“Can you handle it?”
“Try me.” He grinned.
It was much later when I finally crawled into bed, not wanting to change the sheets, but I still did. Bed clean and made, I dialled his number and thensat there with my heart in my throat. I didn’t want to cry but still had to swallow down far too many emotions at the sight of him.
“Hey,” he said softly.
“Fuck, I miss you,” came back. It was the truth.
He was smiling. I breathed. The stupid things I knew about him. I had no doubts. None left whatsoever.
This was very much me, heading straight into another disaster. But then he would say something and all those doubts would so easily trickle away.
“I love you,” he said, rubbing his face, the way he did when he got frustrated. “I love you, and it’s so bloody irresponsible to say something like that, and I should be saying it to your face and not over the bloody phone.”
Fuck. But…
“For fuck’s sake, Noah.” I grinned.
“You don’t have…”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Language, Fox.”
“Don’t care.”
“I love you, and this is all so messy, but I have plans.”
“We have all the plans. When can you come back up here?”
“Soon. You can come down and see me too, but I know how busy you are. It’s not as easy for you to leave for the weekend.”
“No. But I would, for you. I can make it happen.”
“Good.”
“Noah?”
“Yeah?”
I was a mess, and I had to put the phone down for a second so I could wipe my eyes with the sleeve of my jumper.
Cold. I was cold, and he was not here and I wanted him to be, and for heaven’s sake, Bailey had got in my head and now I wanted to marry Noah and all sorts.
“I love you.”
There. I’d said it too, and the weight off my shoulders was immense. I knew I did; that was not the issue here, it was more acknowledging the fact. Making it real, when my entire purpose here was to not.
It was real. Everything was, and I had to start dealing with that.
“I love you,” I repeated. “I love you, and I want you here. Ideally, I want you to come up and move in with me and we get married and we’ll make a mess of everything. I have no doubt we will…”
“We won’t make a mess of anything. We haven’t so far, have we?”
“We’ve made a mess of a lot of things,” I said sternly.
“True…” he drawled, “But not of the important things. I love you. You love me. We’re too far apart for this to work, so we need to fix that. Do you agree?”
