Trepidation settles in her expression, but she remains seated, ready to listen. “Okay.”
This is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, given how fragile our relationship is, but then again, this is what being in a mature relationship is all about, right? Effective communication, or at least attempting to have effective communication.
Knowing this might hurt, I look her in the eyes and start from the beginning.
“Before Rupert and I came here, we got drunk one night and were fucking around, playing truth or dare. The last dare was him setting me up on the fiancé website and having me submit my profile. Not thinking much of it, I hit submit and was done with it, just laughing it off. It wasn’t until the next morning that my father saw it spread throughout the media that I was looking for a fiancée.”
Her eyes remain fixed on me, but she stays silent, so I keep going.
“My, uh…my father wasn’t pleased, and he started saying all these shitty things about me. If I were to go back and think about it, I’d say the majority of them were probably true. But the thing that stuck with me was that he was claiming I never follow through on anything. And it struck a chord. So I told him that I really was looking for a fiancée and that signing up on the website was real. He was pissed because it looked bad for thefamily, but I didn’t care. He attempted to call my bluff and when I hung on to it, he threatened me.”
She wets her lips but still remains silent, which makes this confession that much worse. But I keep moving forward.
“He, uh, he told me that if I was so serious about getting married, that I had to, by the end of the summer, marry someone.” I swallow the lump that’s forming in my throat. “And if I didn’t marry someone, then he’d force me to marry his friend’s daughter.”
I expect a reaction. A widening of the eyes, a gasp, hell, even a flinch, but I get nothing, which creates a ball of panic in my chest. Because I knew this was going to happen. I knew she wasn’t going to take this well.
Clearing my throat, I keep moving forward. “So I set out to come and meet you and propose, because I thought that you were in the same mindset as I was—wanting to get married. And then, well, when I found out you weren’t looking for a fiancé, but rather a financier, I decided to stick around and see if I could convince you otherwise.”
She slowly nods as she leans away from me some more, but I don’t let her get far as I hold on to her hand tightly.
“And the intention at first was to get you to marry me, knowing just how insane that sounds. The persistence I had, it was all with the intent that I’d propose again, with the hope that you would say yes. I’m not going to lie about that, but as time went on and the days ticked by and I got to know you, and you shared your life with me, you shared this shop with me, I started to forget about the real reason I was here because I began to care about you.” I rub my thumb over her knuckles. “I started to grow feelings.”
She looks away and I swear for a second I see her eyes water, which throws more panic into the ball that’s tightening my chest, making it harder to breathe.
“But because of those feelings and how I can’t stop thinking about you, how I want to be near you all the time and watch you succeed, helping out in any way I can, even if that means cheerleading from the sidelines, I, uh…I decided to tell my father that I’m stepping down from receiving his title. It’s not going to go over well, it will blow up in my face, and well?—”
Her eyes find mine and softly she asks, “This was all just…some funny joke to you?”
Fuck.
I knew this would happen. I knew she wouldn’t take it well given her disappointing past with men, especially her father. But what was I going to do? Let her find out the truth somewhere else? Because that was bound to happen, especially with how vindictive my father can be. He’d sniff out the truth and deliver it to her on a silver platter.
Swallowing, I say, “At first, that night when I was drunk with Rupert, it was a funny joke. The next morning with my father, it became real. When I came out here, it was more real than anything, because if you said yes to my proposal, I was going to see the whole thing through.”
She looks away, a tear falling down her cheek that she quickly wipes away.
Fuck, my gut churns with anxiety.
“Renley, I need you to know that the walks, the conversations we’ve had, me helping you, the pond…that’s all been real. Every single fucking minute of it. I have spent this summer getting to know you and falling for?—”
“Don’t,” she says, shaking her head. “Please don’t say it.”
“Falling for you,” I finish as more tears stream down her cheeks. That’s when she turns away from me and buries her head in her hands. “It’s true, Renley, I?—”
“No,” she says, her gaze locking with mine, showing me just how hurt she is. “What’s true are the feelings I’ve developed foryou over the last few weeks. The feelings I’ve tried to deny, that I’ve tried to ignore, that I wanted nothing to do with because I knew I was going to get hurt, and yet I couldn’t help it. You made me feel special, different, cherished.”
“That was all real,” I say in a panic. “It’s all been real, Renley. Please, you have to believe me. This hasn’t been a show, or some fake shit that I decided to convince you of. This is real. Last night, it was so fucking real.”
“It felt real,” she says. “It all felt real. It felt like you cared about me, like I was important in your life, like in every moment we spent together we were forming some sort of unbreakable bond. And it scared me. It scared me so much that I’ve been questioning myself. Because I’ve never felt this way about someone before. I’ve never felt like I needed to be around someone so much that I might burst. Or that just at the sight of them, I felt my chest grow lighter. Or that relying on them meant giving up my control, and I was more than happy to do so.”
Guilt twists inside me.
“Renley,” I start, my throat tightening. “I…” I clear my throat, my emotion getting the best of me, because I can’t have this. I can’t have her walk away. Not now, not after everything we’ve been through. “I promised you that I wouldn’t hurt you, right?”
“And yet here you are, hurting me.” More tears flow down her cheeks and I try to wipe them away, but she shifts so I can’t.
“I said I wouldn’t hurt you,” I continue. “That’s why I’m telling you all of this, so that you hear it from me, so that you know why I was here but also understand the reason I stayed. I didn’t keep pursuing you on the off chance that you would somehow come around to the grand idea and marry me. Maybe initially that was the case, but that was quickly wiped away when I started spending more time with you. I was intrigued, I was enamored, but most importantly, you treated me differently than anyone else. You gave me a chance to break out of the moldthat I was put in from the day I was born. You didn’t see me as an accessory, you saw me as a human and you gave me a chance to actually feel that. You got rid of the numbing agent that has been filling my veins from a very young age and gave me the opportunity to be so much more.”
