HEADLINE ✓

TRACK 49

With (NO) love, Tyler-Jane Roberts

"You love me?"

"Yeah." I bit the inside of my cheek. "Did I say it wrong?"

Carter shook his head with a smile. "No - you said it perfectly." Putting the flowers down on the table, he stood in front of me, placing one hand on my waist while the other cupped my cheek. "I love you too."

"You do?"

"Of course I do," he said as if it were obvious.

My arms wrapped around his neck. "Can you say it again?"

"I love you."

"Again."

"I love you."

The heat spread across my cheeks like wildfire. "One last time."

He leaned closer, giving me a quick kiss. "I," kiss, "Love," kiss, "You," kiss.

I loved him. And Carter loved me. 

"So, we're, like, in love with each other then?"

"I hear that's usually how it works, yes."

"That's fucking weird." Realizing I had spoken my thoughts out loud, my eyes widened. "I don't mean it like that! I just mean that it's weird because- Shit. No. It's not weird, like oh that's weird, ew, I mean weird in the sense of-" I cut myself off, knowing I had zero ideas of where my train of thought was going and wanting to stop before I ultimately made it worse.

"It is weird," he said softly, leaning closer. "But it's a good kind of weird, right?"

"Right," I whispered in agreement. "It feels so normal to say out loud. I. Love. You." I dragged out each word for dramatic effect. "It's like I've already been saying it for a while."

If I were standing in front of anyone else, I would have worried that they thought I was insane. Telling someone you loved them, just to immediately ramble about how weird it was, and then try and say how normal it felt.

But the person standing in front of me wasn't anyone.

It was Carter. 

And he responded in the exact way I had grown to expect - by grinning like the Cheshire cat and capturing my lips in a kiss.

"I love you," he whispered, "I really fucking love you." He kissed me again. "God - you have no idea how long I've been wanting to tell you."

It was hard to explain the way his words made my heart flutter. Maybe it was because I used to think someone could be incapable of loving me. For years I had built my walls high enough to ensure that would be impossible for someone to do.

All the people I should love, I hate. Carter Young was the first person to be able to break the saying I had lived by for the past twenty-one years of my life. And I was perfectly okay with that. There was no one else in the world that I wanted to break that saying aside from him. 

My entire life had been spent viewing love as this evil thing - something that made you weak and vulnerable. I watched it destroy the people around me, and saw the way they hurt others because of it. I used to wonder why the fuck anyone would want to feel that way. Now I knew those people had far too much hate in their hearts to ever know what true love was. They masked the pain they inflicted onto others by calling it love. But that wasn't love at all. Because it was nothing like this.

"I can't believe you did all of this for me," I whispered, taking in our surroundings once again. "Your secret agent was quite cute."

"Yeah? Did she do a good job?"