I want you, you you
- You by Tom Waits
The issue was that he loved her.
It had taken him a while to realize it: to really understand that this draw he felt to her, this inexorable feeling where he wanted to talk with her, listen to her, be around her, see her, touch her, was him in love. He was so intrigued by such a large part of her, so fascinated by her, so comfortable, that it had become an issue. It wouldn't stay small inside of him. He didnt't feel like it could be reduced anymore, hidden in him.
He had been drawn to her from the beginning. Her kindness wrapped around him and encouraged him like he hadn't felt in his adult life. He felt polished, renewed, uncovered by her. So he'd co-created and put his signature on the No Nail Clause. In his defense, the clause had initially held weight. Nick, Schmidt, Coach, and Winston all knew Jess was physically attractive, and a contract to withold sex seemed like enough at the time. As the year and a half of living together wore on, Jess wore Nick down. She reduced his whole slew of unfelt feelings and confused emotions to one single, solitary idea, and that was that he was in love with her. Whatever love was meant to be articulated as, Nick felt it.
And so now it was like a wound that had the scab ripped off. It was right there, obvious, and he couldn't stand it. He hugged her, truly wanting nothing more than to quell the feeling of absurdity in his head. He felt like an idiot, an absolutely transparent fool who couldn't swallow words that he'd let out. He'd kissed her and meant it, and tip-toeing around the fact that it even meant anything killed him. Because it meant a lot.
No, a single kiss didn't contain some key to everything that he felt. It wasn't some all-telling event that shifted the balance of the universe so that they could fall into an easy transition to roommates to soulmates. So the issue wasn't that he regretted kissing her or touching her knee or sitting outside of his doorway while Russel's daughter tried on bras or chosing not to move in with Caroline. All of these things could be, and were, silenced. They happened, a palpable connection linking them together, and then they were let go. The issue here was that he was a human being, he was in love with Jess, and he wanted to tell her.
Watching her struggle to understand him and to configure the collection of their relationship in her mind, to make sense of how she felt, was tolling. That it wasn't as simple shrugging against their confused, jumbled conversations of their feelings and saying "Listen Jess, all of this boils down to me being in love with you and wanting you to know."