Despite the fact that we’d slept in the same bed for a week, this was still intimate, still exciting, still terrifying. He held himself up on his elbows as much he could, but he was weak, so his weight still pressed in to me.
I liked it.
“What was I saying, again?” He asked. “Oh, right, that I might be falling in love with you.”
I blinked. Then blinked again.
I blink-blink-blinked my way through a multitude of emotions in mere seconds—shock, disbelief, excitement, fear, lust, uncertainty, and settled on something… something too big for a name. There was a galaxy inside of me—complex and infinite and miraculous and fragile. And at the center was my sun. Garrick. Love. The two were like synonyms to me now. He was falling in love with me? With me?
A brush of his hand brought me out of that universe, and back into the moment. “You could drive a man crazy with that kind of silence.”
“I love you, too.” I said. Then I remembered that he hadn’t quite said those three words. He’d said he was falling in love with me. And there had been a maybe in there. Shit. “I mean… what I should have said was that I feel the same. I’m just falling, too. Because already being in love with you is too fast. That would be crazy. It’s too much, right? It’s too much. It’s too fast. So… I’m not in love with you. I’m not. Not that you’re not loveable, it’s just there’s a difference between falling in love and being in love. And we are the first and not the second, not yet. So, I too may be falling in love with you. That’s what I meant to say. That’s all I meant to say.” I was falling apart. His eyes were soft and unchanging and gave nothing away, so I kept devolving into incoherency. Finally, he kissed me, quickly, but it felt like a punctuation, like I could finally stop talking.
I sighed, “You’re supposed to do that before I start crazy-talking.”
He laughed and kissed me again, a little longer this time.
“I like your crazy talk. Better yet, I love your crazy talk. It’s settled. I’m no longer falling. I am definitely in love with you. That’s not too much, is it?” His grin was blinding and so mocking that I gave him a swift pinch to the arm.
He didn’t even have the decency to look pained. He just kissed me, pressing all of his weight in to me, and it was the best kind of ‘too much.’
I’d always thought too much, too much in my head, as Eric said. But since I’d met Garrick, I had an embarrassing tendency to stop thinking completely. The things that came out of my mouth as a response were almost always embarrassing, but sometimes… they worked out. Sometimes, saying the first thing that came to mind went well. Sometimes simple and honest worked the best.
I hoped this was one of those moments.
“I’m a virgin,” I told him. “That’s why I ran away the night we met. I didn’t have a cat. I wasn’t with Cade. I was just afraid.”
He paused mid-kiss on my neck. Then, slowly, like shifting-of-tectonic-plates-slowly lifted his head. He stared at me, into me, through me. I resisted the urge to hide my face, to run away screaming, to make up ridiculous excuses involving some other kind of animal. I whispered, “You could drive a girl crazy with that kind of silence.”
He reacted—it was small—the skin between his eyebrows pinched together.
“Let me get this straight… you didn’t have a cat? Did you get a cat just so that you wouldn’t have to tell me you were a virgin?”
I pressed my lips together to keep them from trembling. I nodded. The look on his face was somewhere between shock and amusement. He was flabbergasted. That was the best word. His flabber had been thoroughly gasted.
“You said you loved my craziness,” I reminded him.
“I do. I love you. It’s just… honestly? I’m relieved.”
“You’re relieved that I’m a virgin? What, did you think I was a hoe-bag?”
“I would never think you were a hoe-bag.” Was it completely inappropriate to find the way he says ‘hoe-bag’ adorable? “But I knew you were hiding something. I was worried there was some other reason you didn’t want to be with me. I’ve been paranoid about it for months.”
“You’ve been paranoid? I heard that phone call where you said I was an inconvenience. You were planning to change jobs because of me. I was petrified if I ever looked at you too long or gave away how much I missed you that you’d pack up and leave.”
“What are you talking about? I was never planning to leave.”
“I heard you. That day I came by the office. You were on the phone with someone back in Philadelphia, and you said you were over us, that it had just been a inconvenience—“