Page 139 of Smoke and Glitter

"You did."

"I don't want to stop this time."

The park keeps moving around us. Someone jogs past with headphones in. A bicycle bell sounds somewhere behind me. The woman with the spaniel has surrendered the stick to him now.

Sam's hands stay clasped between his knees.

"I love you, Autumn."

The words don't hit like I imagined. There is no rush of victory. No enormous relief that makes the last few months rearrange themselves into something easier. They settle into me slowly and hurt everywhere they touch.

Sam swallows. "I'm in love with you. I was in love with you when you were sleeping upstairs and leaving shoes under my bed. I was in love with you when I sat downstairs and told Bex we weren't serious. I was already there. I just kept pretending there was a difference between feeling it and having to let you know."

My eyes burn again.

He keeps going, and I can't decide whether I hate him for it.

"You weren't casual. You weren't easy. You weren't someone I could take or leave. I needed to call it that because the truth was the exact opposite, and the truth scared the shit out of me."

I look down at my hands.

Sam's voice gets rougher. "You asked me to choose you. The fucked-up part is I already had. In every way except the one that required me to admit it."

I turn toward him on instinct. He doesn't look away.

"I don't want easy," he says. "I want you. I want the work that takes you places I don't like and the calls at terrible hours and the weeks when you're buried and I barely get you. I want to figure that out with you instead of acting like the only relationship I can handle is one that never asks me to change anything."

Months ago, I told him nobody was asking anybody to rearrange their lives. I remember exactly how quickly he'd agreed.

Sam does too.

"I was wrong about that," he says. "I don't want you doing all the rearranging. I don't want you deciding what parts of your life will fit around mine and quietly cutting off everything that doesn't."

My throat tightens.

"I want to rearrange too."

I stare at him.

He shifts on the bench, but his eyes stay on mine. "I want to build around you too."

The name of the bar comes back to me then, one word handed over with coffee in his kitchen.

"You did give me one thing."

Sam's brow pulls together. "What?"

"Smoke. You told me the name before anybody else knew it. Before the plate. Before Pilsen was anything but an idea." My throat tightens. "You gave me one thing that was mine before I ever asked, and you never knew it counted."

His expression changes slowly. "Did it?"

"It did. It still does."

Sam looks down at his hands. When he looks back, he doesn't reach for the moment like it cancels everything else. He just nods.

There are sentences you wait so long to hear that eventually you stop imagining what they will sound like. I had stopped imagining that one.

Sam breathes out slowly. "You're the woman I love. You're the person I want to come home to. That's what you were asking me to tell you."