I laugh. “You talked the exact right amount about soil.”
He exhales dramatically. “Good. I was worried you were going to say something so much worse.”
His self-deprecation can wait until later. I shake my head, still stunned. “You set off this whole chain of events that I genuinely do not think we can undo even if we tried.”
I look at him fully now. Really look.
“And that,” I say softly, “blows my mind. Because I don’t want it to stop.”
The gym is quiet. Empty now. It’s only the two of us, and the echo of everything that just happened.
“I didn’t plan any of this, Juliette,” Sawyer steadies himself. “For you. For Theo. To fall so hard and fast, but now that it’s happened…I don’t want my life to be any other way.
“I know,” I say. “Believe me. I get it.”
He takes a step toward me this time, closing the space I left between us.
“Juliette,” he says gently, “I’m not trying to be anything. I never was. I don’t want to replace David.”
“And I’m not looking for a replacement,” I say quickly, but too quickly because I can tell by the look on his face it’s not landing the way I want it to. “What I mean is that, to me, replacing something means getting another type of the same thing, just different. I don’t want that.”
“What do you want?” Sawyer asks.
“You. I want you. I’m so sorry I reacted the way I did the other night. It wasn’t fair to you.”
“But,” he says, his voice hushed and thick with understanding. “You had to do it. For Theo.”
My chest tightens, my heart pounding so loud I’m sure he hears it. I don’t even realize my hand floats to my chest to rest.
But he does.
“Is your heart pounding like mine?” he asks, taking my other hand and placing it on his chest, where I can feel his hammering a mile a minute, too.
“Yeah,” I whisper. “That’s exactly it.”
“It’s applauding for us. Because we’ve gotten here.” He winks. “Someone tiny and wise taught me that.”
Of course he did. I only know of one tiny, wise human who I’ve ever told that to, of course he’d share it with Sawyer. Standing here in the school gym, with my hand on Sawyer’s chest and a school full of little humans and education all around us, I realize the truly terrifying part.
I don’t want him to stop being here with us.
Not now. Not ever.
I swallow and look at him, really look at him, standing therelike he hasn’t just quietly rearranged my entire life in the most magical and unexpected way possible.
“I felt like a black cloud,” I say, the words tumbling out now that I’ve opened the door. “Like I was carrying all this heaviness around, just following me everywhere. And then you showed up—like a ball of sunlight, this giant orb of yellow and orange and ridiculous bright light—and you just…landed. Right square in our lives.”
His expression softens, like he’s bracing himself for something important as he steps closer.
“You know,” he says quietly, “I never thought I could meet someone and fall in love with their kid while I was falling in love with them.”
I can’t help but chuckle. To think my son was a matchmaker in this? I’m going to send that kid to any college he wants if this lasts.
“But I think,” he adds, shaking his head like he’s still wrapping his mind around it, “that might be exactly what happened.”
I don’t interrupt. I can’t.
“Then there’s you,” he says. “I’ve never wanted to protect anything harder. Or hold something closer to my chest. What this is—whatever this is—it matters to me. You matter to me.”
