Return To You: A Small Town, Second Chance Romance

29. Ethan

twenty-nine

My phone chimes with a text message, and I make the mistake of checking the screen.

Shit.

I pocket the phone. I’ll answer later.

Grace’s gaze on me is questioning but warm. She wants to know, but she’ll let me share on my own time.

We go back to talking shit with Colton, which is way more enjoyable.

When we get back to Grace’s place, the sky is turning pewter. There’s still time to enjoy the day. I open up the bottle of Zin I bought earlier and pull out two stem glasses.

While Grace is in the bathroom I call Damian. “Hey, bud, look what I got for you.” The laser light is an immediate winner, and my four-legged friend is running around the living room like crazy, jumping the couch, pounding into the air, crashing into furniture.

“Ohmygod, what did you feed him?” Grace half shrieks, half laughs when she joins us.

I hand her the gadget. “Here. Got that at Noah’s store. Isn’t it cool?” I pour the wine and slide the porch door open. Damian trots behind us—or rather, behind the red dots bouncing randomly around.

“You spoiled little cat,” Grace coos as she sits on my lap in the single lounge chair.

My phone digs into my hip. I pull it out to set it on the floor. Then I take a long draw on the wine and set my eyes on Woodbury Knoll. “That was my commanding officer, earlier. Sent me a message to let me know I should get ready to go back in a couple days.” I feel Grace tensing against me, so I add, “It’ll just be for a week or two of meetings.” Hell, there’s no avoiding it. “But after that, I won’t have much time left. I’ll see where they send me.”

She sets her glass on the floor and moves on my lap so she can look at me. “I thought you were going to Brussels?” Her voice is barely audible.

I smile feebly at her, not even asking how or where she got that information. It’s true, that was what I was hoping for. “Ultimately, I’ll go wherever I’m needed. But yeah, Brussels would be quite the career move.”

“What’s in Brussels?”

“NATO.”

“You deserve the best, Ethan, and if Brussels is your dream post, I hope you get it. I know you’ll get it.” Her eyes are shiny, but her smile is genuine. “Now tell me what you’d be doing.”

I take a sip of the wine, let it swirl in my mouth, swallow slowly. “For NATO, it’d be doing anything from cyber defense initiatives to protect communications, to threat analysis, or it could be partnering with countries or other international organizations, training and exercises, incident response… whatever they need. It’s part of what we’ll be assessing in the next few days. The world is a scary place, Grace. Potentially the most dangerous wars are fought online now. That’s where guys—and girls—like me come in. We always need to be one step ahead.”

She looks at me with a devious smile and sets one hand on my chest. “Do you spy on the bad guys?”

I grin. “One step ahead, baby.”

“Too bad this has to be in Brussels.”

“Could be Maryland, or Florida.”

“For NATO?”

“No—that would be NSA in Maryland, or the Air Force could want me in Florida, or Texas. We’ll see. Like I said, wherever I’m needed.”

She plays with the top button of my button-down shirt. “And so—where you’re going soon, that’s…”

I set my glass on the floor and my hands on her hips. “Undisclosed location. Basically, we gotta talk through shit.” I’ll be in top-secret meetings where needs and skills will be discussed and evaluated, and then I’ll be posted wherever it makes the most sense to the powers that be. I used to find that exciting, rewarding. I felt needed, valued.

I’m not sure I feel that way anymore.

And then there’s the fact that when I got here, I couldn’t wait to leave.

Now, I’d rather stop time and just stay right here forever. “I’ll come back for a few more days. But after that…”

She nods softly, resigned. Sets her hand on my shoulder. “Then you should spend the night at the farm. With your parents.”

That catches me by surprise. I thought we’d had a good day. The river was fun, and so was having a dinner at Lazy’s. And I feel like we’ve opened up to each other a lot. We’ve talked about the past and fixed some misunderstandings. It was good but exhausting. At least to me it was. “Would you rather be alone tonight?”

Her eyes narrow on me. The nerve on the side of her eye is twitching, and I’m not sure what to make of that. “That’s not what I said. I just suggested you might want to go home tonight.”

“I don’t have a home.” What I really want to say is, Home is where you are. But that’d be crazy, right? I might scare her away.

“Don’t ever say that again, Ethan. Your home is here, in Emerald Creek.”

“What I mean is—”

“I think I know what you mean. But a house isn’t a home. A home is where you’re loved no matter how long you stayed away. No matter how far away you are. It’s where you live in people’s hearts.”

My throat tightens and my eyes prickle. “Okay. I’ll sleep at the farm tomorrow, after the barbecue.” Even though where I feel at home is right here, with Grace.

She cups my face in her hands, just like I love to do with her. “Get used to it. You’re loved here.”

I pull her into me, tightening my arms around her, burying my head in her hair, inhaling her scent as I try to contain my emotions. How am I going to go about my day-to-day without her by my side now?

“You know,” she says softly, her cheek against my chest, “I never understood why you stayed away from Emerald Creek for so long. Why you didn’t at least visit your family once a year or something.”

“My folks came to visit me,” I counter, feeling defensive and trying not to show it. “They said it gave them a reason to travel.” My hand goes up and down her back in a gesture that’s soothing to me.

“Right.” She grabs the laser beam off the floor and plays with it, sending Damian in a frenzy. “It’s just… you used to love it here, and then your siblings didn’t get to see you that often. Why? What happened?” She straightens on my lap, looking me in the eye.

I shrug.

“You don’t want to tell me,” she drops, waving the hand that holds the laser in the air, in a gesture of disbelief.

Damian jumps over us to try and keep on top of his perceived task.

I stay silent.

Grace drops the laser beam. “That’s not going to work. You need to help me help you.” She swings one leg over so she’s straddling me, nesting her center against my dick, plunging her gaze into mine. “Talk to me.”

I take a deep breath. “I uh… I took Justin’s accident personally. Meaning, I felt responsible for it. And… I felt like me being here, healthy, alive, was just pouring salt on a wound.”

“I don’t understand,” she murmurs, a deep frown shadowing her features as she strokes my hair.

I close my eyes and lean my head back against the lounge chair. “I can see now how stupid it was, and maybe I was just scared, unable to face the mess I felt I had created.”

“What mess? What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t look after Justin. I was dismissive of Audrey. All this wouldn’t—shouldn’t have happened. The fucking butterfly effect,” I add, hoping she won’t ask for an explanation. I’m getting exhausted.

“M-hm.” She’s still stroking my hair. “Did you ever think how it made your parents feel?”

I open my eyes. Can I tell her this? Will she understand? I don’t want her to judge my parents poorly. I’m the one who fucked up. “I think at the time, they sorta wanted me gone.”

I feel her stiffen on my lap. Her hand stops stroking my hair. “How can you say that? They adore you.” Opening my eyes to meet hers, I see compassion, not the disapproval I was expecting.

“They wouldn’t let me postpone my departure. It’s like they wanted me to leave.”

“That was your misplaced guilt talking.”

“Pretty sure Mom said I owed it to Justin to go live my life the way I had it planned out. I couldn’t delay because of him. Although I wanted to. I would have done anything to help him out. I was going through hell after his accident.”

Grace’s eyes fill with tears, and she tugs at my hair. “Oh, honey. You know Lynn. Somewhere between her heart and her mouth stuff gets mumble jumbled and she can say the worst things ever at the worst possible time but with the best intentions. I mean, pretty sure even our sweet Sophie is writing an anthology with all the collected material at this point.”

I chuckle at the fair point she’s making. “Sophie?”

“Sophie Yarwood. She’s our librarian now. And she writes stories. No surprise there.”

“Sweet,” I say, remembering a nerdy and lovely girl our age who would insist on writing the screenplays for our high school shows so our productions would be original and royalty free.

Grace brings us back on topic. “You need to talk to your mom. There’s no way she said it the way you took it. No way.”

“I’ll talk to her tomorrow. When we go to the barbecue,” I add, squeezing her hips in my hands.

Her gaze strays off my face. “About that. I might-I think I’ll pass. Tomorrow is just the Kings.”

I look at her but only a grunt comes out of my chest as I think of all the arguments against this. That she’s mine. That we’ve always been together. That she’s always been family. “Chloe is coming,” I counter.

“She and Justin are together. She’s as good as a King. Did you see how Justin wouldn’t stop touching her?” I’m always touching you too. Right now you’re on my lap. At the bar I was playing with your hair, stroking your back. “They’re so cute together. He really deserves to be happy.” Yes he does. You do too. Me? Debatable. “And she doesn’t take his shit, lemme tell you. She’s something else.” And you’re in a league of your own. “Don’t you love her?”

“I love you,” is what comes out of me, raw. There. I said it. This isn’t a fling. An interlude. This is the real deal and I need her to know it.

Her hands clasp around my face. ”And I love you too, Ethan. Always have, always will.” Her voice is a bit shaky. She doesn’t lean down to kiss me. “No matter what happens now.”

No matter what happens now?What does she mean? “So what you’re saying is… we’re not really together.”

And are we? Back together? I can’t decently think this way until I have my shit together, and that means a plan of action. Next month, next year, next ten years, the rest of our lives.

“What I’m saying is, I don’t feel comfortable going to a small family dinner…”

I shut my eyes and clench my jaw. I want that, god I want that so much. I want my name on more than just the jersey she sleeps in.

“…yet,” she adds, reading my emotions. “I need a little time. And also, we haven’t talked about… us.”

“Yet,” I counter, pulling her against me. Her lips finally find mine, and her hands get lost in my hair and my grunts are echoed with her moans.

I stroke her neck when she breaks the kiss to nuzzle against my chest. “Would you? Want to…” Fuck, I can’t ask her this way. This is no way to propose to anyone, and certainly not to Grace.

“You don’t always get what you want, Ethan.” She turns to me, eyes shiny but chin firm. “You and I… all this is very new. We can’t just pick up where we left off. Even if it sometimes feels like it’s what we’re doing, there’s a lot to… to think about… and consider. I mean…” She makes an all-encompassing gesture. “This is where I live. This is my world. I’ve got Dad, who’s sick. I’ve got Skye. I’ve got Mom and even Colton. My spa. My staff. My clients. And you have your ultra-top-secret career. Here one day, gone the next.”

I love, love that she’s already thinking about all that. She’s level-headed, if you exclude the squirreling tendencies—but even those, I can rationalize. I can see her point. And I hate that I’m who made her that way, in a sense. I bring her mouth to mine and kiss her tenderly. “You’ve always been the one for me, Grace. But you’re right, this is going very fast.”

She closes her eyes, and I suspect it’s to keep the tears in.

“Grace? I love you. You’re the love of my life. I… I want to find a way where I stop hurting you. Stop messing it up. I want to find a way for us.” I just don’t know where it is.

She shuts me up by kissing me again. When she looks up at me, tears are streaking her cheeks. “I love you too. And I’ll say it again. Always have. Always will. No matter where your path takes you.”

“I know.” And she’ll always be my home.