How to Say I Do

by Tal Bauer

Grief lived there, along with memories that I’d buried. His absence, like my mother’s and father’s, was a constant gnaw in my life. Did Noël ever think about me? Did he regret leaving me? My unanswered questions lingered like ghosts, and they haunted my mind and my soul. This don’t mean what you want it to mean, Wyatt. It don’t.

But… Don’t make this into something it’s not. You already did that once.

Noël and I weren’t anything to each other anymore. And, judging by his email, he didn’t want to acknowledge that, once—a month ago, a month ago—we’d been everything to each other. Or I thought we’d been everything to each other. There I went with my assumptions again.

Noël wouldn’t dare step foot in Texas ever again, and after that, he’d forget (again) that there were wineries here, or beautiful ranches, or… me.

And I didn’t need to see Noël again. But if I said yes, I would. You really wanna get hurt again Wyatt? Didn’t you learn your lesson the first time?

I thought Wyatt would have said or done something already, or given me some kind of sign or signal about how he felt about my reappearance in his life, but, no, there’d been nothing. He was as impassive now as he’d been expressive in Cancun. It was only six days. He probably doesn’t even remember you.

I kissed you. I climbed your body and I tore off your clothes and we made love for days. I kissed you, and I sleep with the fading scent of you as my pillow and I think about you every moment, even when I’m desperate not to. And now? I don’t know how to face you.

His eyes slowly slid to mine. I held my breath— Wyatt raised his fingers to the brim of his hat. “Howdy.”

I’d dreamed of this place so intensely and for so long that being here now seemed surreal.

“Noël?” I thought Wyatt was talking to me— Wyatt shook his head as he answered Tyler. “No, Noël and I don’t know each other at all.” No, not at all… Except for the way you made love to me, Wyatt.

All my fantasies collapsed, shattering against a rocky shore. Upheaval swept me out to sea. I’d been the center of Wyatt’s world last month, and he’d built his days and nights around making me smile, but all of that was gone. Too much, too fast.

I wasn’t anywhere in Wyatt’s photos. Whatever we’d had, and whatever we’d been to each other, was over. No, worse. It was like we had never existed at all.

I cupped my hands and held them to my face like I could drown myself in his bathroom.

Why did this hurt so fucking badly? I knew Wyatt and I were over. I’d been the one who left. I’d left him, and he’d never tried to find me.

Of course not. So what had I expected today, that Wyatt would be happy to see me? Give me a fucking break. Something had snapped between us, and now we were falling away from each other and picking up speed the farther apart we got.

It also smelled, overwhelmingly and heartbreakingly, like Wyatt. I took it immediately. Fuck my pride—fashion or personal. I was desperate to feel a tiny piece of him again.

When I shrugged on his jacket, I nearly collapsed. God, that was him. Saddle leather, sunshine, sweat, sweet rain. Roses and turned earth, and, when I closed my eyes, I almost smelled the scent of the sea.

Dear Wyatt, I promise I won’t let anything happen to your father’s dream. I know you can’t trust me after everything, but I swear, Wyatt, I swear—

Sorry Tessa, so sorry, but we can’t use the Gran Cielo Viñedo. There aren’t enough toilets or lights, and also, I fucked Wyatt. Literally and figuratively. I think I’m in love with him, but he can’t even look me in the eyes. So sorry, but your perfect dream wedding will have to be somewhere else. And what would I say to Wyatt? Turns out, your ranch isn’t worthy. Sorry. But we’ll leave a five-star review.

God, I’d written him so many times, and I’d said so much. I’d written drunk, sober, and sobbing, huddled up on the train at two a.m. or staring up the air shaft before dawn. I’d emptied out my broken heart, and I’d meticulously detailed each and every one of my many insecurities. I’d whined about how horrible my life was, and most of all, how dreadful and awful I was.

They were absolutely not the Noël I wanted to showcase to the man I adored. Well, too fucking bad about that.

How was I going to face him? I’d written about how I still dreamed about him making love to me and how there were times I woke up desperate to feel him between my legs and in my arms. I’d gone on and on about how much I missed the taste of him, and had typed out long, drunken, Willie Nelson-fueled ramblings about how confused I was.

I couldn’t understand how, after a lifetime of being exclusively attracted to women, I’d fallen for Wyatt harder than I had for anyone else in my life....

And, after knowing, all he asked for was my flight information. Take a hint, Noël. Take a fucking hint. He’s been shoveling them at you. He won’t look at you. He told Tessa and Tyler you didn’t know each other. He doesn’t want you. So don’t make more of an ass of yourself in front of him. You’ve already done a spectacular job of that.

Still, I thought, maybe. Maybe he’d email me about it, or maybe he’d call me, and maybe he’d say something about how I’d poured out my heart. He’d say, Me too, and I feel the same, and Get here, and we’ll talk—

He climbed out when he saw me, of course, and opened up the passenger door while he unhooked my bag from my shoulder and set it on the back bench seat. A fucking gentleman, even now. I wanted to vomit.

Had he read my emails? Did he agree that I was a horrible person? Was he regretting his insistence on picking me up now that he knew exactly the kind of utter basket case he was sitting next to? And was he, in fact, even regretting ordering that burger for me, or rescuing me, or being so damn kind when he should have left me, the wretch that I am, to wallow alone?

Images hit me like sparks flung off a bonfire. His broad, bare shoulders shining in the sunlight. The sway of his hips against mine as he’d led me around the dance floor, and the rumble of his voice as he sang next to my ear. The softness of his lips—

Nothing I’d feel any sort of way about if he held them out to me with a smile and said, I think about you, too—

But nope, I’d remembered accurately. There was his home, just as beautiful as I’d stamped into my memories. Tulips and poppies and lilac, oak and pecan and elm. Pale-yellow paint, snow-white trim. Golden roses. Bright-red door. Mariah would be so proud. It was all so beautiful, so stunningly beautiful.

He set the bottle down with a crack. This was the conundrum of me: how could I make things worse? I’d always pick the wrong choice when my heart was on the line.

And after all of that, he’d gone to Mexico for his brother’s wedding and had found the space to make a howling, miserable, selfish man feel cherished and adored. Shame burned me alive. I didn’t deserve this sip, or this glass, or this wine. Or this man. I didn’t deserve him at all. I didn’t even deserve his glance. So it was damn good that he still wasn’t looking at me.

I’d meant to check it out last time, but after my awful realization that there was no fixing things between Wyatt and me, I’d shut down and entered survival mode, doing my all to muscle through the remaining hours with Tessa, Tyler, and Peanut.

Now, I needed an escape, and that sunroom, as still and silent as a diamond, seemed to be the answer. I walked away, and Wyatt didn’t try to stop me.

I’d met him inside out, when he’d been bleeding from those tender spaces, and I’d watched him rebuild his strength and his walls over the next six days. I’d thought those walls included me on the inside, all the way up until he walked out on me.

Why there, Noël? Why did he have such a talent for wounding me?

We needed to talk, but I had no more idea now, after six weeks and dozens of sleepless nights, how to explain to Noël all the multi-hued and corrosive ways that I ached. I didn’t know how to feel, either.

I’d fallen so hard for him and imagined only the best. And now? If I tried to talk to him? I could only imagine the worst. I was frozen, too scared to be hurt again and too paralyzed to take a risk.

And the truth was, I needed to do a little soul excavation of my own. I was realizing, slowly, my own part in all this. If I stepped back and looked at the situation from a different pe...

Every word I spoke seemed to gather more thunderclouds over his head. Damn it, it hadn’t been this hard to talk to him before. I had unburdened my soul to him, bared my past ghosts and my little-boy insides and shown him the contours of my heart. Now I fought for a handful of stubborn words, and I was, abruptly, sick of this shit.

“And I get it. I know I went too far. I know what I was hoping for wasn’t what you wanted.”

Liam’s voice in my mind, torn between astonishment at my brokenhearted audacity and wild fury at Noël. Wyatt, he just wanted a hookup. He didn’t want anything else. How did you let yourself fall in love with him? How do you not fall in love, though?

“I wish you’d said something.” My voice dropped, rough edges and rumbling pain. “I wish you’d let me know what we really were.”

I had wanted to make it work with him, however that looked and whatever it entailed. Long-distance love, and sending each other a million texts, and calling every night so we could fall asleep on the phone to the sound of each other’s snores. Emails that were love notes on purpose, eagerly sent, not mistakenly. Flying to New York and being lost in a strange land, out of place and out of time, but who cared, because Noël was there. I’d wanted the chance at that future with him.

“I wish you’d been clearer that I was something else for you.” Time to kill, sensations to feel. Something wild and otherworldly after getting dumped, a fling he could forget, and a walk on the gay side no one would ever need to know about.

My first time making love to a man had lit my heart on fire, and I’d bought him a ring and imagined a day where I could whisper I do to him. What had Noël felt ...

I hadn’t looked at him since I’d started speaking. I was locked up tight, my eyes down and muscles rigid, because if I glanced his way, and if I saw him just once flicker with disbelief, I was going to fall apart and blow away...

It was shameful and despairing enough to feel his dismissal secondhand and be the man he’d left behind. My pain was as raw and as real as it had been the morning he’...

Noël’s agony was a lighthouse for mine. I reached for him, slowly, giving him the chance to reject me, but he didn’t. Instead, he collapsed into me, burying his face in my chest as he let out a body-shaking sob.

“Wyatt, I didn’t know. I didn’t know, I didn’t fucking know—” He could barely breathe, and he couldn’t get anything else out. He curled into a ball, hyperventilating as he wept.