Noah had rehearsed this moment so many times that the words didn’t feel like words anymore.
They were just sounds he’d repeated in his head while staring at the ceiling at three in the morning. They were lines written in his notes app, rewritten until the screen was full of almost-identical sentences. They were something he’d carried around for months, something that felt heavier and heavier by the minute.
Because every time he got close to speaking those words, fear won.
The first time, he’d planned it perfectly. He had the ring in his pocket, his hands shaking so badly he thought Val might notice. She had looked at him with that soft, curious expression she always got when she knew he was trying to say something important.
The second time, he’d made it halfway through a sentence before his mind filled with every possible thing that could go wrong.
The third time, he’d convinced himself he just needed “the right moment.”
Noah had spent his whole life feeling like moments were things that happened to other people. Like everyone else knew the rules and he was always a few steps behind, trying to figure them out.
But Val had never made him feel like he was behind.
She knew his pauses weren’t him ignoring her. She knew his silence wasn’t a lack of feeling. She knew that sometimes his anxiety got so loud it drowned out everything else.
That was what scared him the most.
