Page 87 of The Maverick
The room went very quiet.
"Tommy—"
"I know what I'm saying. I know how long it's been. I know what it sounds like." He held my gaze. "I love you. And if we're going to be together—and I intend for us to be together—then anything I have is ours. That's not charity. That's just what it means."
I pressed my lips together.
My eyes were doing the embarrassing thing and I was not going to let them.
"Are you feeling it, too?" he asked. "Tell me, honestly."
I looked at the partial harbor through the balcony glass. The pale morning water. The palmettos.
"Yes," I said. Quiet. True. "I love you, too. I don't know how that happened so fast, but it did and I—yes."
"Then—"
"But that doesn't fix it." I turned back to him. "Tommy, I buy my clothes at Walmart and the only hotel I ever stayed in before last night was a Holiday Inn in Orlando that I sold sixty-three bags of fruit to afford. I don't know how the shower works in there. I didn't know which knob was the water. And you—" I gestured at the room, the suite, the whole of it. "You live here. In this. Like it's nothing. Like it's just—where you happen to be this week."
He was quiet.
"I need time," I said. "I need time to figure out how we exist in the same world. Because right now, I feel like you're in oneand I'm in another and the distance between them is—it's a lot. It's more than a helicopter ride."
"I grew up with nothing," he said. "I told you that."
"I know you did."
"I know what the knob feels like."
"I know you do. But you figured it out a long time ago and I'm figuring it out right now, in real time, this morning, in your bathroom, and that's—" My voice caught. I steadied it. "That's embarrassing, Tommy. That's genuinely embarrassing, and I don't want to feel embarrassed around you, and right now I do, a little, and I needed to say that."
Silence.
He looked at me for a long moment. The level, patient look. Then something in it shifted—not softening exactly, but opening, the way windows opened.
"You have nothing to be embarrassed about," he said. "Not one thing."
"I know that up here." I touched my temple. "I'm working on the rest."
"We can work on it together."
"That's what I'm afraid of," I said. "That together starts to mean you doing things for me and me letting you because it's easier than not letting you, and then one day I look up and I don't recognize myself anymore. I've seen what that does to people. My mama let my daddy carry everything and when he couldn't anymore she didn't know how to stand up straight without him."
Tommy was very still.
"I'm not your daddy," he said. "And you are not your mama."
"No," I said. "But I'm also not going to find that out by accident."
The silence stretched.
Outside, the harbor was going gold in the morning light. A pelican crossed the window slowly, improbably, like punctuation.
"I have to go to work," I said.
"I know."
"I have a double shift."
