How to Say I Do

by Tal Bauer

What I’d been to him and what he’d been to me were exceptionally distinct realities.

Knock me the fuck over with a feather.

Wyatt tried to sit up, but I was draped across his chest like a dead water buffalo, fucked out and unable to move.

Dear Wyatt, I wish I’d never left you— Dear Wyatt, I wish I’d never met you— Dear Wyatt, I can’t do this without you—

I wanted to fast-forward to the end of whatever this was and know how it was all going to turn out because I couldn’t handle another hammer swing to my heart.

Looking at him, I realized: even with all the heartache and the unknowns, and even if Noël, with all his luminosity and his prickliness and his brilliance, his defensiveness and his shyness and his hidden sweetness, ultimately wasn’t meant to be with me, I was still unbearably lucky to have him brush against my life.

If Wyatt liked me—really, honestly liked me, maybe even enough to fall in love with me—then he had to know me. He had to know all my difficult parts, my moody parts, my high-maintenance parts, and my bat-shit parts. If I was too much for him, it would be better to find out as soon as possible.

Here it was, the hat he said he’d get for me. I lifted it from the box. “It’s beautiful.” “Try it on?” I did. His lips parted, and his Adam’s apple rose and fell. “Now it’s beautiful,” he said. Well, now I would never take the hat off. Not if that’s how he was going to look at me.

tipped my heat right off my head,

Typo? Hat*