Page 15 of The Note
I straightened away from him slightly. “Notthatway. Jeez. I got overthatcrush years ago. I just meant, you know, being near each other. Like, hanging out together. Eating dinner together. Watching Drag Race on the same couch, not over FaceTime. Or actuallygoingon a vacation together, not just planning one. I know we haven’t done any of that stuff either, but—”
“That crush?”
“What?” I was feeling so sorry for myself that it took me a second to realize what he was talking about. “Oh.Yeeeeah. I mean, it was just a high school thing. Before Alex wrote me the…I mean, before we got together…I kinda had a thing foryou.” I grinned. “All tall and hot and steady andpatient. Older. Those big, brown eyes. So good atcalculus. Is there anything sexier?” I pushed against him with my shoulder, intending it to be a friendly shove, all part of the joke, but his arm tightened around me so I ended up slamming against him instead.
I expected him to tease me back, and when he didn’t, I waved a dismissive hand. “You know what? Let’s pretend I never mentioned it.”
“Let’s not,” Gus said, with an eerie sort of calmness.
“Huh?”
“Tyler. That paper in your pocket. Why did you bring it today?”
“Oh. The note?” I patted my pocket and the paper crinkled. “Because I’m stupid, like I said.” I let out a huge breath, and for the first time ever, I confessed, “Alex wrote me a note. The day we got together.”
“A note.” Gus seemed to be choking on air now, and I patted his chest gently.
“Yeah. Remember the day we were at your house and I slammed my hand into the table?” I winced at the memory and held my hand up in the moonlight, like I might see the same scrapes and bruises on my knuckles. “I’d been feeling so shitty that day, remember? So alone. I was this ball of teenage hormones and self-doubt and whatever. I went off on you. Total angst-filled dumpster fire.”
Gus shook me. “Shut up. You were not.”
“Yeah. Well. Felt like it. Anyway, after my word-vomit, Alex and I were watching TV and he wrote me a letter. It said that hesawme. That I was worthy of love, just the way I was. That he loved me. That he always would.” My mouth twitched up at one corner. “He said I should be bold, get mad, live my life for myself. It was so unexpected. And, I don’t know. It’s weird to even be talking about this, because it’s always been one of those things that was too special to even talk about, but… that note changed the way I felt abouteverything.Like having this one person believe in me made all the difference. Trouble was, I took the ‘always’ part literally.” I shrugged.
It seemed like the cold had finally gotten to Gus. He wasn’t moving. I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. He was frozen solid. So I pressed on.
“I mean, we werekids. And Alex was wild back then, not like he is now that he’s with Marissa. He was all insane energy. He didn’tdoalways. He didn’t mean what he was saying. And tonight I realized that… I’ve never really loved Alex, either.” It felt strange to say it, butrighttoo. True. “I loved theideaof him. I loved thenotepart of him. But that… wasn’t him. Not after that first day. I see that now.” I sighed. “And bynow, I mean approximately thirty seconds before I downed my four glasses of wine in there.”
“Eight,” he whispered.
“Whatever.” I sighed and leaned more of my weight on Gus, who accepted it without a word. “Eight glasses of wine for eight years of believing in a fairy tale? Sounds about right. Because I did, you know? I believed it. Even after Alex and I broke up. Because if thealwayspart wasn’t true, then maybe the rest was a lie too. Maybe I wasn’tworthy, like he’d said I was.” I snorted. “So dumb. I’m a grown man. I have a career, and friends, and a great sister. I know who I am now, and I don’t need a note to tell me I’mimportant.” I shook my head at my own stupidity.
“Special.”
“Pardon?” My heart gave a crazy lurch and I wasn’t even sure why.
Gus inhaled a breath that went on forever, like the world might suddenly run out of oxygen, or he was preparing to deep-dive into water.
“The note,” he said. “Says you’respecial.”
I pulled away so I could stare at his face. Gus watched me, stunned and wary. I was pretty sure I was looking at him the same way.
“There is no way you could know that.” He hadn’t even looked at it when he took it out of my hand tonight. I’d kept it tucked in a drawer foryears. Unless…
“You did not write that letter,” I informed him. “The probability of that is… is…negative.”
Gus snorted, and I swear I knew what he was going to say, because he’d said it so often before. “Probability is never negative, Tyler.”
“No.” I shook my head. “No. Nope. There is no way I could have gotten things this wrong. There’s… just…”
But I was piecing things together in my mind, thinking of that afternoon and Gus’s patient eyes. Of how the motherfucking note wasunsigned.
“I tucked that note in your backpack eight years ago,” he said, like he could read my mind.
“And… and you didn’t put your name on it? You never said anything to me about it afterword foreight years?Gus… what thefuck?”
“I didn’t put my name on it. It didn’t occur to me that I had to.Dumbass,” he said softly, and the words of the note came back to me.
Stop, dumbass.
