Page 60 of Teach Me
“I told you before that you’re not any more broken than the rest of us. Everyone’s broken in different places. Maybe you and I found our perfect complement.”
He gave me a short nod. “I think that’s why it feels so hard to let go.”
“Is it possible that we…wait?” I offered the suggestion quietly and with full awareness that there were no guarantees in life. Cameron might not be interested in that. Hell, Cameron might lose interest in me.
“Like, wait until after the publicity tour?”
“And after you graduate, yes. I suspect I’ll be traveling most of the summer. You’ll be busy with classes and the cafe. It’s not ideal, but it’s all I’ve been able to come up with. And in the interim, if you change your mind?—”
“I won’t.” He cut me off, shifting around so we were at eye level. “I know what I feel.” His words wrapped around my heart and took root, and I had to swallow back a surge of emotion at the determination in those striking blues. I believed him, as I always had. As I always would.
“I know what I feel, too. I just want you, and I’ll wait however long I have to or until you tell me to stop.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
We kissed again, a slow, lingering kiss that sealed those words between us like an accord.
“Summer’s going to feel really fucking long, just so you know,” he groused half-jokingly.
“I know.” Imagining not seeing him, touching him for those months, spawned a preemptive ache inside me. “One day at a time, though, right? Isn’t that how the saying goes?”
“Yeah, yeah.” He gave me a wry twist of a smile and rolled his eyes, and I pulled him in for another kiss.
“Grady?” he said when we came up for air again.
“Anything you want,” I said prematurely, and he laughed with a shake of his head.
“I’ll remember that for the future.”
“Please do.”
“I just wanted to ask if you could start coming to the cafe again like you used to. At least until you leave? Even if you don’t sit in my section, even if you’re with John or someone else—except Professor Lingen, fuck that dude.” An endearingly possessive snarl threatened his upper lip. “I mean, I know I’ll see you in class. But I really like seeing you outside of it, too.”
“Done,” I replied without a moment’s hesitation. I brushed my fingers over his cheek, soaking in the warmth emanating from him. “Besides, everyone else’s omelets are shit anyway.”
29
CAM
When I got back to the house the afternoon after taking my final exam, there was a package addressed to me waiting outside my bedroom door. No return address. Grinning, I took it into my bedroom and closed the door, then flopped on my bed to unseal it.
Inside was a proof copy of Grady’s book,The Choice Code: Cracking the DNA of Decision Making. I stared at the glossy cover, then flipped it over to the back, examining the headshot of Grady with a grin. He’d told me before that he hated how they’d styled his hair, that it defied his natural part. All I saw was the gorgeous, brilliant man I adored. Pride swelled in my chest as I leafed through the pages and snuck a sniff of the paper and ink.
When I got to the title page, Grady’s familiar scrawl leapt out at me.
“While it’s highly unlikely that this was the first book printed, it’s the first one I’ve signed (my signature needs work, I know. I can all but see you squinting at the page right now). It’s funny to think I spent so many years researching and writing a book about the nature of decision making, and yet there are still many aspects of both of us that remain an enigma, defying all logicand patterns discussed in these pages. Perhaps that’s a subject to explore in a different book. Or, perhaps, it’s all the sweeter to leave the mystery intact. Regardless of the nature of human behavior, choosing you remains the best decision I’ve ever made.
With love, Grady”
I read it and then read it again. The last several weeks of the semester weren’t the torture I thought they were going to be and definitely nothing remotely approaching the tumult of the early days when Grady and I had been hooking up. That didn’t mean it was easy, but there was comfort in knowing we’d made a mutual decision based on the love and respect we had for each other. It was a security blanket wrapped around me, filtering every single interaction we had.
In a different world, or maybe a Lifetime movie, we’d have run away together or had some dramatic blowup where we were exposed. Maybe Grady would have made a rousing speech to the department heads about the imperfect and often untimely nature of love that would move them so greatly he’d be forgiven, and we’d celebrate by fucking in his office.
Or maybe he would’ve been unceremoniously fired.
But we weren’t in a movie, and the situation with Paul had been enough drama for us both. I loved Grady to the edge of the solar system and knew he loved me, too. I also knew that our best shot at making something work was if, despite all of that, we kept our feet firmly planted on the ground where we could see our path forward, step by step.