Page 94 of Try Hard

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 thatshethought aboutmethat 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—amnot. 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 forweeksover 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.”