I step closer. “You don’t—”
But he shakes his head. “I need to say this. No one has ever seen me the way you do, Delaney.” He stops. Looks at me. “To be confronted like that—it scared the shit out of me. I wasn’t expecting it, and my reaction wasn’t great, but you were right. I’ve never felt like enough. It’s a huge insecurity and you just…you saw right through me.”
I set the book on my desk. “I was harsh.”
“You were honest,” he says, voice ragged. “I didn’t want to accept that I’m someone who tries so hard to meet some arbitrary threshold of being enough.”
“You weren’t wrong about me either.” My racing heart gives way to everything I’ve needed to tell him. “When you said the fear of fucking up my life was preventing me from living it? That was true.”
He winces. “I’m sorry.”
“I’msorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize.”
“Sumner, I called you a self-righteous dick.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
His eyes cling to mine, clouded with emotion and something I can’t quite pinpoint. He wrings his hands, the movement anxious. I haven’t seen Sumner this emotionally fraught, well, maybe ever.
“I know it’s late,” he goes on, “and I know everything feels impossible, but I was lying in bed and suddenly it felt so—urgent.” That tormented look returns, a flash of vulnerability in his eyes. “God, Delaney. I’m in love with you. I’ve loved you since I first knew you. You’re like the sun at the center of my galaxy, so bright even when my own world feels dim. It’s like I can sense you with my eyes closed. Every moment you’ve spared me—every glance—all of it’s made me love you more.”
His voice cracks on the final word. I’m barely prepared for the dizzying sensation his words impart on me. All my breath gathers at the base of my throat.
He changed for you, I think. All of it was for you, to be seen and accepted and loved. This brilliant boy who’d bend and stretch the bounds of the universe, defying all laws of time if it meant spending one more day in your presence.
But that’s where he went wrong. My love doesn’t need earning. Not in that way. He’sneverhad anything to prove to me.
“What about last summer?” I whisper.
He sucks in a breath. Runs a hand down the nape of his neck. “I wanted you then. You have no idea.” A muscle in his jaw jumps. “But, Delaney, we were at your house.Anyonecould have walked out on us in the backyard. If it were Jared, he may have murdered me. It’s a big reason why I said we shouldn’t. That and—I mean, I worried I was someone who happened to be there, you know? Not someone you necessarily wanted. I needed you to be sure, because it would break my fucking heart if you weren’t. You’d gone throughthis enormous loss and I never,everwanted you to feel like I was taking advantage of you in a vulnerable state.”
“I never felt that way,” I get out, throwing my arms to my sides. “Iwas the one who kissedyou.”
A ghost of his tilted smile appears. “Trust me, I remember it well.”
Heat coils around my belly. Emotions cumulate in my heart like the start of a rainstorm, begging for release. “You never said.”
“I screwed up, and I’m really sorry. I could have handled it better—I should have told you everything then. But when things went back to the way they’d been between us? I thought I had my answer. That you regretted it.” A hand twists through his hair. “Until you told me otherwise.”
I’d been so caught up in my hurt and embarrassment that I hadn’t thought to see it from his perspective. Sumner was never a distraction from my grief. He’d let me talk through the hard parts and kept me company on reflective nights and listened to old stories transformed into memories. And all this time he assumed he wasn’t enough, resetting our friendship as a defense mechanism.
He’d said he hadn’t known how to talk to me when we first met, but that wasn’t true. Maybe we’d exchanged sparring words and teasingly riffed off each other for the sake of casual conversation over the years, but even when I was pretending I didn’t, Ilikedhis attention. Hadn’t I felt empty without it? Shouldn’t I have known then?
He leans against my desk. My face flushes.
“I had a crush on you.” It comes spewing from me like a geyser. “The time Jared called me out in the common room? I lied.”
“He only did that because he used to catch me staring at you,” Sumner says, eyes flitting to mine. “And then, that day in the common room, he straight up asked me. I didn’t deny it. But then you got with Brayden, and I…I couldn’t escape you. So I tried to move on. And I was pricklier to you, which was unfair, and I am sorry for that—butgod. I was bitter. And jealous. Maybe it’s wrong to say, but Brayden is a pretentious dick. His disinterest in youkilledme. Because I would’ve swapped places in a heartbeat.”
My heart flutters. All this time I’d been on his mind. Thisentire timeI hadn’t known.
“What about Hailey Collins?”
“We’re friends, that’s it.” His eyes flash. “Maybe part of me hoped you were jealous. And don’t get me started on William. I get he’s the real-life Mr.Darcy—”
“Wrong time period.”
