional. It’s the... Cap’n Crunch, I think.” A hiccup escapes me, and I shake my head. “Why do you have to go and change everything? Why now? Why not in five, ten, a million and one years?”
Ollie is quiet for a moment. He worries his bottom lip as he searches my face. “You remember New Year’s?”
“Of course,” I say. “You were...”
“A fecking mess.”
“I was going to be polite and sayvisibly upset, but sure.”
“I’d just gotten a phone call from Jack.”
“Jack... your brother?” As far as I know, Ollie hasn’t talked to Jack in fifteen years.
“He tracked down my number. Called to tell me Da died.”
“Oh,” I say. The entire night reframes itself in my mind. I’m notsure what I’m supposed to say. Somehowsorrydoesn’t feel right. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He leans back on his heels with a sigh. “I meant to, I just didn’t know what to say or how to say it. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it all. You wanted to know why now. Talking to Jack, Da dying... You spend all this time thinking time is exactly what you’ve got. But then something happens, and you realize you don’t have as much time as you think. In my head, Jack’s been a kid all these years. But he’s not. He’s all grown up. And Da...” Ollie pauses. He rubs at the back of his neck with a hand before continuing. “I always wondered what it would be like to see him again. I used to have these conversations in my head, imagining what he’d say, rehearsing what I’d say back... I still do sometimes, even knowing it’ll never happen now. Jack, he asked me to come home and see Mum. Guess she’s not taking it so well.”
“You could visit home now, right? Now that your dad’s... gone.”
