The Cheat Sheet

by Adams, Sarah

  “Says who?”

  He doesn’t answer me. I pull away and frame his jaw with my hands to make him look at me. Even in the dark I can see his eyes are red and puffy, and he’s deeply embarrassed. He tries to turn his face away, but I don’t let him because I need him to know I’m not ashamed of this part of him. He’s probably never cried in front of anyone in his entire life, largely due to the culture he’s steeped in day in and day out that tells him his maleness is defined by his ability to remain impenetrable to emotions.

  “Why do you have to handle it all, Nathan? Why won’t you let yourself rest?” I ask, looking deep into his eyes.

  He squeezes them shut and tears roll out. “Because I don’t deserve to.”

  “What?” I ask on an exhale.

  “Bree, I’ve never had to work for anything in my life. Nothing! It’s all been handed to me. Catered to me. I wanted to work in high school, but my parents actually wouldn’t let me. Even my current position on the team is because it was handed to me. Daren, the man who rightfully earned his spot, got injured, and I took over after sitting on the bench for two years. Do you see? I’ve been given all of this success—so what do I have to complain about? What right do I have to be exhausted? None. I’m just a rich kid who was provided everything he ever needed and handed more money and more success on a silver platter.”

  I had no idea he felt this way.

  “So this is the reason you work yourself to death? Why you never say no to people? You’re trying to prove your worth?”

  His eyes turn down again. “When I work hard, when I feel tired, it’s the only time I feel a little bit of the guilt in my chest lessen.” I want to speak to this, but he keeps going, new tears shaking his voice. “I’ve never had to go through hard things in my life. I’ve never known anything close to poverty or struggle or even just budgeting, for that matter. I have a chef, a driver, a manager, an agent—everything I could ever need, so tell me…what reason do I have to complain about any of it?”

  Tears are streaming down his face, and the look in his eyes is anger mixed with defeat.

  “What right do I have to resent it? To want to escape any part of it ever? No. I don’t deserve to get help for the anxiety I can’t escape. I don’t get to feel overworked. I need to keep my shit together and give as much of myself as I can, because otherwise everyone will see that I don’t deserve to be where I am.”

  Nathan lets go of me to press his face into his hands. For a moment, I sit, stunned. I stare at this man I thought I knew better than anyone in the world and realize all along he’s been bottling up his feelings, his hurts, his anxiety and stress because he feels like he has to wear a cape to be a hero.

  If he can bare all of this to me right now, I can do the same for him.

  I pull his hands down from his eyes so I can look in them. “Listen to me. It is not the things you do that make you worthy, it’s that you have a beating heart in your chest. You have a soul, which means you are allowed to feel hurt, tired, stressed, sad, angry. All of those things—you are allowed to feel them. Everyone is.” I gather all of my strength for my next words. “Your ability to shoulder everything, to give 200% of yourself all the time, to be perfect at everything you attempt…these are not the attributes that make you a valuable human being.” I pause. “And they are not why I fell in love with you.”

  His black eyes shoot up to me.

  I smile. The weight of these heavy secrets falls off of me, and I feel relieved to continue. “I fell in love with you because you’re goofy. You’re fun. Your heart is so big I don’t know how it fits in here,” I say, pressing my hand to his chest. “You’re a terrible singer. You make me soup when I’m sick. You bought me tampons that time I was laid out on the couch with cramps and couldn’t move. You didn’t even send someone else for them. You went yourself!”

  He chuckles lightly, and I wish there were more light so I could see his smile clearer.

  “Look, Nathan, I don’t care if you never pick up another football a day in your life, or if no one in the world attaches the word successful to your name ever again.” Now I’m the one dumping tears, and Nathan’s hands have moved to cradle my face. His thumbs dash across my cheekbones.

  I shake my head lightly and try to swallow down my sob enough to finish speaking. “So don’t say you’re not worthy or deserving, because you are to me. You always will be.”

  Nathan pulls me closer and crushes me against his chest. His strong forearms are pressing into my shoulder blades, his face buried in my hair.

  “I love you too,” he whispers over and over again. “I love you, Bree. I love you. I always have.”

  I talk Nathan into letting me drive him home in his truck, and he arranges for someone from his entourage to go get my car and drive it back for me tonight. Hello, celebrity perks. We leave almost immediately even though Nathan is severely worried this is going to upset everyone.

  “Let me take care of you,” I say, looking up into his hesitant eyes. “Please?”

  He relents and hands me his keys. “Thank you.”

  I get a kiss on the cheek, but I sort of want to do the move where you turn your face really quick and get a kiss on the mouth instead. Not the time.

  On the drive home, we’re both physically and emotionally exhausted. Nathan turns on some mellow music, takes my hand, and laces our fingers. He kisses my knuckles with an aching tenderness that tears right through me. We drive for two hours, not saying a word, just listening to the music in comfortable silence.

  “Will you stay at my place tonight?” he asks, finally breaking the silence as I pull into the parking garage of his building.

  I’ve stayed at his apartment a hundred times, so that question shouldn’t feel heavy or important. But it is, because I’ve never been asked it while he holds my hand and the words “I love you” hang between us. It feels easy to say yes though. Natural.

  When we finally walk into his apartment, he tosses his keys on the entry table. I toe off my shoes and go into the kitchen to get us both a glass of water. It’s all so normal, but also lightly scented with different. Neither of us speak, because we’re not sure what words would be adequate enough to follow the emotional roller coaster we just rode together. So we carry our waters down the long hallway that leads to our rooms. I get ready to part from him and go into mine for the night like I always do, but he catches my hand, tugging me back around. A bit of water sloshes onto the floor.

  “Stay with me?” He says those three words not as a demand, but as a defenseless question. A need. A desperate hope. Tonight has peeled back everything I thought I knew about Nathan, and now I see a man who’s just as scared as me. I love him more.

  I nod and step into his expansive room. Nathan gently closes the door behind us, and my heart gallops when I hear it quietly latch. The floor-to-ceiling window is ten steps away, and I take each of them with a measured calm then look out over the most incredible view of the ocean, nothing obstructing the dark expanse of water and white crests of the waves breaking against the sand. It looks peaceful yet dangerous out there. That’s exactly how it feels in here too.

  “Bree?” Nathan asks from behind me, and I whirl around like a tornado that’s suddenly directionless.

  “I’m nervous,” I blurt.

  Nathan’s eyebrows rise, and then he lets out a long breath and a tiny smile. “Same.”

  “Really? Okay, good. Because logically, I know it’s me and you.” I sputter a humorless laugh. “It’s a dream come true, in fact! I shouldn’t be nervous—I should be tackling you.”

  “It’s harder to accomplish than you think,” he says, cracking a joke that instantly eases the prickling in my lungs.

  “But what I’m nervous about—or afraid of, really, is that I said I love you back there and you said it too only to humor me.” I have big cartoon eyes now—I can feel it.

  Nathan smiles in a way that shows barely contained amusement. “Humor you?” He takes a nervous step away and runs an awkward han
d through his hair. “You thought I could have been humoring you by telling you I love you?”

  “Yes. You don’t have to keep repeating it.”

  “I do. Because if you were in my head, you’d see how difficult the concept is to comprehend. Bree, I…” His voice trails off and then he freezes. He deflates with a sharp breath. “Sit down,” he commands, and then he disappears into his giant walk-in closet.

  I perch on the bed and bounce my knee. Then I realize I’m sitting on Nathan’s bed—something I’ve never done before—and I jump up like it just burned my butt cheeks. I force myself to sit back down and process this like an adult. I’m in Nathan’s bed. In his room. He loves me. Nope, see? None of these abstract ideas will permeate. I’ve spent too long believing he has not a care in the world for me outside of friendship. It’s all I’ve known. How am I supposed to retrain my thoughts?

  Nathan steps back into the room, and if he notices that I’m barely letting my cheeks rest on his mattress, he doesn’t show it. His attention is fixed on the shoe box in his hands. He looks nervous, maybe even a little sick as he extends it toward me. When I try to take it, it doesn’t budge. He’s white-knuckling this thing so hard.

  I grunt. “Nathan, do you want me to look in here or not?”

  “Not,” he says, dead serious. “I mean, yes. But no.”

  I shift back a little. “Well now I’m terrified. What do you have in here? Bones? Endless pictures of earlobes? Am I going to be scared of you after I lift that lid?”

  “Probably.” He winces lightly and then relinquishes the box.

  I set it down on the bed carefully (because who knows what’s in here or how fragile thousand-year-old bones are) and gingerly lift the lid. I steel my spine for something to jump out, because he’s prepared me zero percent for what’s actually in here. Lizards? Maybe he keeps a box of moths in his closet and when I open it, they’ll rush out and choke my airway.

  It’s neither.

  After the lid is off, it takes me a second to realize what I’m looking at. Nathan paces away from me with a tight hand on the back of his neck. I dip my fingers inside and pull out…my scrunchie. The sunshine yellow scrunchie I thought I lost after Tequila-gate several weeks ago. I look up and make eye contact with Nathan. He looks like he’s going to barf. His fist is pressed to his mouth, and his eyes are crinkled. Poor thing is really going through the vulnerability wringer tonight.

  “This is my scrunchie,” I say, holding it up for his confirmation that what I think I’m seeing is actually true.

  He gives me a tight nod. “You took it off and left it on the table that night. I kept it.” He gestures toward the box with his eyes. “Keep going.”

  Nathan resumes pacing, looking at me every so often like someone might watch a surgical operation they have been forced to attend. Next, I find a cocktail napkin with my lipstick imprint from the epic poster-ripping night. Then the orange Starburst I threw at him on the couch.

  The deeper I go into the box, the more I recognize things I haven’t seen in years. A concert ticket from a Bruno Mars show he took me to for my birthday (and got us backstage passes to, which he pretended to randomly find on the sidewalk because I never allow him to buy me extravagant things). Toward the bottom, I find a gum wrapper with my phone number scribbled on it from high school. I remember this day like it was yesterday. We had run together for the first time that morning before classes. That afternoon in homeroom, he asked me if I’d want to run together again sometime. Of course I said yes, and we exchanged numbers. I didn’t save the slip of paper he gave me with his number, though, and now I feel like a horribly unromantic monster!

  Once I’ve gone through every single item in this box and spread it all out on the bed around me, I meet his gaze. He finally comes near me and plucks the scrunchie I’m clutching like it’s a million-dollar bill out of my hands. “This smelled exactly like your hair. Coconut. I should have given it back to you, but I couldn’t.” He tosses it in the box. I’m never getting that scrunchie back. Next, he grabs my hands to tug me up to stand with him. “Do you see now? You’re always giving me things that remind you of me, but I’m over here stealing things that remind me of you. I’m not humoring you, Bree. I’m not taking this lightly. I’m so devastatingly in love with you, it hurts sometimes—and I have been since high school.”

  Hope, hope, hope. I hear it beating in my ears.

  “I’ve been dying for you to love me back—but I never thought you would. Remember when you found out I’m celibate and I told you it was to help my game? That was a complete lie. I’ve been celibate because I am so gone for you I couldn’t even stomach the thought of another woman anywhere near my bed. She would never be you.” He cradles my face. “I love you with everything I am, and that’s never going to change for me. I think I should be the one making sure you’re not just humoring me.”

  I can’t take the space between us anymore. I rise up on my toes to lay one soft kiss on his lips, feeling like this has to be a dream and I can do anything I want in my dreams. “I’ve loved you since the day you tied my shoe on the track. You didn’t tell me it was untied, you just tied it.”

  The muscles in his jaw jump like he’s swallowing back tears. “Bree, that was the first day we met.” His tone says, Don’t toy with me, woman.

  “I know. That’s the day it all started for me.”

  His massive shoulders rise and fall in one huge breath, and then his eyes shut like he’s in pain. “Do you mean to tell me…we’ve both loved each other all this time and never said anything?”

  I laugh even though it’s not funny at all. I run a finger over one of his eyebrows. “Yes. I think so.”

  “But what about college? You completely pushed me away then. I thought I did something wrong.”

  Oh. That.

  I smooth a hand down the front of his shirt, suddenly very concerned about wrinkles. I guess while we’re emptying our emotional tanks, I might as well go ahead and squeeze a little more out. “I’m so sorry, Nathan. I pushed you away because I was terrified. I could see the way you were thinking of turning down your UT scholarship to stay home with me, and although I never told you, I was really depressed after the car accident. I was afraid you were about to completely give up your dreams for me, and after hanging around me in my mopey, angry, defeated state, you’d realize I wasn’t worth your time anymore and resent me. I was scared you’d see me low and heartbroken and not want me like that. So I pushed you away. I’m sorry, Nathan. I Old-Yellered you.”

  His hand tenderly cradles my face. “I never would have felt that way. I’ve always just wanted to be the one to take care of you.”

  “I know that now. But back then, depression told its own story, and it was hard to hear the truth through it.”

  He dips his head and sighs against my throat. “Well, hear me now: I adore you, Bree. When you’re happy or sad, I love you.” Nathan lays a slow, open-mouthed kiss on my neck and climbs up to my mouth.

  Heat swirls in my belly, and my head tips back to receive his lips. Softly, they sweep over mine. He gently tastes the corner of my mouth, and I part my lips to reciprocate. I am a puddle. So melted he has to hold me up. Kisses by themselves are nice; kisses after a declaration of love are life-changing.

  I’m lifted off the floor and tossed playfully onto his bed. A laugh rips through me until Nathan grabs the back of his shirt and tugs it over his head. His eyes are as dark as the sky at his back. I swallow thickly as he moves to hover over me. His weight. GAH. Golden taut skin. OOF. That ripped abdomen I finally get to dance my fingers across. MMM.

  Nathan smiles down at me as I explore every inch of his exposed skin. I rise up and kiss one pec. Then the other. I lightly bite his bicep, and he laughs. “So that’s how it’s going to be?”

  I innocently bat my lashes at him, and he dips his head to crush his mouth against mine. This one is not soft or tender. It’s years and years and years of waiting. It’s a desperate breath at the surface of the water when you’
re rescued from drowning. I cling to him for dear life. He kisses me deeply, thoroughly, lavishly. His hand slides under the back of my shirt, and that calloused skin scrapes delicious fire over mine. I feel branded.

  Nathan is everywhere. And I am full of need. I have fallen for this man so completely, and now we’re finally here together, twisting in his sheets, kissing like it might be ripped away from us at any moment. Kissing like we love each other. He whispers soft declarations over my skin that I won’t repeat. They are for me and me alone.

  Suddenly, Nathan pulls away, a drugged look in his eyes when he smooths the hairs away from my face. Breathless, he lets out a guttural groan, coming to some sort of unvoiced conclusion in his head. He adjusts onto his elbow beside me. “Bree, I want everything with you right now more than anything, but…dammit. I can’t believe I’m going to say this. I think we should wait.”

  Shocked doesn’t begin to describe how I feel hearing those words, especially since he’s been celibate for so long. But I won’t lie, part of me is sort of grateful. I’m a girl who likes to be prepared for these kinds of things, mentally and physically, and tonight was so unexpected; I know I’m not in the right headspace for it yet. I need a little digesting time.

  But then Nathan shocks me in a less-than-pleasant way when he continues, “Actually, I…I sort of want to wait until we’re married.”

  WHAT!? My brain screeches to a halt. Did he say married?! Did he propose at some point tonight and I missed it?

  My eyes must convey my thoughts because Nathan’s smile widens and he trails his finger down my neck to dance lightly over my collarbone. Conflicting body language there, buddy. “Don’t worry, I’m not proposing yet. But I know you don’t like to be surprised by stuff, so this is me saying I will propose to you at some point. And I’m hoping you’re okay with that time being pretty soon, because I feel like we’ve already been dating for six years, just not officially.”

  He’s right, and I tell him so. I’ve never known another human more intimately than I know Nathan, and best friends like us don’t casually date. It was an unspoken agreement that by declaring our feelings, we were saying, I’m all in. You’re it for me.