How to Say I Do

by Tal Bauer

I couldn’t be with him, but— I wasn’t sure I could be without him, either.

I’d never realized—until I got back from Mexico—how quiet and still my life had become. At seventeen, with Liam coming apart at the seams, Jason on the way, and my father’s dreams laid heavy across my shoulders, what I’d craved more than anything was stability. Solidity. Nearly ten years on, everyone else had beautiful lives, but I still haunted this house and lived with one boot planted in my past.

It’s one thing to chase your own dreams for your entire life. It’s another thing entirely to have someone else be beguiled with what you’ve created.

This house was filled with ghosts and broken dreams, so what was one more night, or one more lonely stretch of hours?

Dear Wyatt, I don’t know how to move on. I wasn’t supposed to fall for you. Why, why did you save me? This is worse now, so much worse, than it would have been if I’d just been blitzed and miserable for a week in Mexico. I got over Jenna, but I can’t get over you, and now I’m fucking miserable all the time— 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—

Wyatt smiled at Tessa. My heart turned to dust. 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.

Those drafts were crayon drawings of my soul, bitchy scribbles veering far outside the lines, all the wrong colors on torn sheets of paper.

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. Did loving a man change me? Or reveal me?

I’d been not just over the moon, but miles and miles above it. When it came to Noël, I was gone.

Noël had been a dream, someone who seemed to have walked out of my deepest, most cherished, and most fragile hopes. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe that he was real, that we were— Did I tell him that I was already in love with him, as ridiculous as that was? Six days together, six weeks apart, and he still had my heart in his hands.

Did I tell him I was willing to try for a future together if he was? I wanted the emails and the texts and the long distance flights, if all that meant we could be together. I wanted to miss him every day, and I wanted to dream about him and hold a pillow that smelled like him against my face when he wasn’t there if that meant I got the chance to be his man.

If I could have, I would have taken apart the world and rebuilt it until everything was knowable to Noël again.

“I’ll do anything you want, Noël. You tell me what you need.” Was I talking about barns? Or something else?

“You were right,” he said. “The stars in Texas were more beautiful.” “They’ll be here waiting for you whenever you come back.”

“I just… I don’t understand why a thousand people aren’t trying to give you the world,” I finally said. “And someone out there, in the city, with all that opportunity… What they could offer you…”

“Wyatt…” Noël sounded incredibly far away. “You know, when people get to know me, they don’t actually like me.” “That’s fucking impossible.”

For the moment, Noël and I were the only two inhabitants of our little world. We shared our mornings and our midnights, our coffees and our laughs, our tenderness and our goodnight, sweet dreams texts. We both had our hands cupped around our baby star, sheltering it, nurturing it, keeping it shimmering and radiant and ours.

I’d also decided, before taking that flight, that I was going to be fully me this week. Usually, I tried to smooth myself over and turn on the charm. I could cover up my “a lotness” for a handful of months until the unbearableness of me bashed its way through and wore out whoever I was with.

"I didn’t know what you wanted. Or what... Well, I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. What this was." So this was it. We were finally going to have the talk about us. “This is…” This was us trying for a second chance. Me trying to fix everything I’d done wrong. Him deciding whether or not he did actually like me, and if I wasn’t going to be “a lot” for him, or too much for him. This was us maybe falling in love.

“I know what I want this to be,” I said. I knew what I wanted. You don't spend every waking moment of the day thinking about and texting with and reaching out to someone unless you believe they’re the most special person in your world. Wyatt was the star in my sky, the only one I could see in New York.

Embrace every moment with him.

My sweet, sweet cowboy, who was shy and didn’t like selfies and said goodnight to his horse, and who made the lives of everyone he touched remarkably and extraordinarily better. My dearest, darling Wyatt. The man of my dreams.

Somehow—astonishingly, amazingly—it had all been worth it to him. I seemed worth it to him.

‘Take it all slow, Liam. Take everything real slow. Every step, every choice. Make sure everything you choose is the best choice. The best, not the fastest or the easiest choice.’

My borders and my identity were smudged up and smeared, defined by other people’s needs and desires and meanings—magazine shoot, copy for the Insta post, spin this headline, capture that quote, that click. I, as a person, a human being, was so absent from the world. What I did and what I chose didn’t matter, because I, Noël, was hardly real at all.

I’d wanted to bring Noël here, beneath the oak branches and the stars that my father and I used to share. I had a thousand memories of my dad and me here. Now I had new memories to share space with the old: Noël and I dancing in the same dust, loving each other as deeply now as I’d been loved back then.

“I love you,” he said. “So fucking much. You deserve the whole world, you hear? The whole fuckin’ world.” There was too much wine and exhaustion inside me to find the right words to explain to Liam that with him and Noël in my kitchen, and this year's grapes off the vine, and the ranch all dolled up in falling stars, and with everyone I knew joyful in my yard, my world was complete.

I want this whole life to be shared with you, Noël. Tell me you want the same. Tell me you want me forever, too.

“Wyatt, I love you.” Then let’s build this life, Noël. I wouldn’t let the words out, but I still thought them. Stay. Stay with me, Noël. Love me so much that you’ll stay.

“Noël, marry me?” His voice was nothing but a whisper. “Hitch your star to mine, and let’s spend the rest of this life in long certainty with each other. Let’s raise children and grapes and cattle together. Marry me, Noël?”