“It would seem so,” was his solemn reply.
“And because you love me, you don’t mind if I’m not perfect.” That followed, since she felt the same. And when Abbie set aside the fears she’d allowed to rule her, it also followed that … “I bet Will could really love me too.” Those words were whispered, because wishes didn’t come true if you told the world.
Telling Jase didn’t count.
He stared at her for a moment with a little frown on his face, but that frown soon dissolved into an odd smile. “Er, yeah,” he said. “Maybe Will could love you.” He cleared his throat. “Probably, in my opinion. You should ask him and find out.”
Abbie groaned. “Except I’ve already told him a thousand times that I’m not interested and we can’t do this and—”
“Oh, I see. So if you go up there now and tell him you’ve changed your mind, he’ll say, Sorry, you missed the bus, I’ve had an enormous change of heart since last night and cannot possibly want a woman who hesitates.”
Abbie bit her lip.
“That was a joke,” Jase added. “He’s obviously not going to say that.”
“Right,” Abbie agreed. “Yes. Obviously.”
“I mean, you do realise he’s been the one desperately asking for this and you’re the one who’s been coolly rejecting him?”
Abbie’s stomach lurched. “Wait. What?”
Jase shrugged. “I’m just saying. That’s the dynamic, right? It seems like you hadn’t noticed.”
No. No, she hadn’t. She’d been so certain of her own … unsuitability for Will, it hadn’t occurred to her that she had the power to bother him with her nos and her can’ts. But what if she did?
Shit shit shit shit shit. Fuck.
“Oh my God,” Jase sighed. “You look like you’re about to throw up. Go and talk to him before you die of worrying.”
“Right. Yes. Absolutely.” Abbie put her embroidery on the coffee table and stood, her spine straight and her nerves wobbling like string cheese.
It was time to risk a little vulnerability for the man who’d given her all of his.
* * *
“You’re not being fair.”
That’s what Abbie had said last night, and the injustice of it had smacked Will right in the chest. Because how, exactly, was he being unfair? At the time, drunk off his arse and dizzy with her nearness, he’d had no idea.
Then he’d slept and woken up and watched the snow falling outside his window and actually used his fucking brain. He’d asked her to trust him, tried to tease out the secrets he could sense hiding behind her clenched teeth, but he hadn’t really shared his own. He wanted her to lay out all her vulnerabilities for him, knowing what she’d been through, knowing how she struggled—yet he’d held back the full truth of his own heart because he was afraid. She was dealing with shit he could barely fathom, and he’d been stressed out about a little light rejection.
“Wanker,” he told himself firmly as he stared up at the whorled ceiling. “You absolute wanker.” Then he got up and got dressed and ran for miles through the quickening snow because he needed icicles in his lungs, clearing his mind, sharpening his senses, helping him figure a way out of the mess he’d created.
It helped, as movement always did. By the time Will returned home, he knew exactly what he was going to say to the woman he loved. He just couldn’t fucking say it because said woman had been distributing cat breakfasts and bantering with her brother and grandma.
The urge to get Abbie alone burned under his skin as he ate breakfast, as he showered, as he dried off and stared at his hazy reflection in the steamed-up bathroom mirror. A beige-and-blond blob stared back at him.
“You.” He pointed at the blob. “Don’t fuck this up.” The blob was silent. “Just tell her everything and try not to die of embarrassment when she’s horrified. No guts, no glory. Get it fucking done.” By this time, his reflection looked a bit less blobby and a lot more determined. Satisfied, Will nodded, wrapped a towel around his waist, and unlocked the bathroom door.
It opened to reveal Abbie standing in the hall, her hands clasped in front of her and a strange expression on her face.
Will stopped dead.
“Erm,” she said. “Were you just talking to yourself?”
Well, shit. “Maybe.”
She must not have heard his actual words, because she smiled and shook her head and released a nervous laugh. “Huh. Okay. Erm…” Her eyes flicked up to his face, strayed down to his chest, then snapped back to his face again. “It has just now occurred to me that standing outside the bathroom until you finished your shower was an incredibly weird thing to do—”
“I don’t mind,” he said quickly, because he didn’t. First, it suggested she wanted to be near him, which was great, because he wanted to be near her. And second, she was clearly having trouble not looking at his half-naked body, which was excellent. Very excellent. He was not above using whatever advantages he had when it came to holding her attention. He had the vague idea that he should be ashamed of himself, but he was too busy trying to subtly flex.
“Right,” Abbie said, her gaze sliding completely away from him and landing on the floor—which was a good sign. Unless it was a terrible sign. He had no idea. This was why he had to get better at the whole talking thing.
With that in mind, he said, “Listen, I’ve been wanting to tell you—”
“Um,” she interrupted, “maybe you should get dressed first.”
He couldn’t help himself. He grinned. “Should I?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Am I making you uncomfortable?”
She rolled her eyes and pushed her glasses further up on her nose. “You wish, Reid.”
“I do, Abbie-girl.”
She looked at him then, a little spark of surprise in her gaze, followed by … a sweet smile on her berry-coloured lips. “Has anyone ever told you that you are an outrageous flirt?”
“No,” he said honestly. He didn’t think he’d ever flirted with anyone but her. He’d never really felt inspired to bother.
“Perhaps I’m just especially susceptible, then,” she muttered, but by the time his scattered brain remembered what susceptible meant and started to feel pleased, she’d already stepped back and moved on. “Seriously, go and get dressed. I can’t concentrate when your delts are staring at me.”
“Delts, really?” he asked. “I would’ve gone with nipples. Much more eye-like.”
She made a strangled sound of disbelief. “Are you really comparing nipples to eyeballs right now?”
“Are you really comparing delts to eyeballs? Be honest, do you actually know what delts are?”
“This is a ridiculous conversation,” she sniffed.
“So no, then,” he said, and she grinned, and God, he’d talk about literally anything if it made her smile like that. He was about to say as much when the door at the very far end of the hall slammed open, and Ms Tricia appeared in the doorway looking like the terrorised heroine of a vintage horror film.
Her brown skin had taken on a greyish tinge, her mouth was a perfect O, and her hands were panicked claws wrapped around a half-price Ted Baker gift set. “Gravy!” she wailed.
Abbie blinked over at her. “Er … don’t worry, Grandma. We got a ton of cornflour when you sent us to—”
“No! Gravy!” Ms Tricia dropped the gift set and rushed down the hall, sweeping past them both. “I just saw her through the window! She’s out in the blizzard! At the edge of the woods! How did she get out? William, get some clothes on. Jason!” she hollered as she all but sprinted down the stairs. “Jason, Gravy has escaped!”
Will stared after her. “Shit.”
Then Abbie said, clearly confused, “The blizzard?”
Eight
Yes, as it turned out: the blizzard.
Will threw on some clothes and c
ame downstairs in time to meet Jase at the door. He looked like someone had dumped icing sugar over his head, then stuck him in a freezer. Icy winds howled through the open door behind him, and Will squinted out in shock at the snowstorm that had, apparently, popped into existence while he was busy wondering if Abbie preferred men who shaved their chests. (He was glad he’d left the situation alone, after her stare-a-thon out in the hallway.)
“I couldn’t see her,” Jase said as he slammed the door shut.
“What?” Ms Tricia squawked. “That creature is pregnant as hell. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, going out in this!”
“Don’t worry, Grandma.” Abbie rubbed soothing circles over Ms Tricia’s back. “We’ll find her. We’ll all go out and search.”
“Good. Let’s split into pairs and look for her.”
Jase and Abbie exchanged significant glances. “Erm,” Jase said, “maybe you could wait here in case she comes back?”
Ms Tricia speared him with a glare. “Shut up, boy. Fetch my boots. You can pair with me.”
Which is how Will found himself out in the blizzard he’d barely believed in, standing on the edge of the woods that bordered the south of Ms Tricia’s property, holding hands with Abbie Farrell. They both wore thick gloves, but he imagined he could feel her warmth anyway. She held him tight, so tight it reminded him of last night’s hazy, confusing bliss, when her touch and her voice had been the things keeping him steady. Of course, she was only touching him now because her glasses were a snowy mess, and without his guidance, she might fall into a well. But still.
“Grandma said she likes bushes,” Abbie shouted over the wind. “Let’s start over there.” With her free hand, she pointed at a thick, evergreen bramble patch amongst the trees.
“Er, yeah,” Will replied, nodding as they started to trek over. The bobbles dangling from his hat smacked him in the cheeks. Head in the game. He needed to talk to Abbie, desperately, but right now probably wasn’t the best time. If they didn’t find Gravy—
“I need to tell you something,” Abbie said, jolting him out of his thoughts. He squinted at her through the swirl of snow, but she was looking straight ahead: all he saw was the thick, snowflake-dotted mass of her hair, the dark frames of her glasses, and the hard line of her jaw. That jaw could mean she was nervous, but it could also mean she was concentrating on not falling on her arse.
“Yeah?” he nudged.
“Yeah. It’s about us.”
Us. Such a little word, but it set off an enormous fucking disco in Will’s body. Complete with flashing lights to match the frantic pulse of his hopeful thoughts and pounding music to match his pounding heart.
“I was nervous about saying it,” she continued, “but having this conversation outside in a blizzard while we’re focused on finding a pregnant cat is really taking the pressure off, so…”
He laughed and swallowed a lungful of ice. “Fair enough. But—” He didn’t know, actually, if this was the right time for a “but.” Had no idea if she was going to shut him down again or if she was going to say something different, something he really didn’t dare to imagine after his numerous spectacular failures over the last two days. If she was going to shut him down, waving his love all over the place might hit her like the equivalent of a cat dragging home a dead mouse. But if she was going to say something different…
They reached the patch of brambles and spoke at the same time. “You should know—” Will said.
But it was hard to remember the rest of his sentence when he realised what Abbie had said. Which was: “I’ve been in love with you since we were kids.”
* * *
The thing about blurting out mortifying truths in the middle of a blizzard was that you could almost pretend the wind had whipped away your words and no one would ever know you’d said them.
Almost.
That’s what Abbie did, anyway, in the aftermath. She could feel Will’s all-seeing gaze burning the side of her face with typical intensity, but there was enough snow between them to cool her fevered skin as soon as his eyes touched it, so that was easier than usual to handle. She set the most difficult of her words free, then bent down to examine the brambles and thanked whatever god was listening for this precise series of events—because she had a sneaking suspicion that, in any other circumstance, she’d have spent a solid twenty minutes working up to that confession.
She was starting to think Will might take a solid twenty minutes figuring out how to reply.
His silence was … significant. The fact that he’d let go of her hand when she’d dropped down to search the brambles was also significant—even though it was exactly what Abbie had hoped he’d do. Any connection between them, even one so minimal, felt electric and important and far too much. She was working hard at this emotional honesty thing, but she wasn’t about to completely overwhelm herself.
She also wasn’t about to take back what she’d said. Or stop talking, now she’d finally started.
“It’s been a long and weird experience,” she said as she parted various spiky branches. “I thought it was just a crush, and then I kind of realised it wasn’t, but I really wanted it to be a crush because that was way less complicated, so I convinced myself it was. And then I just stayed there, mentally, for years and years because I was a stupid teenager and you were my best friend and avoiding my feelings seemed a lot safer than doing something about it and not knowing what might happen. It was all too high-stakes, I think. Then life happened and suddenly we were in completely different places and stages and—and it didn’t matter anymore. I mean, I thought it didn’t matter anymore. But… You’ve always mattered too much to me. You scare me. I’m not—”
Will fell to his knees beside her so suddenly, she was worried he’d actually collapsed. Then two things happened at once: the first was that his gloved, snow-damp hand cupped her face and he said with a voice like the storm around them, “Abbie.”
And the second was that something beneath the brambles startled, its movement drawing her eye.
“Gravy!” she yelped.
“…What?”
“It’s Gravy! She’s over here.” Abbie shuffled on her knees, further to the right, and reached beneath the mass of thorns only to have Will catch her arm.
“You’ll hurt yourself.” He frowned, uncharacteristically stern, and then proceeded to shove his hand under the thorns like the two of them were made of entirely different organic materials. Or perhaps he was simply behaving like his coat was thicker than hers, which was true, so, fair enough.
He carefully lifted the bramble, and beneath it lay Gravy, who … appeared to be giving birth.
“Are you kidding me?” Will demanded. “Seriously? Seriously?” His voice was practically a growl. Abbie didn’t think she’d ever heard him so frustrated.
“It’s okay,” she said, unwinding the scarf from her neck. “We can help—”
“I’m not worried about the cat, Abbie,” he interrupted, which was also rather out of character. Will was very fond of cats, except for the part where they made him hack his lungs up after prolonged proximity. “I’m talking about the fact that you just told me you love me. You just told me that, and I want to kiss you until I die, and instead I have to hold a bush while you talk Gravy through contractions.” She’d been avoiding his gaze very carefully since her confession began—but he said all this with such desperate, disbelieving passion in his voice that Abbie’s gaze was drawn to him without permission. And when she looked at him, she found that same desperation in his eyes, frantic and achingly tender, and it made her feel as if he’d touched every inch of her skin slowly and lovingly all at once.
The tight braid of nerves in her stomach unravelled, just a little. Enough for her to keep confessing, even as she tucked her scarf around an exhausted-looking Gravy and monitored the extremely gross but not unfamiliar miracle of life being squeezed out before
their eyes.
“The thing is,” she told Will as she peered at the bubble-like amniotic sack, “I … I don’t think my loving you is as important as you might think—”
“Disagree,” Will said immediately.
She ignored him. “—Because I’m not very good at it. Love, I mean. I have some, erm, issues, you might have noticed, and I’m so scared, Will. I really am. I’m afraid all the fucking time. And sometimes—often—I let that fear control what I do, and that’s when I make mistakes and hurt people, and I really don’t want to hurt you.”
“This is why you’ve been pushing me away,” he said. “Not because you don’t feel the same.”
“I feel more.”
“You don’t,” he told her. “You don’t.”
It was alarming, the reckless way her heart leapt at that. But already, Abbie was getting used to the nervous thrill that came with hope. After all, she’d just told Will a secret so huge she’d spent years trying to keep it hidden from herself, and nothing terrible had happened. The earth hadn’t collapsed beneath them. Instead, he was looking at her like she was the sweetest thing he’d ever seen and saying things that lit her up inside, things like, “Abbie-girl, nothing you might do to me could hurt more than being without you.”
“That is ludicrous and excessively romantic and horribly unrealistic,” she told him, and her voice only wobbled a tiny bit.
“Get used to it,” Will told her, “because I have a lot of feelings for you and they’re all kind of unreasonable and I really don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me if you have things to work on. I told you last night, and I’ll tell you today, and I’ll tell you tomorrow: if you’re scared, Abbie, I just want to hold your hand.”
Oh dear. Oh God. She’d wanted to believe something like that, said by someone like him—no, only him, only him—for her entire life, and now she was determined to do so. To choose it. The very texture of his voice weaved between her ribs and held her tight, safe, secure. She was perilously close to sobbing, which made it imperative that she concentrate on something else.
Wrapped Up in You Page 10
