I resisted reaching out to Brett for another week. I did want to respect his wishes, but honestly, the only reason I didn’t break down and contact him outside of work was because I hadn’t yet figured out how to fight for him.
The only way I made it through the next week was by convincing myself that giving him space was fighting for him. The first step, anyway, and other steps were starting to formulate in my mind. Small gestures I could make to prove my feelings. I wasn’t fooling myself—it would take time to build his trust. But I was experienced with sticking to relationships, even when they didn’t have a promising outcome. Surely, waiting for Brett would be worth the reward.
Still, it was an enormously hard task not to linger after staff meetings, not to stroll down to his office to ask if he wanted to grab lunch, not to text him with laugh-cry emojis when Silvia came in wearing that god-awful floral pantsuit. Not to drop my mat next to his at yoga and get in trouble for whispering to him the whole time.
At least he’d come back to class. Seeing him made me hopeful. And when he accidentally met my eyes across the room and offered a small smile before looking away, I decided it was time to launch into the next level of Project Win Brett for Keeps.
What I needed, though, was a big gesture to kick everything off. The following week, Scott’s assistant, Sadie, inadvertently came up with a perfect opportunity.
“What does she want us to do, exactly?” Julie asked after the assistants’ staff meeting that Monday.
Strangely enough, I’d actually been paying attention this time. “She wants us to type up our favorite moments with Scott so she can hang them in the break room and make sort of a memory wall. No names. Leave it anonymous.”
Julie made a judgey face. “Um, that’s dumb.”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
Sadie had admitted she’d heard about it at a team building workshop, and that the assignment was originally supposed to be to share memories about everyone in the workplace, but she’d decided to modify it as a tribute to Scott, who was being promoted out of the department. As the originally intended team bonding experiment, the project might not have been half bad.
As it was now set up, it was bullshit for a variety of reasons. First, it was cheesy, and I hated cheese. Second, Scott’s job as VP kept him tied up with people in other departments and outside of the company. He didn’t intermingle with half of the staff and probably didn’t know many of their names. Third, Scott was the last person who needed smoke blown up his ass. Fourth, even if he did, he never set foot in the break room, so he’d never see it.
Fifth, I was absolutely not relating any of my favorite experiences with Scott. Not only were they private, but they were also X-rated. Besides, after Brett, those once cherished memories with Scott had lost their shine.
I was absolutely not participating.
Until I found a way to make it better.
First thing Friday, I approached Sadie and offered to print, frame, and hang the memories that had been typed up. She’d already bought a bunch of generic standard-sized frames and she handed those over and emailed me all the submissions that had been sent to her over the week.
I spent the morning working on it at my desk. Thankfully, it was an easy enough task, and I had all the submissions done by midday, including my own, which I’d placed in nicer, more ornate frames that I’d purchased myself the day before.
I waited until after the break room was cleared from lunch so I’d have the room to myself, and then, with a level, a hammer, and a box of nails borrowed from maintenance, I spent the afternoon arranging the frames artfully on the wall.
When I was done, I stood back and admired my work. I’d done a relatively good job with the composition, only having to move a couple of my nails when something wasn’t even (a sixth reason why this project was bullshit—all the holes that would be left in the wall when these memories were finally brought down), but those were barely noticeable. The important thing was that my frames—the ones that contained the memories I’d typed up—stood out, and they did. Anyone who decided to read these would naturally start with mine simply because that’s where the eye landed.
I felt good about it.
Mostly.
A little excited.
A lot nervous.
God, I hoped someone actually did read these and that Brett would find out before my additions were taken down.
And that I wasn’t in too much trouble over it.
And who was I kidding? Sadie would definitely come look at it before she left for the day, and she’d surely take mine down immediately.
My plan suddenly seemed as stupid as the memory wall for Scott was in the first place, and I was seriously considering taking my frames down when the break door opened behind me.
I turned around, expecting to have to explain myself to Sadie, and instead, saw Brett.
Well, okay. Kismet.
Except that I hadn’t wanted to be anywhere around if/when he read them. Fortunately, since we’d been avoiding shared spaces anyway for the last couple of weeks, it wasn’t weird for me to immediately gather my things.
“I just finished up,” I said without making eye contact, in case he felt the need to leave first.
“No, it’s okay. I’m just…” He pointed to the coffee machine, which was a little strange since usually Julie took care of things like that for him, but also he was exactly the kind of guy who would get it himself if she was busy or even offer to get some for her.
But he didn’t walk toward the coffee machine. He stood in the center of the room and looked at the display I’d just put up.
“This the Scott’s-a-god wall?”
I bit back a laugh and almost choked on it because oh-my-God-Brett-was-making-small-talk-with-me, and I could hardly breathe. But also, I really had to get out of there, so I gave him a quick, “You said it, not me,” and then headed toward the door.
I didn’t make it out before he exclaimed, “Hold on.”
I froze, my hand on the door, too nervous to turn around.
Then after a beat passed and he didn’t say anything more, I was too nervous not to turn around. When I did, I found his eyes skimming quickly over one of my memories then jumping to another one.
“These are all about me,” he said, and I decided it was awe in his voice, but quite frankly, it might have been confusion.
“Well, not all of them.”
He pivoted to look at me. “The ones you wrote.”
Even though they were all anonymous, there wasn’t any way he wouldn’t have guessed the memories I’d typed up were written by me and that they were about him instead of Scott. They were very specific.
The time we planned Nolan and Avery’s first anniversary party.
The time he rode the train out to Harlem to pick me up from a date gone bad.
The time he flew me to Portugal for my birthday.
The time we braved the cold and the crowd to see the New Year’s ball drop and then ended up back at his apartment watching it on TV before ten.
The time he sat holding my hand in the hospital waiting room when Finch had the cord wrapped twice around his neck and Avery had to have an emergency C-section.
The time he took me to a kennel to cheer me up by petting dogs.
The time he convinced me to sing karaoke with him at the holiday party.
“I couldn’t pick one favorite,” I said. “And the ones I included barely scratch the surface.”
He studied me. “These were supposed to be about—”
“I know,” I interrupted. While I hadn’t thought it would go down like this, I had been prepared to explain myself. “But, see, he doesn’t matter to me. Not really. Not the way you do. He never did, and I know that it doesn’t seem like that, but the truth is that you were the one who was always the Greater Sebastian, as far as I was concerned. You were the one I put on the pedestal. You were the one too good for me to try and reach. I didn’t deserve you.”
He blew out a frustrated sigh. “Eden, I never—”
“I know you didn’t. You have never made me feel like I was beneath you. That was me, all on my own. That’s the Eden Waters you met ten years ago—low on self-esteem and prone to pairing herself with men who treated her badly because that’s what she thought she deserved. And even though I knew you might like me more than a friend, I couldn’t ever believe that you could be the man for me because I knew that I could never be the woman for you.
“Except, little by little over the years, that started to change. You changed that. You changed me. You told me over and over that I was worth something. That I was worth more than I’d ever imagined. And eventually, I guess I started to believe it.”
“Because you—”
“Let me finish, okay?”
With reluctance, he closed his mouth and nodded.
I shifted my stuff to my side and cocked my hip. “You wanted to know why now? That’s the why now. You convinced me I was worth you. And yes, Tess showing up and you saying you liked her was a motivator, because while this change has happened over years, I think I’ve been ready to believe you for a while now. Ready to let myself love you. I just needed a little push.”
He took a deep breath, looked from me to the wall, then back at me again. “I don’t know what to say.”
In my dream version of how this would turn out, he would have immediately swept me into his arms and declared we were meant to be and followed it up by bending me over the break room counter. So admittedly, his hesitance was a little disappointing.
But it was also what I’d expected. “You don’t need to say anything, Brett. You’ve said a lot already over the years. It’s my turn to convince you what you are to me. You are not my second choice. You are my favorite person in the world, and I know it will take time for you to trust that, and that’s okay. It’s my turn to wait. I can wait.”
Maybe I was trying to convince myself as much as him, but I did honestly mean it. I would wait. However long it took.
And because I did mean it, I resisted the urge to stay, silently begging for some form of encouragement, and forced myself to turn around and leave.