FIN BASICALLY TUCKED Kylie into bed that night and then, when she emerged from Kylie’s room and saw Tyler sprawled on the couch, his eyes practically spinning, she did the same for him.
“Stay,” he murmured as she pulled a blanket up to his chin, her skin prickling at being near his neat, golden energy.
She chuckled. “Trust me. None of us are ready for me to stay over.”
She leaned down, kissed his mouth to shut him up and scraped the back of her hand over his stubble. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She knew he was exhausted from his talk with Kylie, because it was the first time he didn’t walk her down to get a cab. Fin took the opportunity to take the train instead. It was an easy ride, only half an hour, and she wanted to feel like herself for a little while. Like the young girl who’d learned the trains with Via at her side.
It wasn’t until her front door was closed and locked at her back that Fin let the tears come. It wasn’t often that she cried. But tonight there was no stopping it. She hadn’t been able to keep herself from absorbing the emotions of the two people she loved. Normally, she would have gotten out of Dodge if she’d seen a fight like that happening. It was too dangerous for her. She knew that those kinds of emotions ran the risk of getting lodged inside of her, where she’d carry them until she could expel them. Tyler and Kylie almost felt trapped inside her heart, their pain and confusion, their loneliness and desperation. Fin clawed at the buttons of her coat and let it fall in a heap on the floor as great sobs collapsed and expanded her rib cage. She fell onto her couch, clutched a pillow and let the emotions come. She knew that fighting them made them worse. She had to relax into the pain; it was the only way to let it move through her unhindered.
She cried Kylie’s tears first. And they were so familiar, because they were the same tears that Fin herself had cried as a young girl in New York City. Tears of abandonment, tears filled with questions, every tear a plea to the universe, Please don’t make me inadequate. Please don’t let them leave me.
And then came Tyler’s tears. And these were tears of helplessness. Tears of utter disorientation, like he was plunked down in the middle of a desert and told, Find Kylie water, her life depends on it. She cried Tyler’s tears of regret and anger. She cried tears of fear and frustration. Kylie’s tears had been great wracking sobs, clear rivers down her face. Tyler’s tears were fat raindrops that seemed unending, until, of course, they ended.
She was shocked when there was more to cry. She realized that this last batch of tears were hers and hers alone. Fin curled on her side, her knees almost to her chin, and gulped for air. Her own tears pooled in her eyes in great batches, blurring her vision before they fell away, sideways, into her hair. These were the tears of someone who was mourning the loss of a life she’d thought she wanted. A life she’d worked toward for years. A life she’d thought would always keep her connected to the woman who’d raised her. She thought of the nail-biting, hair-whitening process that she’d gone through to try to become a foster parent. She thought of how many no’s she’d gotten from the state. She thought of Kylie, inviting Fin into her life. She thought of Tyler, of partnership, how much better they were when it was both of them together. Fin cried harder. She’d wanted to be a foster parent. She’d wanted it so badly, nothing fake or posed about it. And now she cried out her grief over having to say goodbye to it. Goodbye to that life because she was saying hello to another one, a different one. And the hello made her cry as much as the goodbye had. Saying hello to this new chapter was as relieving as it was painful, like those few seconds after a Band-Aid gets ripped off. God, it hurts, but look, it’s not the wound.
When there were no more tears, when Fin shook with exhaustion, when she was carved out like a pumpkin, Fin lay weakly on the couch and felt what remained.
It was a swamping love. A love that had been filling up her heart for months, like water rising that she hadn’t acknowledged until she was palms against the ceiling, her lips sucking for that last inch of air. All before she realized she could breathe underwater. Maybe not all water, but this water. Tyler’s water.
Fin, as exhausted now as Tyler and Kylie had been when she’d left them, let her eyes close, and there was Tyler in bright, almost painful Technicolor, his navy eyes sparkling as obnoxiously as the lights of the Coney Island roller coasters behind him. His dumb, smug smile as he messed with Matty’s and Joy’s baseball caps. The image blurred and smudged and there Tyler was in Seb’s backyard, his T-shirt sticking to him in splotches the size of eggplants as he engaged in hysterical water-gun warfare with Matty. Tyler, jaw shadowed, shirt pressed, eyes shell-shocked as he sat at Thanksgiving, Kylie looking almost identical in expression.
Colors blended, the world tilted as a young, svelte Tyler danced shirtless and graceful across the screen of Fin’s mind. Even replaying it was potent magic. His energy undeniable, there was no going back from having seen it. Gold melted into green into navy blue, his eyes swirled out of nowhere, stern and laughing and a little insane as he stripped socks off of her, as he grinned at her from where he fixed her tub, kissed her silently in his kitchen, rose over her in the dark, scolded her about patience, made love to her with unabashed enjoyment.
And last, the images slowing now, the colors fading to the color of the inside of Fin’s eyelids, she felt the cold wall of Tyler’s hallway against her back, her hands clenched whitely under her chin, as she listened to his voice. As she listened to him parent Kylie. As she realized, for the first time, that the water had already risen, there was nothing she could do but sink down, watch the sunlight play at the surface and breathe.
FIN KNEW THAT she couldn’t wait forever to tell Tyler how she was feeling, but that he’d also had a pretty intense time with Kylie and could probably use a bit of a break. Besides, it was important to Fin that Kylie get comfortable with their new arrangement. She didn’t want weirdness between her and Tyler during this transitionary period. And there was always the chance that dropping the L-bomb on someone could make ’em feel a little weird.
So, a week turned into two, and Fin still hadn’t explained to Tyler that she was pretty sure she was apples-over-applecart in love with him.
She came over almost every night, or Ty and Ky came to her house. Kylie was just starting to trust that Fin and Ty’s connection to one another didn’t, by nature, exclude her.
They went to that women’s soccer match in New Jersey, the three of them. Fin was extremely charmed to learn that Tyler was a terrified, borderline incompetent driver. She’d kicked him out of the front seat of their rental car and initiated road-trip rules in order to have complete control over the music selection. He’d gritted his teeth through the showtunes that Fin had put on just to screw with him and then surprised her when he knew the lyrics to at least four of the Annie Lennox songs on the album she played next.
The soccer game was a blurry mess that Fin could barely concentrate on because she was so freaking happy to be where she was. She couldn’t stop grinning.
“What?” he asked her, his mouth full of hot dog.
“Just thinking about the fact that I’ve been to a whopping three sporting events in the last decade.”
He furrowed his brow. “But you’ve been to three of them with me.”
“Exactly.”
He held out his hot dog and Fin took half of it down in one bite. “Needs hot sauce.”
“On a dog? You’re a monster.”
Unlike at the Nets game, Kylie could barely peel her eyes from the field. She was a terrible soccer fan. As in, she was terrible to sit beside. She yelled and groaned and complained about minuscule details of the game that Fin couldn’t even begin to spot. Tyler just looked proud of his little sister.
And when Tyler made the big reveal that he could use his press pass to get Kylie to meet a few of the players? Hoo boy, the stammering and blushing commenced. Tyler and Fin both just gaped at this starstruck version of the girl they’d come to know quite well.
The drive home was quiet and comfortable, padded on all sides by the plush dark they drove through to get back home.
They spent Valentine’s Day as a trio as well, with Tyler and Kylie throwing popcorn at the screen as Fin made them sit through two crappy rom-coms she’d sworn would convert them.
Tyler and Fin had sex during the daylight hours only, when Kylie was at school. Fin had never been more grateful to have a job where she made her own hours. The hours of one to three p.m. took on a dozy, sexy, lip-biting, sheet-pulling, color-blurring quality that Fin had never before experienced.
The end of February was surprisingly warm, and one week into March there were already tulips crowning in the tree wells. March was a notoriously cruel month in Brooklyn, known for holding out handfuls of candy to unsuspecting citizens and then snatching the candy away, only to shove six inches of snow down their pants. Or at least, that was always how it had felt to Fin.
But the ides of March came and went, and there was no sign of ice. One Saturday morning was warm enough, in the sun at least, that Tyler texted Fin asking if she’d like to join them for a good old-fashioned Prospect Park blanket day. It was a spring tradition after all.
Which was how Fin found herself stretched out on Tyler’s king-sized (of course) picnic blanket, a box of bagels and cream cheese at her feet, a sparkling water in one hand, watching the clouds. Every twenty seconds or so, a frisbee floated through her line of vision as Tyler and Kylie stood on either side of the blanket and tossed it back and forth.
Snoozy from the sun, Fin watched the big cumulus clouds accumulate and puff away above her. It was one of the many things she missed about Louisiana: how tall the clouds were there. They were mile-high monstrosities that only seemed to move in one direction: up. They showed anyone who cared to look exactly the path to heaven. The clouds in New York were usually flatter, grayer, like a wool cap pressed too far down over a forehead.
But not today.
Today they were tooth-white and buoyant, making Fin feel just how small the earth really was.
She took it as a sign. Today was the day.
Who could keep love quiet on a day when the clouds flirted with the blueberry sky like that?
A shadow crossed her vision, something bumped her shoulder rather hard and then an apple crunched in her ear.
“Whatcha thinkin’ ’bout?” Tyler asked as he sprawled out next to her, bouncing his foot across the opposite knee like a toddler at nap time.
She couldn’t help but laugh. Ladies and gentlemen, the man I love.
“Hey, Ty?”
“Yeah?” he answered Kylie, who was kneeling on one end of the picnic blanket, packing her bag up and pointedly not looking at the way Tyler’s head had decided to rest on Fin’s belly.
Kylie generally played the blindfold game whenever Fin and Tyler were close enough to trade DNA.
“Tony just texted me. He and some other school people are up by the Grand Army Plaza entrance. Mind if I go?”
Play it cool. Fin tried her hardest to transmit this direct order into Tyler’s brain. Not only was she about to go hang out with friends her own age, she was willingly asking Tyler for permission to go do it. Don’t blow this.
Tyler lifted his head. “Is it a date?”
Fin nearly face-palmed.
Kylie blushed all the way up to the ball cap she’d screwed onto her head that morning. “No. Anthony and I are just friends.”
“Oh.” Tyler scratched at his stubbled chin and looked back and forth between Fin and Kylie, apparently trying to interpret the eye roll they were giving each other. “Okay. Just let me know if you leave the park.”
“Bye.”
Kylie turned on her heel and practically jogged up the bike path toward her friends.
“Something tells me I should feel like a doofus right about now,” Tyler said, crunching the apple and resting back against Fin’s stomach.
“I’m in love with you.”
Tyler jolted, coughed up a bite of apple and rolled onto all fours. He loomed over Fin, blocking out the sun and framing himself perfectly in a crown of fluffy cumulus clouds. “Do me a solid and repeat what you just said.”
“I’m in love with you.”
He choked on the apple again. “You’re going to kill me,” he said dimly, sitting back on his heels.
“Well, quit taking bites of apple right before I tell you I’m in love with you.” She sat up too, wondering if her smile looked as dopey as it felt.
He made a choking sound again, but this time there was no apple to make a threat on his life. “I—” His hands went to his hair. “Holy cow.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “I wish you could see your energy right now. Seriously, you look like an insane person.”
Tyler laughed, a little hysterically, reached for her palm and placed it over his racing heart. The laughter fell away and left behind was unfiltered earnestness. She’d never seen truth look quite this handsome before.
“Fin—”
“Uncle Tyler! Auntie Fin!”
Their heads pivoted in unison to where—“Oh, good grief,” Tyler muttered—Via, Sebastian, Matty and Crabby all made their way up the path.
“Well, this is one way to tell them,” Fin said calmly, even though Tyler’s heart under her hand had started beating triple-time.
“Tell them,” he choked out awkwardly, either repeating what she was saying or asking that she be the one to do the deed.
They’d decided, a few weeks ago, to go easy on themselves. They wanted to have a relationship free of the fishbowl. Telling Kylie had been an easy decision, necessary, the right thing to do and neither of them regretted it. She’d been fine with keeping it under wraps for them, considering she was still figuring out how she felt about the whole thing.
Telling their best friends, however, had been one that they both had wanted to wait on. This wasn’t like high school where every development with a love interest was supposed to be shared posthaste, or else go down in history as an ultimate betrayal of friendship. No. They were all adults here. Seb and Via had their own lives and—
“What the hell is this?” Via asked as they approached, delicate hands on her slim hips, her eyes immediately clocking the way Fin’s hand rested on Tyler’s chest, the way Tyler’s fingers gripped Fin’s hand. “Is this a date?”
Fin knew Via well enough to catch the giddy joy that was rising through her and to know that she’d just signed herself up for a very long spill sesh with her bestie sometime in the very near future.
“Who’s on a date?” Matty asked, swinging his head around. And then standing almost on top of Tyler, pointing an accusatory finger about an inch from Ty’s eyeball. “Them?”
“Watch where you’re pointing that thing.” Tyler batted Matty’s hand away. “This isn’t a date. We’re here with Kylie.”
Seeming to regain his faculties, he stood, brushed off his pants and held out his hands to help Fin stand.
“Well, where is she then?” Sebastian asked, looking for all the world like he was attempting to restrain himself from some combination of outright laughter and judgy eyebrows. The effect was rather constipating.
“She’s with friends up the park,” Tyler grumbled. “And we were just...”
The lingering pause at the end of the statement implicated them far more than the truth would have.
Fin sighed and leaned into Tyler’s side. “I was just telling Tyler that I’m in love with him. For the first time.”
“What’d he say?” Matty practically shouted.
“He didn’t respond. You all walked up.”
“Oh my god. Oh my GOD. Oh. MY. GOD.” Via tugged at her own cheeks, delighted laughter tearing out of her. Fin had never known that phrase could have so many separate meanings. “We have to go. We have to go.”
Via tugged fruitlessly at her humongous boyfriend’s hand. Sebastian just kind of stood stock-still for a moment, staring between Fin and Tyler.
“Seb!”
“Right.” He shook his head, grabbed Matty by the collar of his shirt and started hauling his family away. “Right.”
“Come over for dinner tonight!” Via shouted back over her shoulder once they were back on the path and practically tripping over her feet to get away.
“Fat chance,” Tyler muttered, collapsing back down to the blanket and dragging Fin with him. “I’m ending my associations with those people,” he mumbled. “They come over here and ruin the single greatest moment of my life. They’ll be lucky if I ever darken their doorstep—”
“Ty?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re mumbling to yourself.”
He didn’t respond, just lunged forward and flattened Fin against the blanket. “Super in love with you,” he said, his lips against her lips. “Like a dumb amount. Ass over tits.”
Fin burst out laughing. “How can you be so proper looking and so vulgar all at once?”
“It’s a gift.”
“Actually, it kind of is. It makes you unique, Ty.”
“Everything makes you unique,” he said, his lips still pressed against hers, his weight pinning her down, every word pushed into her mouth like they’d die if they hit fresh air. “You’re the uniquest. I’ve never met someone else like you. And not just the psychic thing. It’s the everything thing.”
She was laughing harder now, attempting to peel him off of her. “You’re like those fish that hold on to sharks with their mouths.”
“Thanks.”
“Ty, I’m not going anywhere. You can let me breathe.”
He rolled onto his back and now Fin was the one pressing down on him, curled into his side the way they did when they watched TV on the couch together. She was sure they were making a spectacle of themselves and refused to care. The blueberry sky was their ceiling, the sun was just warm enough to have her feeling like they were snuggling into bed. Tyler was her home now.
“I know I’m a broken record but I still can’t believe this is happening sometimes. I mean, less than a year ago you kicked me off the island for being a sad, lonely loser who clung to bachelorhood. And now you’re telling me you love me and I’m full-time taking care of a kid. What a world.”
“I didn’t say you were a sad, lonely loser clinging to bachelorhood.” She pursed her lips and frowned.
“You basically did. It’s okay. I’m over it now. But you told me that you could never trust me because of what my priorities were. That I put myself before everyone else and that wasn’t your jam.”
Fin pushed up on her palms, an urgency pulling strings tight all across her body. Something had just occurred to her that never had before. “Tyler, you know I was wrong, right?”
Her eyes searched his and with a plummeting stomach, she realized that he still believed some, if not all, of the horrible things she’d said to him that day.
She reached out and gripped the sides of his face, needing him to hear her.
“Tyler, that speech I gave you had, like, nothing to do with you. It was completely about me and my own fears. It was so inaccurate. I mean, I called you selfish, Ty. You! You’re so generous and sweet and caring. You always have been. You’ve given years of your life to Seb and Matty. And that entitledness I was so fond of pointing out? It wasn’t you feeling entitled because of your status in the world, it was you feeling entitled because of your place in their lives! You’d spent years basically being Matty’s other parent and then Via came along and you were displaced and totally unsure of what your role was anymore. I get that now, Tyler. But I was completely wrong at first. I had you down as sulky and entitled, but that was just dead wrong.”
Slowly, he came up to a sit as well, his hands clasped over his knees as he looked at the ground, the sky, Fin. His navy eyes seemed to reflect the entire world in that moment. All the way down to the trees lining the path next to them and two tiny Fins living in his pupils. “What changed your opinion of me?”
“I mean, getting to know you better, allowing myself to give you a chance.”
“It wasn’t Kylie?”
Fin frowned, getting the sense that this question was actually many questions all rolled into one. “Seeing you with Kylie was what allowed me to soften toward you in the first place. The way you worked to make her fit into your life, the love and tenderness you obviously had for her. I got to see who you really were from the way you interacted with her.”
Tyler turned away then, his elbow on one knee, his chin in his palm. “Fin...my position as Kylie’s guardian is tenuous. In just over a year, her mother could get her back.”
“Wow.” Fin sat back on her haunches and watched the clouds for a second, feeling all her rising giddiness and adrenaline freeze in place. “I—I’d thought she was with you until she was eighteen. But I guess that was only because that was how my own custody arrangement had worked, and I just sort of superimposed it.”
Tyler was quiet and for the first time since she’d seen the ballet videos of him, his energy was completely unreadable to her. He was closed for business in a way she’d never seen before. It frightened her. Fin reached for his hand and to her immense relief, he immediately laced his fingers with hers.
“Would you—” His voice scratched and he cleared his throat, took a deep breath. “Would you still want me if I wasn’t a package deal anymore?”
Sudden understanding nearly whipped her hair back from her shoulders, and in the stiff wind of it, she felt an instant, biting sadness that he’d misunderstood her feelings so badly.
“Tyler... I don’t love you because you happen to come with a kid. I love you because you having that kid showed me who you really are. You think I can ever unsee that? God, every time I look at you, you’re practically standing in a halo of gold, holding your heart on a silk pillow, mine for the taking. Whether or not the courts award you custody of Kylie has nothing to do with that.”
His eyes were bright with shiny emotion as he let out a long breath, rested his forehead against his knees for a moment. “But you want kids so bad, Fin. And I love Kylie, want her in my life forever. Hell, she’ll probably be the person who buries me. But babies? Little Leshuskis?” He grimaced. “You weren’t completely wrong about me at the baseball game. I don’t want a house full of screaming kids and dirty diapers. I’m not exactly sure what it is that you want. But I hope that me having Kylie in my life doesn’t imply to you that I’ve done a complete one-eighty on this issue. Being a dad... It’s not exactly my thing. It probably never will be.”
TYLER, FEELING VERY much like his heart was on that silk pillow she’d just mentioned, watched the woman he loved with his breath caught in his chest. This was a truth that he’d been holding inside, shifting from one side to the other for weeks. He watched her face and saw a complicated expression cross there. Confusingly, she landed on something that looked an awful lot like guilt.
“You know I’ve been trying to become a foster parent for a few years now.”
“Right.”
“And every time my application has been denied. Over and over.” She paused, looked out over the field that yawned wide before them. Brooklyn really showed out for the first reliably warm Saturday. Frisbees abounded, and picnic baskets, and makeshift badminton, and kites on kites on kites. He had the feeling that she saw none of it. She might as well be watching a screensaver. She picked a piece of grass and worried it in her fingers. “When you’re in the middle of these things, you look so hard for the why, that sometimes there’s no chance of ever seeing it. I was looking with a microscope at every bullet point of my life, but I didn’t just sit back in an armchair and use my own two eyes to see the full picture.”
“And what was the full picture?”
“That I just wasn’t ready.” She laughed, but it was a complicated sound, filled with so much more than humor. “The universe knew. I mean, if I’d gotten a kid thrown my way, I wouldn’t have screwed anything up too badly, I don’t think. I have good judgment and a big heart. But all the reasons I wanted to be a foster parent, well, I was ignoring the biggest one.” She looked up at him and for the very first time, Tyler thought of her eyes as more than light or ice. They were warm and open and inviting, like a blanket of sand seen through two feet of the clearest water. What color were those eyes of hers? It struck him then that he’d never even tried to figure it out before. This woman had so many ways of keeping others just one step farther away than they’d like to be. Her tiger eyes, her sharp words, that emoji eyebrow. He understood then, as clearly as he could see her, what she meant.
“You didn’t want to be alone,” he whispered.
“Exactly.”
He tipped her chin up, had her meeting his eyes again. “You don’t have to sound quite so ashamed about that, love.”
“I’m not ashamed about wanting a family. I’m ashamed to have been so sure that that wasn’t the reason I was doing all this. To have transformed it into this wholly selfless desire in my head.”
“Do you still want to be a foster parent?”
“Yes. I’m positive that it’s part of the reason I’m here, on this earth.”
Tyler knew better than to ask, “Then what’s the problem?”
“You want to know what the problem is, then?” she asked, emoji eyebrow in full force.
He laughed and kissed her lips and then that eyebrow. “God, you’re freaky. Yes. I do want to know what the problem is.”
“It was two things, actually. Via’s logjam theory and watching you talk through that fight with Ky last month.”
“What’s the logjam theory?”
Fin played with his hand, tracing the lines there. He wondered if she could tell his date of death. “That you can’t expect to fully love with any part of your heart if some of it is dammed up.”
“You’re not dammed up!” he protested, instantly irritated on her behalf.
She smiled at his reaction. “Not anymore. Not since letting you in. Loving you. But I think I need to get used to it for a while. Loving you and Kylie. Using my whole heart. I have to build my muscles. It’s like not having used my left arm my entire life and then suddenly someone hands me a firehose and says, ‘Hold on!’”
“A firehose, huh?” He kissed her knuckles. “That’s how much you love me?”
She rolled her eyes. “Listening to you fight with Kylie... Tyler, it was masterful. I know you don’t want to be a parent. And that’s fine. But as a mentor? A guardian? Jeez. I was blown away by how you handled that. With compassion and anger and honesty and so much love. You had all these tools in your toolbox. And it just hit me. Tyler uses the whole toolbox. And he has his entire life. You’re equipped to deal with Kylie because you love with your whole heart, Ty. I accused you of being stunted at that ball game. But I should have pointed that finger at myself.”
“Quit calling yourself stunted,” he said grumpily. “You’re perfect. End of story.”
She laughed and shook her head. “Whatever you say.”
“Is this your way of telling me that you’re not sure you want kids either?”
“Biological kids?” She gave him crazy eyes. “Ah, no. We have that in common. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I wasn’t really raised by either of my birth parents, didn’t even know my father. But yeah. Not interested. There are so many kids in the world who need a hand and a home. That’s what I want.”
He was quiet for a long time and, somehow, they found themselves seated against each other, Fin’s head tipped back onto his shoulder, their eyes watching the sky, using the other’s body to keep their own upright. “Fin?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not asking you to go full psychic on me or anything. But if you had to wager a guess, based on how well you know me, am I gonna be into fostering a kid with you at some point?”
“I don’t see the future, Tyler.”
“I know—”
“But, sometimes I get these images. Other people might call them visions, but everything in the future is so subjective, always prone to change, that I don’t usually put any stock in them.”
“Do you have one about me?”
“I can see you a few years older, hanging up after a call with Kylie. She’s at college, I think. Or maybe some kind of abroad program. You miss her so bad you kind of slump down over the kitchen counter. I’m there, and I ask if everything’s all right. You give me this look like, I have all this energy and love and time and nowhere to put it. And we both kind of know that it’s time to talk about fostering again.”
“So...” he said slowly. “What color shirt am I wearing in this vision?”
She laughed and pushed back against him. “It’s not a science, Leshuski.”
He picked at the grass next to him and sighed. “It sounded right, though, didn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she said in a low voice that he could feel echo through the cavity of her body and into his. “If I were a betting psychic, I’d guess that in a few years, we’ll have built the muscles we need to really do this the right way.”
His stomach executed a perfect pirouette as he tugged a little too much grass out at the root. “Were we, uh, wearing wedding rings?”
She went still for a moment and though he knew he’d never be able to sense energy in the way that she could, he felt momentary tension that almost instantly melted away into humor and sweetness and warm sun on warm skin under white skyscraper clouds. “Are you telling me that you’re a marriage type of person?”
He grinned, even though she couldn’t see it. She’d thrown his own words back at him. Marriage type of person. What did that even mean? “I’m not sure. I never had a great reason to really ask myself that question before.” He lifted his fist and let the grass go in the wind. “I’m an in-love-with-you type person. I’m a committed-to-you type person.”
“Me too,” she whispered, her head lolling back onto his shoulder. “Tyler?”
“Hmm?”
“It’s okay that we don’t know the rest.”
“My favorite part of that sentence is the we.”
She jolted and reached back to lace her fingers with his. A static shock sparked between their palms, but at this point, they barely even noticed. “We is a very powerful word.”
“It can mean so many different things at once,” he agreed. And propped up against the woman he loved, in a park he loved, in a city he loved, Tyler thought about we. All the different wes in his life. In this one park alone. He could almost feel a line of love arcing from him all the way to the north part of the park where Kylie sat with wes her own age. And down to the south of the park, where his best friend’s family had made their own we into an unbreakable unit. And to the woman leaning into him. He relished the weight of her, the trust and challenge of it. He looked at the sky and felt their place in the world. The green, rolling mat of the park underneath them, like the face of a clock in a city grinding its gears all around them.
He looked at the sky and felt both massive and minuscule at once, a tiny cog in the universe perhaps, but imperative to the people who loved him. And what a relief. What a relief to need and be needed. What a relief to have created this happiness.