Page 47 of XOXO, Yours

Not this arrangement. Not the version of this where I'm welcome between certain hours and in certain rooms and not others. Not the version where I have to leave without saying everything I want to say.

You told me once that this was just sex. I know that's what you call it. I've never once believed that's what it was.

And I think you know that too.

I think you've known for a while that this stopped being simple somewhere around the second week. I think the knowing scares you for reasons that have nothing to do with me and everything to do with what you've had to survive to get here.

I'm not asking you to stop being scared. I would never ask you that. I just can't be the thing you reach for in the dark and put away in the morning anymore. It's starting to undo me, and I love myself too much to let it.

So here's what I'm offering instead: I'm here. I'm not going anywhere.

I will still leave notes under your coffee cup and argue with you about which of the Indiana Jones movies is the best. (The Last Crusade. I said what I said.)

What changes is this: I can’t come over anymore. Not until you’re ready to acknowledge that this thing between us isn’t just convenient and fucking amazing sex. Acknowledge that and be willing to risk getting hurt to claim something amazing.

If that day comes, I'm ready. I've been ready.

If it doesn't, then I'll figure out how to love you from here, which will be hard, but I've done hard things before.

Whatever you decide, I need you to know that knowing you has been one of the better things that's happened to me. The kids at school are lucky to have you. I was lucky to have you. I hope you know that.

XOXO, Yours

Payton

chapter

nineteen

Jules

I find it at eight fifteen on Saturday morning, when I open the front door to finally water my damn basil plant.

His handwriting on the front. Just my name, Jules, in the particular way he writes it—the J slightly too big, the rest catching up.

I stand on my porch in my socks and my oldest sweatshirt and I read it twice before my legs decide they're done cooperating.

I sit down on the porch step.

I read it a third time.

The basil plant is right there, the Mason jar of water I carried out forgotten next to me.

I examine my feelings, sitting on my cold porch step with the letter in my hands, and what I find is this: I am not surprised. Not by any of it. Not by the love, not by the ending, not by the fact that he said both of those things in the same breath. Because he is Payton and he does not do anything halfway, including loving people who have done everything in their power to make it difficult.

While I am not surprised, I am completely, entirely undone.

I've been in love with him, and I’ve known it, and I have spent weeks ignoring my feelings. Pretending I feel nothing complicated in a stupid effort to protect him from me, from my history, from the very real statistical likelihood that I will find a way to ruin this because that is what I do.

It turns out the universe doesn't actually care about my noble and protective intentions. It just went ahead and ruined it anyway, in the most Payton way possible—gently, honestly, with a signed letter that tells me exactly how loved I am while also telling me it's over.

I fold the letter.

Then I do something I haven't done in a very long time. Since I learned that falling apart is a luxury and when you have no one to count on, putting yourself back together takes longer every time.

I cry.

I'm still crying—less dramatically, more the quiet, stubbornly persistent kind—when Cora's car pulls up twenty minutes later, Hope in the passenger seat. They get out, each carrying contraband. Cora has a cardboard caddy of coffee cups. Hope has a pink box from Sugar Bakers, the best bakery in six counties. I have a particular weakness for their glazed croissant doughnuts.