Page 37 of Try Hard

I saw the way her eyes flashed wider as she realised where she was going with that sentence.

More surprising was the way I wanted her to finish it.

I wanted to know exactly what she wanted me to be, exactly what I was to her.

I hated people coming onto me. I hated the way people imagined me being theirs.

Not with Eve, though. Perhaps because I’d spent over twenty years wanting to be hers.

Perhaps because, two decades later, here we were, seeing each other for exactly who we were, and fitting perfectly together.

“I think I wouldn’t mind if you complimented me. Physically.” My voice was uncertain, but I knew it wouldn’t feel the same with Eve as it did with everyone else.

She stared at me with wide eyes. “You don’t have to say that. You don’t have to give me something you think I want if it’s going to hurt you. I want to meet you where you are, to give you what you actually want.”

Eve Archer was the most beautiful person in the world—in every sense that word had ever meant or would ever mean.

I smiled at her, and I wasn’t sure that all the unshed tears were those of sadness anymore. “Tanika and Kim said something tonight.”

“About the way you look?” she asked urgently, her body locking down, arms tightening around me.

“No, not that. They said you liked me, back in school.”

“Oh.” She bit her lip, looking momentarily at the way we were tangled together in her bed. “I did. I do.”

My breath caught. Even having finally convinced myself it was a possibility wasn’t enough to stop the force of her admitting it—especially with her answering my unasked question, too. She’d probably heard the hope singing in my words, my touch. Evidently, Eve paid attention to me.

“What’s that expression about?” she asked, amused when I couldn’t seem to find my voice.

“Nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“I just… why ?” I shook my head. “It doesn’t really make sense to me.”

She reached up to trace two of her fingertips across my forehead and down my cheek, brushing lightly against my hair with the back of her hand. “There’s not a single thing about you that I’d change. There never has been. To me, you’ve always been like sunlight, like oxygen.”

My heart raced too quickly for me to catch my breath. How was it possible that she thought about me that way? She’d always been the sun. “But—”

“No buts. Not a single thing. I mean that.”

“I’m… mean.”

She barked a laugh, taking my face between her hands. “You are not. I told you, I’ve been paying attention. You are many things, Ophelia Pendrick, but mean has never been one of them.”

“Plenty of people think I am.”

“They don’t know you like I do.” She grimaced. “Or they don’t have the capacity to respect and appreciate a woman who won’t behave the exact way they believe she should.”

I shook my head, looking down at her lying on soft white sheets. Without thinking it through, I reached out to trace a finger along her jaw, simultaneously soft and square. “You’ve always been able to do so much better than me.”

“I beg to differ,” she spluttered, frowning up at me. “Teenage me found the best woman in the world and never forgot her for a second.”

None of this made sense, and yet, it made perfect sense. I didn’t know what she’d seen in me, but she was describing exactly how I’d always felt about her.

She watched me through narrowed, speculative eyes. “After we left for uni, I called my mum in tears, talking about how I’d missed my shot with you and didn’t know how to handle that.”

“Eve…” My heart ached for her. I’d enjoyed my time at uni, but there was no denying that it had been an adjustment that felt lonely and scary in the beginning. And there was no denying how I’d felt the exact same way about her. Though, I’d never thought I’d had a chance in the first place.

She smiled gently. “I’m sure I was also crying about… feeling alone in the world, my whole life changing, suddenly being a very small fish in a very big pond, but I missed you so much. I missed seeing you every day, missed the way you’d look at me sometimes.”

I felt a blush creeping up my neck. “If you noticed the way I looked at you, you must have known how I felt about you.”

“I never thought I stood a chance.”

“ How? ”

She took a steadying breath, looking dazzled in a way I couldn’t comprehend coming from looking at me. “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. Even when we were kids, the way you understood things, the way you looked at them and sailed through school was ridiculously intimidating.”

“We were in the same classes. You were every bit as smart.”

“I was not— am not. That school was a small pond and you didn’t belong there. You were radiant and intelligent in a way I always knew would take you far from that place.”

“Says the literal rugby star.”

She laughed and ran one of her hands up and down my back in a way that raised goosebumps on my whole body.

“I’m not going to lie and pretend I don’t know I’m a good rugby player, but that felt like nothing compared to what you could do.

That was one thing. You were electrifying in every single class we shared.

It blew my mind how someone could be so good at so many things.

And then… there was the way your laughter—rare though it was—lit up the whole world.

It still does. The way you cared so deeply about things.

The patience you had in hearing your friends out no matter what they were talking about. ”

I laughed through growing tears. “Plenty of people think I’m short-tempered.”

“It’s okay if something makes you feel that way, that you aren’t willing to put up with people’s bullshit just to appease them.

But I watched you listen to Tanika agonising for weeks over whether that guy in her IT class had been flirting with her, only for her to turn around one day and start the same agonising over someone else.

You never stopped listening. You always cared. ”

“It was important to her.”

“Exactly. And you knew that, and, in turn, I knew that about you. You were this artwork of complex, stunning humanity, and I was… a rugby player.”

“You have always been so much more than that.” I wanted, so badly, to tell her all the things I’d noticed about her, all the ways she’d been so much more than she’d ever realised, but my brain was humming over the fact that she’d complimented me in so many ways, so clearly painted the picture of teenage infatuation without once mentioning how I looked.

I didn’t think I’d ever been complimented so well, so honestly, or so much in the exact way I needed.

Eve chuckled. “If it gets you to like me, I’ll take whatever it is you think you see in me, but I absolutely will not stand by and let you think you don’t deserve me.”

“You just… without once commenting on…” My mind was a mess. Every part of me felt like it was buzzing and dizzy, but being out of control felt okay with her.

She smiled and her own eyes glistened in the lamplight with hopeful, emotional tears. “I could spend the rest of my life complimenting you, and I don’t need to comment on your body for that.”

“I really do think it might be okay from you.” I saw my fingers trembling against her jaw. My body wasn’t quite as sure as my brain wanted to be.

The slight furrowing of her brow told me Eve knew exactly what I was thinking. She sucked in a measured breath. “You’ll have to forgive me for being presumptuous, but I’m getting the impression you might like me too—”

“Yes.” I laughed at my unrestrained eagerness.

I really was all over the place. But I didn’t want to take it back.

She deserved to know how wonderful she was and how much I wanted her too.

At some point, I’d find all the words to tell her, but, for now, I was going to let the eagerness do it for me. “I did then and I do now.”

A massive, incandescent smile took over her face, like she’d been waiting over twenty years to hear those words. I knew the feeling.

“You know,” she said happily, “if you’d asked me out back then, I’d have died right there at school.”

“Likewise.”

She looked at me like she enjoyed my brusque tone, like she saw through it to all of the emotion underneath. “I know this is complicated and loaded for you, but I’m here, and I don’t want to fuck up this second chance I’ve been given.”

“Me neither,” I whispered. “You know everyone already thinks we’re together.”

“I’m not going to lie, Ophelia, I have been doing nothing to prevent them from thinking that. You have no idea how wonderful it feels when people think I’m yours—I always have been, after all.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d wanted to kiss someone who wasn’t her.

The true desire to do so had faded before I’d managed to make it out of my last relationship—something I’d realised in the interim, brought into sharp relief by Eve’s return to my life.

There had been nobody after him. However, Eve…

I’d wanted so badly to kiss her when we were teenagers, and that desire was only more insistent now.

Still, that small, scarred part of me needed patience, even if I didn’t love that right now. It needed reassurance first.

“I like being yours,” I murmured. Only Eve Archer could make that something I enjoyed. After my ex’s need to possess me, to mold me, I’d sworn never again. But, with Eve, I wanted to be hers so badly it hurt. I knew she wouldn’t use it against me.

A tear leaked from her eye, running down her temple towards the bed. She looked inconceivably happy. “Anything you want, it’s yours. I’d give you the universe if I could.”

I laughed softly, shaking my head even though I knew I’d do the same for her. “I just need… to go slow. As if twenty-odd years to get here isn’t slow enough. Sorry.”

“You don’t need to be sorry when asking for what you need. Not ever. We can go as slow as you want.”

“Hm. Probably better with your… fans, too.”

She winced. “Whatever you need to handle all of that, too. I’ll do everything in my power to protect you, always.”

Her promises, her vulnerability, and her honesty sparked inside my heart. She was everything.

I wrapped my arms around her the best I could with her half under me, and tugged her with me as I lay back down.

If she’d been unwilling, I didn’t think I’d have stood a chance of moving her.

As it happened, she followed me willingly, holding her weight carefully as she hovered over me, pressing me down into the mattress.

Soft, mesmerising strands of her hair fell across her forehead in that way that only seemed to happen with romantic heroes. She’d been the romantic heroine in every dream I’d ever had.

The way her pupils were blown suggested she was feeling something similar.

Knowing that she was physically attracted to me wasn’t off-putting like it was with others.

It seemed like she always had been—like she always would be, no matter what happened to my body.

The thought was both liberating and terrifying.

I wasn’t yet sure how to handle that, even if I understood it in reverse.

Eve would always be the most beautiful person in the world, no matter what happened to her physically.

I slid my hands up her back, over her shoulders, and took her face tenderly. “I was planning to say I needed to wait a little longer for anything physical, but I… really want to kiss you.”

She breathed a laugh that sent shudders through my whole body. “I would wait forever for you to be ready, to be as certain as you need to be. I wanted to kiss you when I was a kid, I want to kiss you now, and I’ll want to kiss you fifty years from now. I’ll be here when you’re ready.”

Every word from her was the most perfect, most romantic thing I’d ever heard. It was exactly what I needed, and all I wanted was to live in every moment with her, to be ready to give her everything she deserved. I wanted to show her exactly how much I adored her.

And I still needed to honour the pain my body carried, even when I didn’t want to hold it against her.

I pulled her face closer to mine, glad when she let more of her body press down into me.

Our noses brushed, her breath coming every bit as fast as mine.

“You should have been my first kiss, Eve Archer,” I whispered, our lips so close together they were almost touching. “I should have been braver.”

“I should have too. But I’m not going anywhere now, Ophelia.”

I looked into her eyes as best I could when we were so close. “I want to be brave now.”

“You already have been. There’s no pressure for anything more yet.”

“But I want to.”

“You will. When every part of you is ready.