“The auction,” he says. “The night of the event.”
My eyes lift to his, disbelief written all over me.
“You bought it?” I ask, voice too thin. “Because … because I’d looked at it?”
“I watched you,” he says simply.
My chest tightens again, but this time, it’s something else. Something warm and overwhelming.
“I didn’t mean it in a creepy way,” he adds, a faint edge of self-consciousness in his tone. “I just … noticed. You tried to pretend you didn’t care, but you kept glancing back at it like you were fighting yourself.”
I blink, tears rising too fast.
“I didn’t think anyone saw,” I whisper.
“I did,” he says, steady. “And I wanted you to have it.”
My hands hover over the bottle, but I don’t touch it yet.
“It’s rare,” I manage. “This is—Colton, this is expensive.”
He nods once. “I know.”
I laugh weakly through the sudden tightness in my throat. “Why would you do that?”
His gaze drops to the bottle for a moment, then returns to me.
“From the beginning, there was something deeper I felt for you. I knew it but was too afraid to admit it. But I could feel you in that moment. I could feel how much you wanted this.”
He pauses briefly, like he isn’t sure he should say the next part.
“But now it reminds me of us.”
I freeze.
“Not the money,” he says quickly, as if he knows where my mind might go. “The idea of it. The time of this aged wine. The patience. Something that has to sit and become what it’s meant to become.”
My eyes sting.
“It’s ridiculous—I know,” he adds. “Wine metaphors.”
“It’s not ridiculous,” I whisper.
His voice softens. “I’m not healed, Melissa.”
The way he says my name makes me swallow hard.
“I’m not going to pretend I am,” he continues. “I don’t want to sell you some version of myself that looks good on paper and collapses in real life.”
My hands curl into the edge of the table.
“But I also don’t want to keep living like I did,” he says. “Where everything important stays locked behind a door because it’s safer that way.”
He exhales slowly, eyes fixed on mine.
“And I know this,” he says, voice lower now. “I love you.”
The world shifts. Like everything in the room has gone quiet, except for the sound of my heartbeat.