Someday Never Came

Chapter Sixty-Five

It’s a strange but beautiful sight, seeing the only one left walking past the graves of the fallen as I watch Grayson find peace in the place he would one day lie next to his brothers in arms. I watch until I can no longer see him or hear the roar of his truck flying down the side road that will take him to the interstate and back home. I’m the only one who hung around town after Wyhtt’s funeral. While I stayed to find peace in the fact that man I had once loved not only loved me, but was gone, Grayson stayed to make sure his brothers’ woman was taken care of.

When Grayson wasn’t watching over me from a distance in the cemetery, he was with Wyhtt’s widow and children. Making sure they were taken care of before he drove back down to Florida, where he had been living in retirement from the Army the past several years. He gave me and Wyhtt’s family an open invitation to come visit him anytime.

He might regret that sentiment when we show up with bags for a week. Hopefully his new girlfriend won’t mind either, since he told me he was thinking about asking her to move in. Grayson was the oldest of us all, and the last of us to settle down. “Seems fitting though I suppose doesn’t it, Jensen?” I turn to his grave, knowing this will be the last time I see him for a while.

All I can do is grin at the words craved into marble headstone: Forever hers. Two simple words, along with his date of birth and date of death. His brothers had overseen all his funeral arrangements since he had no family left alive, other than me that is.

“Grayson told me that they all felt like if I ever found out the truth, I should have known how you felt. Even if it was coming from the grave. I wish it would have come from your mouth, but I suppose I have to accept it since it is literally craved into stone, huh baby?

I survived off the idea that you were alive and happy with the life you chose for yourself. I was content knowing I was simply not the one you chose to love, the one who fell short of being the one for you. I was just the one you loved before the one you gave everything to. I only continued to live my life, to carve out what should have been our reality because of that. I would have never survived, never truly lived a single moment of my life if I had known what had truly happened to you. I would have died with you, withered away to an old woman sitting beside this grave, tracing these words—Forever hers—but you already knew that, didn’t you?

I am so fucking mad at you. Mad doesn’t completely describe what I feel toward you in this moment actually. Rage. Bitterness. Hopelessness. Shock. Thankfulness. Betrayal. Along with a thousand other racing emotions, all fighting for dominance. You left me, not once, not twice, but three times. Not only did you leave me three times in this life, but the third and final time was in a way I cannot not follow—not yet anyway. I love my life, but it was not the life I would have chosen if you gave me the choice. We both know that.

I love you. I am still hopelessly in love with you despite the beautiful life you forced me to create on my own. I will always love you.” I choke out. “I will love you until my last dying breath. I will love you, Jensen Dean Adler, even once they have burned me to ash and spread what remains left of me. I will be here, with you because if I could not spend my life with you, nothing and nobody will stop me from being with you once death takes me. I will finally be where I belong. With you, at long last my love . . . who needs a lifetime together, when I can now have eternity by your side?”

An almost broken chuckle rolls out of me, turning into a sigh that feels as if the weight of the world is crashing down on me.

“I . . . I can’t join you just yet though. You made everyone promise to keep this from me so I would live, and I will continue to live for you. I opened that small publishing house I told you about, I bring stories to life daily. I have never written my own stories in fear they would find hints of the brokenness still left inside of me from loving you. If I had known though, I would have written the story of us long ago.

You asked me once to write when we were under the covers. Whispers of future we would never share, but now . . . now I will write for you. They will find glimpses of you in every story I dare to tell. Every moment my pen touches paper, or the keyboard lights up in the dead of night, the world will know how you made me feel. I will write the stories of what we should have been, the life you should have lived. The life you deserved . . . the life we both deserved. I may not have had you fully in this life, but maybe I can have you in what I create until I can meet you once again. I will make you proud. I promise.

My love may not have been able to save you from whatever horrific fate you seemed to have been destined for. If it could have, I would have yelled I love you until my lungs burst, until the blood was coming from my lips. And as I fought for one last breath, my last statement to this world would have been I love you, if that is what it took to save you. I would have died fighting for your life. I would have given everything if you had only allowed me, if you had just fully let me in. I couldn’t save you though. Now the only thing my love can do is immortalize you the only way I know how: through words on paper.

Thank you. Thank you for loving me enough to leave when you knew you couldn’t love me the way I so desperately craved. Thank you for keeping the secrets, and for giving me the life I always wanted, even if it wasn’t with you. Thank you for the two beautiful children I was given, even though they look nothing like you, or share your contagious laughter. They may not be a part of you, but they are a part of me. They are nearing the age we were when I fell so desperately in love with you as a teenager. I know you would have loved them. Thank you for stepping back and allowing another man to love me in the way you couldn’t. You would have despised him, not because he is not a good man but because he has been the only other one to make me feel alive. I may not love him in the same way I love you, but I do love him. Thank you for protecting me, for protecting my heart until now from this pain of knowing you aren’t in this world. Thank you for the life I created. It is simple, beautiful, and has been peaceful. I would have never experienced it without you, without the love you held for me. For giving me the once in a lifetime love, that most search their entire lives for.

Thank you for never truly leaving me, I know it is you. I know it’s you who finds me in my dreams. Those little moments I steal away for myself early in the morning. It always felt so real, now I know it was. You found me even from the grave, not even death truly keeps you away. You give me glimpses of what it should have been, and what our heaven looks like. I need you to keep doing it. Show me the life you wanted for us, I will write it all down, baby. We will live it all out through my stories. I have to go now though, I don’t want to leave you, but I promise I will see you soon. In my dreams. I have to get back to my life. I have spent far too much time here, not living like I have vowed to you I would. I am sure there is a dark, twisted irony in that somewhere, but I don’t have the time to laugh over it today.

You gave me everything I could have ever wanted, no amount of thank you’ could express how grateful I am to you. But the amount of sorrow that I will always carry for you will haunt me until I can meet you in the grave.” With one final kiss I place to the ground, I rise.

“I love you, Jensen. I will see you soon . . . ”