Page 214 of The Off Limits Captain
I make myself say the last part out loud, where I cannot take it back.
“I am so tired of being safe to love from far away.”
Ryan does not look like a man being talked into anything. He looks like a man who already had this fight with himself and came out the other side.
“I know,” he says. “I had your name on my phone an hour ago and a clean speech about giving you room. The kind of leaving I’m good at — the kind that looks like protecting someone.” A breath. “I put the phone down before I drove over. I didn’t come to be talked out of you. I came to tell you.”
“Tell me what.”
“That I’m done hiding it.” Not a hope. A decision. The kind the rest of them follow. “I didn’t get the C by handing over the things I want. I’m not starting with the one that matters.”
“That was almost a speech.”
“I came with one. You took the first half.” His mouth almost curves; then it doesn’t, because this is the part that matters. “The second half is for the cameras. I’m going to the podium tomorrow — your name and the word love in the same sentence, in front of every lens Jennifer owns. I’ll stand in the open until the word stops meaning anything. They can’t expose what we put on the table ourselves.”
“That will cost you.”
“You sound like Evan.”
“He’s right a lot. It’s annoying.”
“You were never going to have to choose between me and the story,” he says. “They needed that choice to be real. It never was.”
“Then I write it the way I should have written the last one.” I mean it the way I will have to mean it in print. “The truest version I can defend. My name, my conflict, all of it on the page. If my source comes back, good. If he doesn’t, I keep reporting until someone braver than the smear says a name out loud. Let them call it a vendetta. I’ll outwrite it.”
The thing I came here to give up, and neither of us is going to let me.
I step into him.
“I love you,” I tell him. I do not look away. After tonight, looking away would be a lie, and I am done with the convenient ones.
Ryan goes very still. The way he does when something gets past every guarded part of him before he can decide whether to allow it.
“Say that again.”
“Which part.”
“You know which part.”
“I love you.”
He kisses me on a public sidewalk under a paper twenty-one in the bar window across the street, where anyone with a phone could turn us into exactly the thing they’ve been selling.
He does it anyway.
So do I.
He drives us to his place, and for once I do not care who might see.
We make it to the couch first.
Barely.
His apartment is dark except for the city light through the windows. He kisses like he has been waiting all night for permission to be done waiting. My jacket hits the floor. His shirt follows. His hands are everywhere and still asking, thumbs stroking my ribs, his mouth at my neck, his breath hot against my skin.
“Bedroom,” I manage.
“Yes.”
