“That’s the most maddening thing! You’re not a dumbass at all. You’re not any of the things you still seem to think you are, and if that’s my fault then let me make it super clear: I adore you. I think you’re amazing, no matter what you do. And if you’d never done any of this and just gone ahead with the plan you apparently knew you could do, I would have kept thinking you were amazing. I will always think you’re amazing now—because you are, in every way that a person can be.”
He covered his face with his hands as soon as he heard the last word, and he didn’t take them down when she nudged him. He didn’t even take them down when she shook him, finally, after what felt like a thousand years. She had to speak and break the silence.
“Tate—”
“Don’t talk. I need a second to compose myself.”
“Yeah, but your composing is adorable and I want to tell you that, too.”
“Goddamn it, stop. I can’t take anymore. I’m going to lose my shit.”
“I think you already have lost it. But that’s okay, because I’m pretty much doing the same thing.”
She was, too. Just watching him be like this was enough to do it.
And that was before he dropped his hands and shifted on the bed to completely face her.
Said things that left her wrecked, in all the ways anyone could be.
“I love you, Letty. I know it’s way too early to say that, but I do.”
“Yeah, you’re right. It is too early to say that. Pretty lucky then that I love you, too.”
“You do? Like, for real, or are you just saying that because I’m having a nervous breakdown?”
“I’m saying it because it’s true. How could I not love you? You get involved with the mob so you can spend more time with me. I don’t think many girls can say that their boyfriends did something that idiotic and dangerous just so they could watch more cheesy movies together in her dorm.”
“Watching cheesy movies together in your dorm has been responsible for the best moments of my whole shitty little life. And I know that’s probably pathetic to admit, and makes me at least sixty percent less cool, but it’s the truth. Everything else I’ve ever done doesn’t compare. It’s not even in the competition. I would trade away everything I have—money, my life, my peace of mind—just to sit beside you on this bed and hear you reply like what I said mattered to you. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
She threw her arms around him then. What else was there to do? He had said the most romantic, heartfelt words she had ever heard. His sincerity had never wavered, in either his soft gaze or his tone. Nothing could have ever been sweeter, or more real.
She could never have known in a million years that it was all just a lie.
—
She thought she would be nervous when Harrison got to their presentation. But when it came time to go up to the front, she didn’t get the usual shakes. There was no sense that everyone’s eyes would be judging her. The person who used to do that was up there with her. He squeezed her hand before they stood up, as though he knew what she might be thinking.
Most likely he did.
It was something he’d been very good at it, even when they were mortal enemies. He always knew just what would hurt the most, so she supposed it shouldn’t have surprised her that he understood the opposite, too. He knew what would make her feel the best. Like him calling her my learned colleague when he finished his part of their introduction, and squeezing her shoulder when she stuttered over the first part of the section they’d call the orgasmic double standard.
Not that she stuttered often. In fact it was surprisingly easy to go into the gorier details. She spoke clearly about the difference it made to the rating when a film showed a close-up of a woman’s face as she had an orgasm, and barely stumbled when she went into the examples they’d lined up. It was easy to talk about the rift between what movies implied about female sexuality, and even easier to listen to him talking when it came to his part of the main argument.
It made her realize, when he spoke, that this was the start. Seeing him be like this was the reason she had let him in—and especially so when every other guy seemed to have viewed the project as an excuse to look at boobs. That was the name of one presentation: breasts in the movies. The guys who had worked on it put up pie charts with various examples of bared boobs in different movies. There were categories like side, full frontal, nipples, and size. Everyone thought it was hilarious.
But Tate didn’t. He rolled his eyes and whispered, “Morons,” to her.
He was different.
She was absolutely certain he was different. That some seismic thing had occurred in him, still occasionally nameless and uncertain to her but definitely there. She had faith in it—of the same sort people had that the sun would rise the next day and their loved ones would return after work and school and play. It had become an easy thing, a taken-for-granted thing, to the point where she didn’t really understand what Professor Harrison was saying when she stopped by his office to thank him for putting them together.
“Well,” he said. “I do like to respect my students’ wishes.”
Though even then she didn’t fully grasp things.
She was still smiling when she asked, “Sorry, Professor. What wishes were those?”