Chapter 22 Forrest
22 FORREST
I come back to earth in pieces. I feel her steady breathing on my chest, her hair tickling my shoulder, and her leg tucked between mine. Each point of contact seems to glow as I become aware of it. Her eyelashes blink against my chest, and I open my eyes.
“Forrest?” she says, and the drowsy confusion in her voice—the way my name’s the first word out of her beautiful mouth—is something I enjoy to a disturbing degree. To a one-way-ticket-to-Los-Angeles degree. To a what’s-your-thread-count-preference-so-you-never-want-to-leave-my-bed degree.
“Right here, sweetheart,” I say, sliding a hand down her back.
She lifts her head to look at me, her hair a mess, cheeks pink, lips swollen. She gives me a sleepy half-smile, showing off one of those dimples, and I’m a dead man. I feel weak as a baby bird knocked out of its nest, but somehow, I’m already getting hard again, just looking at her like this. Roughed up. Tender. As soon as the thought occurs, the question is out of my mouth. “You feel okay? I didn’t hurt you?”
She gives an experimental wiggle that has me counting to ten. “I’ll live. I just need to sit in a snowbank for an hour.”
She’s teasing, but it doesn’t stop the rush of guilt spearing through me. I knew I was too rough with her, and I wasn’t even on top. Thank God . She’s so much smaller than I am, but I just couldn’t—
“Forrest. Stop.” She grabs my chin and pulls my face to look straight at her. “I’m good. I’m better than good. That was—” Her lashes drop. Her thighs tighten around mine, and Christ . Will we ever see the outside of this cabin again?
“Terrible?” I finish for her as my hand continues traveling south. “Not worth the trip?”
Her eyes close as my thigh nudges hers farther apart, my fingers lightly following the curve of her ass downward. “Ahh—definitely zero Chars.”
My hand stops short of its goal as a deep rumble of laughter builds in my chest. “That’s just cruel.”
I can feel her smiling into my neck. “Fine. I’ll give you one.”
“Only one, huh?” I say, wrapping an arm around her back and flipping us. She gasps but doesn’t argue when I start working my way down her body with my mouth. “I bet I can earn another.”
A good while later, I’m propped up against the headboard, my rating up to a solid three, and her back is a limp noodle against my chest. I kiss her damp temple, breathing deeply and pulling her tighter against me.
“Don’t you even start again,” she says weakly, her head lolling against me. “My legs will fall off.”
I chuckle, releasing her enough to hold two fists in front of her. “Fine. Pick one.”
At this she rouses a little, tensing against me. “Oh, God, this isn’t about tomorrow, is it? You aren’t, like, making me choose between cliff rappelling or heli-skiing, are you?”
I smile into her hair, nuzzling the silky gold locks, and fine. I prefer blondes. This blonde. Sue me. “Tomorrow’s excursion is canceled,” I murmur. “This storm’s going all night.”
She turns, tipping her head back to look at me. “Wait. You’re telling me we’re literally getting snowed in right now?”
I kiss the tip of her nose. “Your favorite trope?”
She snuggles back into my chest with a contented hum. “It definitely is now.”
I lift my fists back up. “Pick.”
“I need to know my choices.”
“Not how this works.”
She huffs a breath. “Fine. This one,” she says, poking my left hand.
“Mmm. That’s too bad.” I tsk. “You got your letter, but you would’ve loved the other one.”
She sits up and turns around, laughing and giving my chest a swat. “Stop. What was the other one?”
I kiss her outraged mouth. “It’s in the kitchen. Go take a look, and I’ll grab your letter.”
Her eyes go wide and bright at the prospect of a surprise, and then she’s out of the bed, walking out of my room with the same sway of her hips I’ve seen about a hundred times. Except this time she’s stark naked, and when I hear her gasp at the crate of avocados I sold a kidney for in Anchorage, all my life plans shrink down to keeping Margot naked for as long as possible.
I get up to grab her letter, and when we climb back into bed, she slots back against me like I’m her favorite easy chair. She tears the envelope open, occasionally forking another creamy green slice into her mouth with muffled pleasure, and I lean my head against the headboard to let her read in privacy, wondering if life has ever been this good.
I’m not sure how long it’s been since I drifted off, but when I wake, she’s no longer against me. I spot the letter first, abandoned next to me. There’s also a little enamel pin in the shape of an ax, but I don’t spare it more than a glance. Margot’s sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing a threadbare Stanford T-shirt that used to be mine but is now hers exclusively. Her usual upright posture is slouched, her shoulders caved forward. She’s looking at her feet, still as a stone.
“Margot,” I say, and she starts at my voice.
“Oh, hey,” she says with false brightness, her spine straightening. She’s still not looking at me. “You should go back to sleep. It’s so dark out.”
“It’s been dark since three p.m.”
She flaps a hand. “You know what I mean. It’s late.”
“Then you should come to bed too.”
“I’m busy,” she says, trying her best to conceal a wet-sounding sniffle.
“Busy crying?”
“Busy wishing you were still asleep,” she says without any real bite.
I move over to her, planting my feet on the rug beside her dangling ones. After a moment I say, “I’ll go start a fire, and then you can stop pretending you’re not dying to tell me all about it.”
She gives a watery laugh, and I kiss her damp cheekbone. I don’t know how much she’ll tell me, but I’ll take any piece of her heart that she’ll share.
In the end, with the fire crackling and snow silently building itself around us like a pillow fort outside, she lets me read the letter for myself.
Dear Margot,
Based on the brilliant chronological arc of my last letters, I’m sure you can probably guess what this one’s going to be about. Maybe you’ve even been dreading it a little? I know I have, but only because writing it involves mentioning He Whose Name Starts with A and Should End with Hole but Unfortunately Doesn’t.
First, though, I want to apologize. When we talked that night after the interview, pinning all of your new-to-me jadedness on Adam was a) giving him way too much credit, and b) such an oversimplification of what has clearly been the result of not one asshole but a whole… pride of assholes? A murder of assholes? A bloat of assholes? Okay, sorry, that last one was gross, but so are they, and I curse them all with chronic hemorrhoids for eternity. Moving on.
Despite my finally understanding what led to your heartbreaking disbelief in all things romantic, I’m sure you get why my knee-jerk response was to blame Adam. Because while the other guys I’ve mentioned have done undeniably shitty things to you, breaking up with you one week before your wedding was next-level douchery. It was douchery to the power of douche squared. It’s math, and no, I will not be taking questions about my art school education at this time.
Anyway, the day you were supposed to get married and I took you to that ax-throwing biker bar instead, I saw a side of you that left me (and the rest of the patrons) in awe. Frightened awe, but awe just the same. Afterward, I thought : This is it. She’s never going to write another love story again. But to my utter astonishment, you walked back into your office the next day and sat down to finish writing Last Call—possibly the sweetest HEA you’ve ever written. You also exorcised all evidence of Adam from our house (including that incredible set of vintage Italian espresso cups he bought me—grr!), and suddenly, it was like your whole relationship had never happened. You didn’t speak about him, and I was too scared to bring him up (you are really good with an ax, btw).
I couldn’t understand it. Life went back to normal-sans-Adam so fast. The only real difference was that you had even more time for me. And if I’m honest, maybe that’s the real reason I didn’t question your supernatural powers of compartmentalization. Perfectly Fine and Holding It Together Margot was very, very convenient to have around. But now, looking back on all the ways you’ve shielded me from your pain, I can only imagine what it must have been like to go through that alone. Yes, I was living with you, but I wasn’t there for you, was I? As usual, you were there for me . To this day, I don’t know why he broke things off, and if you never tell me, that’s okay too.
I suppose the main purpose of these letters is to let you know that I’m sorry it took me so long to see what was right in front of me. But I see you now, Margot. I see you, and I guess I’ve been wrong—it is possible to love you even more than I did before.
Stay safe, but not too safe,
Savannah
Carefully, I refold the letter. The original creases aren’t perfectly square to the edges of the paper, so I reopen it and correct the fold. Then I unfold it again, and my eyes lock onto the string of words that took me a solid two minutes to move past. One week before your wedding . And then the next set. The day you were supposed to get married . The revelation sears through me again. Margot was engaged. She’d been a single week away from becoming another man’s wife.
Once, I was driving on the I-5 back in L.A. when a white pickup truck veered aggressively into my lane, clipping the bumper of the car in front of me. The accident was terrible, but by some miracle, I escaped unscathed. For days, I couldn’t get rid of the sick, swooping feeling of having barely dodged something cataclysmic. I have the same feeling now.
“Forrest?” Margot’s voice reaches me from what seems like a great distance. “Did you finish?”
I turn to look at her, and the dam-breaking relief rushes through me, roaring in my ears. She’s spending the night with me . Saying my name. I have to physically restrain myself from crawling on top of her. Greedily seeking comfort when, like Savannah said, Margot is the one who needs support.
“Are you okay?” I ask once I have a grip on myself.
She’s sitting on the other end of the living room love seat, curled up in a flannel blanket, her golden skin and hair alive in the firelight. She’s stopped crying, but her eyelids are a little puffy. She shrugs, and the blanket slips off, tugging at the large neck hole of my T-shirt to reveal a delicate shoulder.
“It wasn’t exactly light reading,” she says. After a moment she adds, “I don’t like being reminded of that time in my life. I like the idea of Savannah blaming herself even less.”
I’m quiet for a minute, tallying everything I just learned against everything I already know about Margot and Savannah. “Is that why you’ve never told her what happened with Adam?”
She looks at me sharply. “She had nothing to do with it.” At my raised eyebrow, she shifts irritably. Exhales. “Fine, it wasn’t about her , but about how I am with her.”
I nod slowly as my theory is confirmed. A pillow hits my face.
“Stop being so all-knowing. No one made you the omniscient narrator here.”
I shake my head with a small smile. “I don’t know everything. But she said she was living with you. That you had ‘even more’ time for her. I can imagine that would put a strain on any relationship.” She’s curling herself into an ever tighter flannel ball, and I know I’ve got it right. “You said yourself the last thing you want is Savannah blaming herself for anything. So you shielded her, like she said you always have.”
A dull red flush is creeping up her cheeks. On a selfish level, I don’t want her thinking about her ex for another goddamn second. But a bigger part of me knows that if she’s never told her sister what happened, then she hasn’t told anyone. And more than anything, I want to be the person she confides in.
“You can tell me,” I say softly. “I want to know, if you want me to.”
Her eyes are as wide and unblinking as a startled doe’s, staring at me like I’ve said something crazy. And maybe I have. But then she takes a shuddering breath and starts talking like she’s just been waiting for someone to ask.
“It was this big night for Adam,” she says in a small, resigned voice. “He’s a journalist, and he’d won a prize for one of his pieces. I was so excited for him, because things had always been tense between us professionally. I’d had a lot of early success, and he…” She glances at me, and the tiny crease between her eyebrows looks like a load-bearing structure for approximately one metric fuck-ton of toxic male insecurity. She takes a breath, and I copy her, hoping it’ll soothe my building anger. It doesn’t.
“Let’s just say it was hard on his ego,” she summarizes. “So a week before our wedding, we were supposed to go to the awards ceremony, but that morning, Van came down with a huge flare. She’d been pushing herself so hard as my maid of honor, and it flattened her.”
Margot looks at me and pulls her blanket like an iron shield around her. “I chose to stay with my sister at the hospital that night. It was the worst I’d seen her in years, and it was all my fault. My fault for letting her take on too many responsibilities.” She sighs. “But even if I’d had nothing to do with it, I would have been there. She’s my sister.”
She looks away at the fire, and when she speaks again, her voice is hushed. “Adam couldn’t forgive me. He said I would always put Savannah ahead of our relationship, and I told him he was right. So he ended it that night, and the thing is, as devastated as I was, I couldn’t really blame him. Because he’s not the villain in this story,” she says, her voice shaking. “It’s me. That night, I realized I’m not cut out to be in a fully committed relationship with anyone except my sister.”
When she looks back at me, she’s not crying, but there’s a bone-deep tiredness that has nothing to do with the amount of sleep she’s gotten. “Anyway, like you saw in the letter, Adam was the last straw in a whole stack of rotten straws. I started writing my Happily Never After file to cope, and never wanted to try another relationship again, until—”
She stops herself and looks down at her feet, which have migrated to the side of my boxer briefs. Her toes scrunch like they’re trying to hide.
“Until?” I repeat, mouth going dry.
She sneaks a hand out of the blanket to brush hair out of her face with a flash of impatience. “Until this . Whatever this is. Which I don’t like, for the record.”
And just like that, all the denial over what I want with Margot evaporates. For weeks now I’ve put off turning down the grant at Caltech, even though I know I have to. With this unbelievable admission that Margot might be willing to put her battered trust in me, the temptation to move back to California is more powerful than ever. And this time my research, the grant, even my gardenias have nothing to do with it. Reaching for her, I pull her into my lap, leaving most of her blanket behind.
“You don’t like this,” I repeat.
“Not at all,” she says, tilting her face up to mine. Her breathing picks up. “You’re very dangerous for my mental and emotional health. You’re also very unattractive.”
I cup her face in my hand, wishing I could erase every moment she’s been punished for her incredible selflessness.
“You have to know I’d never ask you to choose me over your sister,” I say softly, wanting to make every promise Adam never gave her. “I’d never punish you for loving her, Margot.”
Her gaze stutters up to mine. “I… I know you wouldn’t.” She swallows. “You understand what it’s like to give up everything for your family. You’d do anything for your father.”
She’s right, of course. It’s why I know I’ll be scraping whatever’s left of my heart off the airport floor when I watch her plane fly away in two weeks. So I kiss her. There’ll be plenty of time to worry about that. Right now the snow’s only getting deeper, the night’s almost gone, and I still have a very long list of ways to get her to admit she likes whatever this is.