“Okay,” I say again.
“Great. Happy New Year, Casey.”
“Happy New Year.”
The second I hang up, Alex has me off the ground. He scoops me up behind my knees and spins me around in a circle. “I fuckingknewit! I’m so proud of you,jagi.”
My body isn’t sure how to process this. Inside, all my tiny molecules are fusing together and fissuring apart. Again. Again. Again.
He puts me back on my feet, still holding me upright. The sturdiest, most solid thing I’ve ever felt. “How do you feel?” he asks gently.
Terrified. Thrilled.“I’m… confused,” I tell him, honest as I can get.
Alex’s eyes glaze with sadness, and he rests his forehead against mine. “There goes all my plotting.”
“What plotting?”
Alex swallows thickly and murmurs, “How to keep you.”
This is dating.
“Alex.” I grasp at his hair. “What the actualfuckare we doing?”
He shakes his head, forehead rocking against mine, his fingers bunching into my coat like the grip will hold me there forever. “I don’t know. Casey, I would… I wouldfollowyou there. I think I would follow you anywhere.”
The sentence calcifies into my own bones, his words becoming a physical part of me that I couldn’t get rid of unless it broke. “You would?”
“If you wanted me to, I would.” He tucks my hair behind my ear, sighs, and starts talking.Reallytalking.
“I’ve thought about this a lot. I started thinking about it theminuteyou left my place, the time you told me about moving to London with stars in your eyes after I’d spent the best minutes of my life inside your body. I’ve asked myself if I would ever move back to London if I’d never met you. I’ve asked myself if, had you’d been interested in someplace else, would I still have tried to follow you then?”
He tilts my chin up, his irises turning flinty. “Every day, Casey, every time I’d look at you, I would play out all those what-if scenarios in my head. They always ended the same, with me thinking,Yes.If you were existing near me, the answer was yes. And if you weren’t near me—funny enough, Case, the answer was still yes. That’s the best part. It doesn’t feel like a tether, it feels like achoice,because the stars in your eyes are fuckingwhyI fell in love with you.”
He wipes a tear from the corner of my eye, thumb lingering on my cheek, and his voice softens even more as he continues. “So, to me, it pretty much came down to only that. Once I figuredthatpart out, the rest wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t difficult. If you want me—if by some miracle this is a mutual feeling—then I go where you go. I am where you are. But I don’t want you to feel pressured,so if you don’t want me to be in London with you, I won’t, and I will completely understand. I mean, we made a deal when we started this whole thing, and I broke the rules—”
I put a finger to his lips. “Stop. Just stop right there. Alex, Idowant you there. I want to keep you, too.”
Oddly, his expression falls even further. “Are you sure? It wouldn’t be for a while, what with the BTH board holdup. Maybe even six months, until they really let us launch.”
The cloud bursts.
The secret bursts.
It pours out of me, sentence after splintered sentence: Tracy approaching me, asking me to uncover the truth behind Robert and Dougie’s feud (during which I swear to Alex I never breathed a word to her about his relationship with his dad, which is the truth). The news of the acquisition, my being sworn to secrecy, learning the BTH presentation was just a red or green light to sell.
When I say that part, Alex’s eyes gutter, and his face goes cold. He stands there mutely through my apology, stiff and frozen. I want to touch him, but I’m scared he’ll flinch away. I’ve never seen him look like this. Not in the entire time I’ve known him have I seen him this… defeated.
I shift on my feet. The grass beneath my boots is still crunchy from frost. It’s all that breaks up the silence that follows.
“Alex,” I whisper. “I’m sorry. I really am so,sosorry. About all of it.”
He rubs at his face, eyes pointed listlessly toward the sky. When he doesn’t say anything for a few moments, I can’t take it.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“I am wondering,” he says, voice gravelly, “if I have any right to be mad at you for keeping a privileged secret from me that might have gotten you into serious trouble, had I not kept it to myself. And I think the answer is no. I don’t have that right.” His eyes drop to mine. “But I’m also wondering why you didn’t trust me enoughto tell me that secret anyway. Because whether we admitted it to each other or not, we were dating a month ago. I was already telling youeverythinga month ago.” I can see his frustration visibly growing. “I spentweeksworking on that presentation.Youspent weeks. Now you’re telling me the whole time, Dougie Dawson was justwaitingfor the curtain to close?”
“It wasn’t like that. Tracy thought we had a chance—”
