Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 97466 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 487(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97466 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 487(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
The video switched again, back to Oscar. He sat in his living room back in the city, nearly every surface around him lit with glowing candles the way it had been two months ago when he’d proposed to me. “We even set all these rules to make sure we wouldn’t accidentally fall in love,” he said, laughing and shaking his head. “The number one rule: our only communication was via text.”
Snap to me laughing. “Sooooo many texts. We talked about everything, and I mean everything. Oscar was the first person I messaged in the morning—”
Oscar’s face filled the screen again. His expression was confident and sweet, a heady combination I adored. “He was always my last text of the day. And you know what? Every night I heard from him, I went to bed with a smile on my face.”
Back to me. “He made me laugh all the time. I learned to mute our text chain when I was working out of fear I’d end up cracking up at some inappropriate moment.”
After fading out again, Oscar shifted on the couch, smiling softly. “Then came our first mistake. We ended up at the same wedding. We spent the entire weekend together.”
The video cut back to me. “The tipping point was probably my sister’s wedding celebration. My date bailed at the last minute, and Oscar offered to step in. I can’t believe I’m about to admit this to the entire world, but at the time, we pretended to be dating to make my ex-boyfriend jealous. I know, I know, it’s not the proudest thing I’ve done.” My smile slipped to something softer, almost nostalgic. “Somewhere in all of the fake dating, I realized something: my feelings for Oscar had become very, very real. No…” I sighed. “That’s not the truth. The truth is… I’d been in love with Oscar for a long time.”
In the video, Oscar clasped his hands together, staring at his fingers for a moment. “I refused to fall in love with Hugh.” He blew out a soft breath of laughter. “I’d have had better luck telling the sun not to set, or the ocean not to touch the sand, or wind not to blow. Because that’s what love is—true love is a force of nature. It’s a tornado that storms into your life, and you can try to stand against it, but you will fail every time.”
My heart thundered in my chest as I looked over at Oscar sitting next to me, our wedding cake in crumbs on the plate, champagne glasses half-empty from so many loving toasts from friends and family.
This was it. I was living my happily ever after.
And it was so much better than I’d ever imagined. More real. More unpredictable. More full of love and laughter, friends and family.
My face appeared on the screen again. “Oscar makes everything easy… including falling in love. By the time I realized, it was too late. I was too far gone. Hopelessly, irrevocably, helplessly in love.”
When it faded to Oscar again, he was back in the park. “The honest truth is, I was scared. I’ve dated a lot of men in my life, and every breakup took a piece of me with it. But I knew breaking up with Hugh would take my whole heart. There’d be nothing left. And so I panicked.”
“He was so prickly. So stubborn,” I said, sitting in the exact same spot in the park, months before Oscar must have recorded his own video with my sister’s help. “Oscar made it clear he wasn’t going to fall for me no matter what. And I, having been a helpless romantic my whole life, had gotten a somewhat skewed vision of what love should be. I thought it should be easy. I didn’t think it should require fighting for it. And I knew that if I wanted to be with Oscar, I was going to have to fight for it. So I figured that meant it couldn’t be true love.”
The video flipped back to Oscar. “I was an idiot.”
Then it was my turn. “I was an idiot.”
The crowd in the barn laughed. I looked around at our friends and family as they learned the truth of our beginning.
“You know there’s this ‘curse’ about dating Oscar, right?” I continued. “How every single man he’s dated has gone on to find true love, most of them with the next man they’ve dated after breaking up with Oscar? So many happy couples out there supposedly have Oscar to thank. But for me, I knew there’d never be an after-Oscar, because Oscar Overton is the love of my damn life. So I decided to fight for him. For us.” I smiled at the camera. “Except, as it turned out, Oscar made that easy too.”
The screen switched to Oscar. He was in our apartment again with the candles, and I had to assume he’d recorded this before I’d come home to the surprise that night. I held my breath, wondering what he was going to say next. “Hugh, you once told me you wanted candles and fireworks.” Behind him in the video, the sky exploded in a riot of fireworks, just like it had later that night after I’d said yes. “You wanted passionate declarations of love… and you deserve them. The truth of the matter is, I love you, Hugh. The kind of breath-stealing, knee-knocking, life-altering love that comes around so rarely you think it would never happen to you. You are it for me. You’re my person, you’re my forever, and I want to spend the rest of my life proving to you that you’re my happily ever after.”