Page 76 of Double Dared
Then I turned around.
He was walking up the last of the slope with the speaker in his left hand and his right hand free, and his eyes were already on mine by the time they had anywhere to look.
I got to my feet before I’d decided to.
It happened the way things happened with Harrison: my body understood before my mind had finished its argument. The grass pulled at my jeans as I stood, and the eclipse was behind me now, the world around it gone to that deep, bruised blue, and I faced him instead.
He came up the last of the slope without hurrying. He looked at me the whole way up.
Not at the eclipse.
At me.
The family to my right had gone quiet. The two women were holding each other by the shoulders. Somewhere in the sky above and behind me, the corona burned in a ring of white and gold that I felt on the back of my neck like a held breath, like the universe leaning in, and Harrison walked through it with his eyes on my face.
“You’re here,” I whispered.
He stopped a few feet away. One corner of his mouth lifted into that lopsided smile, the one thatarrived before the rest of him caught up, the one I’d been memorizing without knowing I was doing it. “There’s nowhere else I’d ever want to be.”
Something in my chest lurched upward, and I pushed it down, hard, with both hands, metaphorically speaking. I was terrified to take it. Terrified to open my hands around something this good when they were still holding the shape of letting go.
Harrison set the speaker in the grass without breaking eye contact, and then he closed what was left of the distance, turning us slightly as he did, so that the eclipse unfolded to my left at the very edge of everything. The moon’s shadow sat across the world like a single, held note. The air was ten degrees colder than it had any right to be.
He took my hands in both of his.
His fingers were warm. His hands were always warm.
“I’ve been so afraid of telling you this,” he said, and his voice was quiet enough that it belonged only to us and the thin, cold air. “And because I haven’t told you, you somehow decided to be gallant and let me go.” He looked at me steadily. “And if you’re ever gallant with me again, Taylor, I’ll make you watch the three-hour director’s cut of every film I’ve ever loved, in silence, without commentary.” The smile came back, brief and gentle. “But it’s my fault. Because I’ve been a coward. And I haven’t told you all the things I wanted you to know. I haven’t told you, so long ago, that it’s not about her. It’s not been about her for weeks.”
He looked down at our hands for a moment, his thumbs moving over my knuckles, slow and deliberate, like he was mapping me.
“I didn’t want to scare you away.”
“You won’t scare me away,” I said. Too fast. A little eager. I didn’t take it back.
Harrison looked up.
For a few seconds, neither of us spoke. The track shifted somewhere below us, the piano of “Brain Damage” giving way to something larger, building, the opening of “Eclipse,” and Harrison’s fingers tightened around mine so suddenly and so surely that I felt it in my sternum.
“It’s as simple as this,” he said.
He said it the way he said everything important: without announcement, without performance, dropping it into the space between us like something that had always been there and simply needed to be named.
“Taylor, I love you.” His eyes didn’t move from mine. “I love you more than you can ever know. And I’ll keep telling you that until you believe it. And when that isn’t enough, I’ll show you.” His hands tightened again. “And I’ll keep showing it for as long as I breathe. I swear.”
The words went in slowly. They went down through every layer, every careful wall, every place I’d built a joke or a shrug or a too-casual departure so that nothing could reach the part of me that wanted this exact thing, exactly like this, exactly from him.
I stood in the cold grass at the edge of the worldwhile a solar eclipse happened to my left and Harrison loved me, and I let it be real.
“And I want you to be my boyfriend,” he said, and something in his voice shifted, cracked open a little, warm underneath. “Because you are my boyfriend. You are my world.” A breath. “You are my everything.”
My throat was full of something I didn’t have words for. I’d always had words. That had been the one reliable thing about me, the jokes arriving before the feelings, the punchline already positioned before the pain could land. But standing here, with Harrison’s hands holding mine in the shadow of the moon, I had nothing.
Nothing except the truth of it.
I squeezed his hands, both of them, hard.
“I love you,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I expected, and I didn’t mind. “I love you, Harrison. I have for a long time. I just kept putting other names on it.”
