The only thing that mattered was that she knew the truth.
“Jo?” he whispered into the darkness.
She stirred under his gentle touch. “Hmm?”
“I need tell you to something.”
She shifted again, closer to him. “What is it?”
His hand went still on her arm. “I’m in love with you.”
Jo’s breath caught. Her fingers slid into his chest hair. His skin tingled where she touched the scratches she’d left on him. Marks on his skin to match the ones she’d already carved on his heart.
“Really?” Her voice had been sleepy until now, muffled and soft and low. Now, she sounded wide awake.
“Yes.”
Her arm looped over his shoulder, and she dragged herself against his body. She buried her face in his neck. “Felix. Say it again.” Her voice was breaking; her body was trembling. “Please, please say it again.”
Felix wrapped her in his arms. He cradled the back of her head. He closed his eyes and felt every inch of their joined bodies. “I’m in love with you, Jo. I don’t expect you to say it back. I know it’s… it’s so soon. I just needed you to know.” Tears welled in his eyes, and he tightened his grip on her. Jo squeezed tighter too.
“I wish I could,” she said. “But not yet.”
Yet.
His heart leapt at that beautiful, hopeful word. “I know. I understand.”
They clung to each other, neither one willing to let go. Soon, Felix could sense Jo fighting off sleep. Her breathing would deepen, and her body would relax, then she’d stir and redouble her effort to hold him close. After the third time, Felix kissed her temple and whispered, “Go to sleep, cariño. I’m not going anywhere.”
The days that followed were some of the happiest of Jo’s life. June was just beginning, but even the sweltering humidity couldn’t dampen her spirits. It did, however, dampen her scrubs, mostly in her underboob and between her thighs. Even the briefest walks to and from her car left her clammy and in want of a shower. It would take some getting used to, but it was worth it. Because, while Ashville, Kansas, might have god-awful humidity, being here meant being with the man who loved her.
Felix loved her, and he even seemed to love all the nerdy, over-the-top parts of her that she was slowly learning to love again herself. In those last ten days leading up to the game night launch, Jo lived and breathed Monsters and Mythology in a way she hadn’t in years. Immersing herself in it, with Felix alongside her, was like learning to fly. No, it was like remembering that once upon a time she had known how to fly and realizing she still had wings.
Both Jo and Felix had long since given up pretending that she was volunteering at the library for only one hour a week, so most of her free time was spent helping with final preparations. On Sunday afternoon, they met up with Leni at Ashville Community College for the summer outreach event. The three of them spent hours handing out flyers and talking up the library’s programs. Felix and Leni discussed the programs as a whole, changing up their pitch depending on what each person was interested in. Jo, on the other hand, had no qualms about giving every single person the hard sell about MnM. If she was going to be out there getting sunburned in the sticky heat, she was going to get some new gaming friends out of it, damn it.
To help, she had brought twenty sets of dice that she wasn’t terribly attached to. She hung a sign on the front of their table reading “Free Dice!” and gave them away to the first twenty people who signed up for the library’s e-newsletter and put the MnM launch in their calendars.
The dice were gone within thirty minutes.
“How are you so good at this?” Felix asked her after she handed off the last set to a student in a Minecraft T-shirt.
Jo smiled and sketched a bow. “You, sir, are looking at the 2009 to 2011 Social Coordinator for the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing, Gamma Tau at-Large chapter.”
He stared at her. “I know some of those words.”
She laughed, a big, boisterous sound that carried across the quad. “The first rule of advertising to college students, Felix? Give them free shit.”
“All of the library’s programs are free,” he said, clearly puzzled.
“Which you should be leading with, by the way,” Jo said. “It’s an obvious selling point.”
Leni piped up. “Should we take the sign down now that the dice are gone?”
“No, no,” she replied. “Tell people they just missed the giveaway, but there will be more freebies at the MnM launch, and to sign up for the newsletter for more info.”
“We’re giving away freebies at the launch?” Leni asked, turning to Felix.
Jo answered her first. “We are now.”
By the end of the afternoon, Jo was a living, breathing puddle of sweat, all the flyers were gone, and over fifty people had signed up for the newsletter. Not bad for podunk little Ashville. Ecstatic, Felix called Warren on the spot to let him know how well it had gone, giving Jo all the credit. She grimaced and tried to mime to him to stop, but he only winked.
“Aren’t you supposed to be saving your job?” Jo asked him after he’d hung up. “I don’t mind if you and Leni take credit.”
“Skilled volunteers are hard to come by. We’ll take the credit for finding you; you take the credit for doing the work.”
“All right,” she relented, wiping her forehead with the back of her wrist, “I can live with that.”
The rest of the week was a blur. At work, Jo reminded Vanessa about the launch and helped her make a character over lunch—a druid with a crow companion named Tom. On another day, she used her break to call up a local bakery and paid out of her own pocket to order three dozen cupcakes decorated with the MnM logo.
Her evenings were spent at the library, or wherever else she was needed. She drove all around town to put up flyers in every place she could think of, including the Starbucks out by the highway. She showed Leni where to order dice sets in bulk to give away. She helped Felix punch up the newsletter copy so MnM night, and all of the library’s programs, sounded more enticing.
After hours, she stationed herself at Felix’s dining room table, creating half a dozen starter characters for people to choose from if they didn’t have their own. Felix sometimes sat with her, making his way through a thick book about the transcontinental railroad. (Jo called him a nerd for that, and he fired back a very mature “look who’s talking” that sent them both into a fit of giggles.) Otherwise, he was down in the basement, boxing and blasting his favorite pop songs. When Felix returned upstairs, shirtless and glistening with sweat, he would offer her his hand and ask her to join him in the shower. Jo always said yes.
And every day, she thought of the words he had whispered to her in the dark. Words he repeated often. Words that ran through her mind like a refrain from the most beautiful song in the world. He loves me.
When she woke in the morning to find Felix sound asleep, with tousled hair and Merry curled up behind his knees—he loves me.
