Beautiful Secret (Beautiful Bastard 4)

Even when he’d found me in the office, packing up, and begged me to forgive him. Even when he’d come to my flat and told me he loved me.

I was an idiot for sending him away. I knew it at the time. But more than that I knew that if I let him in that day, there would be a proud, resolved piece of myself I wouldn’t ever get back.

But the silence seemed unending.

Number of Days I’d Gone Without Speaking to Niall Stella:

One.

Seven.

Fifteen.

Thirty two.

Fifty nine.

In June I got my acceptance letter to Maggie’s program at Oxford.

The innocuous-looking envelope was there waiting for me when I got home from work. Some days it was harder than others to resist the pull to walk toward Niall’s flat. Other days I could pretend to be absorbed in a song, or reading some news on my iPhone, and the knowledge that, if I wanted, I could go sit on his stoop and wait for him to get home was only a sharp jab between my ribs. But today the mental debate had been torture. Was I over my anger? And if I was, and if I went to his house, would he open the door and regard me blankly, and then with awkward apology, and tell me I’d been right to end things? That he’d been impulsive to get involved with me in the first place? That his life was better in an ordered system than with such a wild, emotional girl?

The problem was that I could see him rejecting me just as vividly as I could see him embracing me. I knew Niall’s schedule, the facts of his life and his preferences for food and coffee and clothing. But I wasn’t sure I knew his heart at all.

I tore open the envelope, heart pounding and unknotting in an odd sort of unison, and I read the letter three times, the papers clutched in my shaking hand. For what felt like minutes, I was unable to blink or breathe because it was happening. I was going to Oxford, I was studying with Maggie. That shithead Anthony hadn’t ruined my chances.

I read through the letter again for dates, and filed through my mental calendar. Michaelmas Term for the program began in September. This meant I could work through the rest of June, July, and into the beginning of August, and use the first part of the following month to find a new flat in Oxford.

Of course my first instinct was to tell Niall.

Instead, I called my girl London.

“Ruby!”

“You are never going to guess what happened!” I told her, feeling my smile for what had to be the first time in more than fifty-nine days.

“Harry Styles is your new roommate and you’ve purchased a ticket for me to come visit?”

“Very funny, try again.”

She hummed. “Well, you sound happier than I’ve heard in months, so I’m guessing that you finally called Niall Stella, he welcomed you with open arms, and now you’re lying in a pool of postcoital bliss. And by ‘pool of bliss,’ of course I mean—”

My chest ached sharply and I cut her off, unable to play along. “No.”

Her tone softened. “But it sounded pretty good, didn’t it?”

It did. But the prospect of seeing Niall couldn’t be better than what I had in my hand.

It couldn’t, could it?

But as soon as she’d said it, I knew that being back with Niall would be just as good. I wanted Niall just as much as I wanted to work with Maggie. And for the first time since I’d been fired, I didn’t feel embarrassed for it, or that I was betraying some inner feminist thread by admitting how deep my feelings were. If I went back to Niall, some days he would be my entire life. Some days school would. Some days they would occupy the same amount of space. And that knowledge—that I could find balance, that maybe I did need to separate my heart from my head after all—loosened a tension that had seemed to reside in my chest for weeks now.

“I got into Maggie’s group,” I told her. “I just got the letter.”

London screamed, made clomping noises, which I think might have been dancing on the other end, dropped her phone, and then came back and screamed some more.

“You’re going to Oxford!”

“I am!”

“You’re going to study with your dream lady!”

“I know!”

She exhaled an enormous gust of air as if she’d just fallen backward on the couch, and said, “Ruby I’m going to ask you a question and you don’t have to answer it. Though, let’s be real, I’ve put up with your moping for months now so I sort of deserve an answer.”

I groaned, knowing where this was going. “Can’t we keep talking about Oxford?”

Ignoring this, she asked, “Was I the first person you wanted to call when you got the letter?”

I didn’t answer and instead focused on picking at a loose thread on my sweater.