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“I love you,” he says, and your heart skips a beat and the color drains from your face. It startles him that you don’t say it back. It mortifies him that you look like you’re going to cry. Immediately, he rushes to mend the situation. “Was that too soon? I made it weird, didn’t I?”
Your eyes travel down his furrowed brows and the freckles that pop out through the engine red blush blooming on his cheeks, down the colorful button-up and finally fall on his hand which is still enclosed around yours. The feeling of his hand around yours is safe and kind, but you feel inexplicably as if you need to let go of it immediately. You fight the feeling, knowing you’ve already humiliated him enough without trying. Still, a panicked cloud is building in your lungs. It feels as if it might spill out of your mouth all over the roof terrace floor, breaking down your fierce facade and revealing to Bobby just how much those three words scared you.
You look at him, trying to keep your face unreadable. It frustrates you how well he still manages to read you, his eyes communicating both understanding and reasonable offense - it’s so frustrating, you find it steals your voice away even more.
“Do you need time?” he asks gently. Your hands have stayed unnaturally still. It’s the last link to whatever you were before he confessed to you. You don’t even want to consider what you’ll have left if you let it go, but you know the answer. Even softer, he asks you, “Do you want me to go?” His grip on your hand loosens.
Your grip tightens, shaking your head vigorously as your eyes start to well up. He raises his brows, riddled with concern. “No?” he asks, and you wipe a tear away before it can fall. “Oh, God. You’re crying. That’s never happened before.” A nervous laugh escapes him, “I’m sorry, I think. Do you need a hug?”
You force your concrete lips to move. “I… love you too.”
This only crushes him even further. He can tell you’re lying through your teeth to make amends, but it’s salt in the wound. If you feel you need to lie to make sure things are alright, then maybe he didn’t love you. If he loved you enough, you would know you could be honest.
Your fingers stay entwined with his, however. It’s as if they’ve been frozen in time.
“You don’t have to say it back,” he tells you quietly. “You don’t have to lie if you’re not ready. We can talk about that, if you want.” When you say nothing back, his gaze drops to the floor. “Or we can just sit here. I can be quiet.”
A part of you thinks back to what you would have said before this happened. You bite back a snide remark. Maybe under different circumstances you might have asked him how sure he was about that. But silence is all you can manage at the moment. So you stare at him, or whatever blotchy figure you can make out through the blur of tears that’s welling up in your eyes.
The silence has gone by for seconds that feel like hours. He glances between your hands and your eyes, as if he’s asking for permission to hold on a little while longer. Your stomach churns violently at the thought he might think you don’t care, because you do.
But saying, I love you? Well…
It becomes very clear that whatever glorious couple you once were was crumbling on camera. The crippling guilt soon becomes a suffocating panic - you’re now mortified, and it’s not only because of the pressure of this moment. You can feel the cameras. You can feel the lens crawling over the crevices and flushing of your face. The imminent reality of 25,000 is slipping through your fingers with every further moment of hesitation.
The frustration washes away the panic; you let out a long, humiliated sigh.
“Damn it, Bobby,” you say, and he flinches at the sound of his own name. “We had it in the bag.”
Bobby holds true to his promise of keeping quiet, because he’s been lost for words. He only barely stammers out, “Pardon?”
You raise your eyebrows at him. You can feel his palm turn clammy in yours, and you see the color drain from his face. Then it hits you - he was being honest. This whole time. Your eyebrows arch together in an attempt to show some mercy, perhaps some earnest pity. But Bobby doesn’t take well to it. He turns a sickly shade of green.
“It,” he repeats, and you nod slowly. “As in the fifty grand.” You nod again. His gaze drops to the floor of the roof terrace, then back to your hands. He breaks the silence by yanking his hand out of yours, and with it, any chance that this could be okay. “Right. You were… playing the game.”
He barely chokes out the last three words. You both stare at the pavement for a few moments more. Birds fill the air, chirping back and forth the way you used to do with Bobby. It’s early after the fact, but you still feel a pinch of sadness knowing those moments are gone. Finally you meet eyes again, and he tries not to let his look too glossy.
“Sorry,” he mutters. He picks amiably at a spot on the nail of his thumb. The look on his face is one of an unearned shame. The unfamiliar feeling prickling in your chest isn’t frustration or panic anymore - it’s guilt. “If I had known - “
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” you cut in immediately. “I led you on.”
Bobby shakes his head. “No, no. You’re, uh, you’re good. Nothing I can’t handle,” he says, pretending to flex his biceps and putting on a faux smile. “Grown bloke and all that. I hope I wasn’t a total mug though.”
When you say nothing back, he clears his throat and wrings his hands in his lap for a moment. “Is it looney to tell you I wasn’t joking back there? I do love you.”
You realize you’ve been holding your breath up until he speaks, and you let go in an uncomfortable chuckle. “Not looney at all,” you respond, trying to keep on a playful tone to mask the fact your mind is racing with fears of future regrets. You can feel your own eyes on you right now, watching you. You can hear your own frustrated voice screaming at you to mend things right now, but you don’t have retrospect on your side right now. What’s there to say? He already knows you don’t love him. The audience knows you were playing the game. Everything’s over. You’ve lost it all to a moment of hesitation.
But does your anxiety even compare to what Bobby’s going through right now?
It feels strange looking at the lit up eyes and showstopping smile on your face and knowing he won’t get to wake up to it every day. It feels foreign, sitting here, laughing with you about something he’s said, even if it should feel familiar. Because it is. You’ve done this together countless times before. But he’s hyper-aware of the fact this moment will end. He’s hyper-aware that this moment will live on forever in his mind - excruciating heartache and all.
The moments of silence aren’t silent for him at all. He sits there, eyes and feet planted on the concrete flooring, but his mind is stuck in the past three weeks. He rewinds the moments he’s certain he felt in love with you. He stops himself when he realizes he’s replaying every single one. His face contorts and his tongue recoils in his own mouth; he can taste something very bitter. Before he realizes it, his eyes have welled up. But the world around him doesn’t stop, even though it feels as though perhaps it should.
The gentle, warm breeze flies through his hair, and it reminds him of your hands in it, which reminds him of where your lips were, the feel of your hot, heavy breath against his ear. The sound of your laugh just before he shoved you in the pool, the feel of your hand on his wrist as you pulled him down with you and shit, he loved you. He loved you so much and you never even asked him to. But here he sits, feeling as though his heart is crying out, begging to be loved in return.
Love me, he wants to say. Although it’s absurd - it’s barely been over three weeks - he knows it’s helpless to deny that whether you did or didn’t feel the same way, he had fallen in love with you all too completely, all too suddenly, all too truly.
And how cruel that is, he thinks as he scowls at the clouds scaling the curves of the Spanish hills. He only wishes he could be a part of a love that is mutual. Secure. Real, not built on illusions and irrationally sudden emotion. It hits him all at once - the desire to be loved in his entirety, the way he loved you.
In his mind, he’s on his hands and knees, begging you to love the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed. He begs you to look for him in a crowded room and drag your fingertips up his spine to the tense spot in his back, kneading it between your fingers until the stress melts away. He pleads with you to daydream about him, to think of him during love songs, to feel devastated thinking that a break-up song could ever apply. He wishes you would wake up before him, watch the winter sun stretch over the grooves of his face and say a grateful silent prayer to whoever’s in charge, for sending him to you.
But that’s exactly what’s wrong. The love he wants, the love he thought he was in - it shouldn’t need to be wished for. He shouldn’t have to chase or beg or plead or change, because the love he wants is unconditional. He isn’t in love with you, is he? Because he vowed not to let himself love someone who doesn’t love him right back. So then he starts to tell himself you’re going to walk away, and just those words strung together destroys him.
You’re not what he knows he wants. You’re not what he deserves. He’s painstakingly aware of it, too.
So why does he adore you?
And before he even hears the question in his mind for the first time, the blanks start to fill themselves in. Because it’s you he checks to watch laugh when he tells a joke, and if it was ineffective he would spend the rest of the hour trying to tell one that works. It’s you whose cuppa he has memorized without even trying, it’s you whose stories he wants to hear. Every trivial detail about you is riveting, down to the reason you hate toothpaste and cinnamon gum. The look in your eyes when you found out he stayed single for you after Casa Amor - God, it filled him with an unmatched joy. He stored the memory away for a rainy day, to revisit its sweetness if he ever felt as low as he did right now. But it was soiled. And suddenly he understood why you hated the flavor of cinnamon gum, because now he hated the taste of a memory, that he could never touch or change or relive again. He hated the taste of this moment, which was thick with regret and an unfamiliarly uncomfortable silence.
No one has spoken for almost ten minutes. It’s the longest time you’d ever gone without laughing together. Bobby waits for you to speak, because although he’s never been all that tall, he’s never felt smaller than he does in this moment.
He clears his throat, hoping and praying his voice won’t come out hoarse. It’s watery; a dead giveaway of just how hard he’s really taking this.
“Am I crossing any lines if I ask why, uh, you don’t feel the same way?” he asks you, barely able to meet your eye. With every word, he feels more and more like shrinking away, packing himself into a smaller case so that he takes up less space, so that your unchanging, beautiful eyes never have to look at him again. He feels insane. He feels wrong and gross, like he’s covered in maggots, or like loving you as much as he does is intrusive and disrespectful.
I love you, he had said. What you didn’t say, but what you definitely meant to say was, Yeah? But I never asked you to do that. And now he doesn’t feel so much like he loves you. He just feels sorry.
“No lines at all,” you say, and you realize you’re shivering even in the Majorcan heat. “I, um. I don’t really know,” you admit. It’s the truth, but it still stings him as if it were a lie. “You’re a nice bloke, Bobby.”
“I get that a lot,” he says, trying not to let any bitterness seep into his voice. When you flinch, he knows he’s failed. Seeing the guilt flicker across your face makes his stomach churn, and he’s not sure why. He’s hurt, but he’s sorry that you’re sorry.
“Because you are one. And you deserve someone who loves you for it.”
Bobby can’t help but laugh at that. He glances back at the clouds, then his eyes flick up, his face forming an out of character scowl. “I used to think so,” he says. “I think the man upstairs has other plans though.”
You purse your lips, unsure of what to say. The thick, pungent silence is upon you again.
She doesn’t want me, Bobby thinks, and when he exhales his breath shakes into a single, broken sob. “So this is over,” he says, trying to keep his tone cool, glancing at you. “Uh, good run. Buddy.” He glosses over the pain of this moment by putting on a horrid attempt at an American accent and a handshake.
Hesitantly, you accept it. You try to pretend it’s him who holds on just a moment longer than buddies should, but it’s you who doesn’t want to let go. Bobby stands up and you prepare to watch him walk away, but nothing could have prepared you for the next words out of his mouth.
“If you ever want to be in love,” he says, giving you a sad look that makes you feel as if you’ve kicked a puppy. “You know where to find me.”