I didn’t want to say it. Even though voicing it out loud wouldn’t change the outcome, I didn’t want to admit that I’d thought she was breaking up with me for good and I was terrified of that prospect.

“I’m…” She pulled away and I wanted so badly to reach my hand out and snatch hers back. But she was looking back over the park again, a clear signal that she needed thinking space.

“I don’t really know what I’m trying to say.” She sighed. “It’s like … it’s like if I had been dating you for eight months without knowing that you liked cooking.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, cooking is pretty fundamental to who you are, right? It’s your passion. It’d be like if this entire time I never mentioned poetry or fandom.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’d feel like I’d missed something huge.”

“Exactly,” she said. “I think I knew, on some level, that I was missing a big part of the picture. You were already hiding pieces of yourself, whether or not you meant to. I thought I could break through your shell, but I—I never expected this. I’m … I don’t want you to feel like I’m freaked out because of what you can do…”

I could see her wanting to believe that, wanting to just take everything I’d told her in stride. But I let her off the hook.

“It’s okay to be freaked,” I told her. “I know it’s … weird.”

“It’s incredibly cool,” she said, a real Emily-grade smile blooming across her face for the first time in this entire conversation. “You have a superpower. You can go inside people’s heads!”

“It doesn’t creep you out?” I asked, even though I definitely didn’t want an honest answer.

“It’s … a lot,” she admitted, being nicer to me than I think I deserved. “And I don’t want you to—you can’t use it to try and be the person you think I want. But it’s still exciting. It’s fantastic, it’s—it’s—I mean, I wish I had an ability, but just knowing they exist … it’s everything I’ve always dreamed of.”

She winced.

“No pun intended.”

There was a beat where we just looked at each other, wondering how the other was going to react, waiting for permission, and then Emily’s mouth twitched at the corner and we both burst into laughter.

It felt so good. It felt like all the information I would ever need was in the melody of her joy and as long as I could harmonize, we would never need anything else.