I should stop him, but I don’t.
“Sitting in that doctor’s office with you felt right. Having her call us both Harper’s parents didn’t feel wrong.” He pauses. “I’m tired of pretending this is just a professional arrangement when it hasn’t felt professional in weeks.”
Harper squeals happily in her swing, completely oblivious to what's happening above her head.
"Tyler, we can't?—"
"I'm not asking you to decide anything right now." His voice is gentle but certain. "I'm just being honest. About how this feels. About whatIwant."
"What do you want?"
He doesn't answer right away. "I want to stop pretending. I want to stop correcting people when they assume. I want—" He stops. Shakes his head slightly. "I want a lot of things I probably shouldn't. But I just wanted you to know."
Harper starts fussing, breaking the moment, and Tyler turns back to her. We pack up the stroller and walk back to the car in something that isn't quite silence; it has too much weight to be silence.
People we pass by smile at us as if we're exactly what we appear to be.
The terrifying part is how much I want it to be true.
At home, we get Harper down for her nap together; the choreography of it is familiar now. Tyler changes her diaper while I prepare the bottle. He settles into the glider with her, and I stand in the doorway watching the two of them—Harper's little fist curled around his finger, Tyler's voice low and steady as he talks hertoward sleep.
When she's down, he comes out into the hallway and stops in front of me. He doesn't touch me, just stands there.
"I have practice in an hour," he says.
"I know."
"Okay."
"Okay."
Neither of us moves for a moment longer than makes sense. Then he goes into his bedroom to grab his gear, and I go downstairs and start tidying things that don't really need tidying.
I watch his car leave from the living room window, Harper drowsy on the monitor.
I press my fingers against my lips, thinking about how I want to stop pretending, about how easily he said it, about how I didn't say anything back.
This is dangerous. This feeling, this pull, this growing certainty that Tyler West is becoming something I can't afford him to be. I know what it costs to lose someone. I know in the specific, irreversible way that you only know it when it's already happened; when you've already woken up in a hospital room and had to be told all at once what was gone. And I swore, somewhere in those two years of rebuilding, that I wouldn't put myself back in the path of that. That I would never let someone become necessary again.
And then he stood there at the park and saidI want to stop pretending, and my whole chest lit up before I'd decided to let it.
That's the part I can't reconcile. The fear is real. The risk is real. But so is the way my chest goes warm when he's close. The way I looked at him in the park this morning, and thought I could love this man, and didn't immediately argue myself out of it.
It's not that I don't know what I want. It's that I know exactly what I want, and I know exactly what it would cost to lose it.
Standing here at the window, watching his car disappear around the corner, I can't quite make myself care about the danger.
Even though I should.
Even though I really, really should.
Because this is starting to feel less like falling and more like arriving.
And I have no idea how to make myself stop.
22
TYLER