Chapter 54 #2
Strange somehow that I know those words so completely by heart and he doesn’t. But of course, he wouldn’t. He hasn’t read them every day for the past ten and a half years.
“Yeah. And your name. You signed it with a heart.”
I can see in his eyes and in the slight drop of his jaw the moment it clicks. “You kept this. You took it with you.”
Nodding, I let go of his hand to flip the cover open. He leans in against me, resting his head on my shoulder. Watching.
A decade of use has the book opening easily, the spine laying flat over my palm.
Charlie lets out a soft laugh that turns into a gasp as he reaches forward and traces his fingers over the purple inked message he’d left me.
Fuck but it kills me thinking back to the idea of him writing those words. Probably (because I know him) he was tearing up over the fact that we’d be going weeks at a time without seeing each other. How, back then, that had seemed like the worst thing possible.
“That’s exactly what I wrote.” His voice trembles a little as he looks up at me. “You know it by heart?”
“I do.” I press a long kiss to his temple. Breathe in a deep breath of his rainwater and bergamot smell.
Choosing at random, I flip forward in the book, past the early pages. Those ones are sad and angry. Some of them are dark. I’d poured the sorries and the pain and heartbroken rage I couldn’t actually tell him into those pages.
He can read them if he wants. They’re his, after all. But those aren’t the ones I want to show him right now.
“Here.” I stop off somewhere around the middle. “Look.”
His eyes scan the page, taking in the sketch of a white-tailed tropic bird flying low over a crashing wave.
And then his breath leaves him with a startled little sound as his fingers reach out again to stroke over the paper.
The writing here’s small and cramped, just scrawled in pencil in the spaces around the drawing.
There’s more, but I can’t see anything but him as he looks up at me.
“When did you write this?” Those brilliant green eyes of his swim with unshed tears.
“This one? Four? Four and a half years ago? When I was in Ecuador.”
A shuddery breath punches from his chest.
“Can I?” His hand’s shaking as he reaches out for the book.
“It’s yours,” I tell him truthfully.
Carefully, like he’s afraid he’ll damage it, he takes it from me, flipping forward, skimming, stopping at a page that’s half filled with a sketch of the roots of a huge banyan tree growing up out of the crumbling blocks of an ancient temple wall.
As he reads, I glance over a few of the familiar words.
Mostly, I just watch his face though.
One heavy tear spills over his lashes as he reads, but my thumb’s there to wipe it away before it rolls down over his freckles.
“Are they all like this?” He looks up from the page, lower lip trembling, eyes locked on mine.
“Yeah. I did what you asked. I drew the things I saw, and since I couldn’t show them to you like you’d wanted, I told you about them here. There are more, in other notebooks. I saved this one for my favorites. I’ve been doing it since a few months after you left.”
“Ohmigod—” Two fresh tears splash down onto his cheeks.
“I told you,” gently, I take the notebook from his hands so I can pull him into my arms. “I’ve always loved you. You’re my person, Charlie, and I needed you with me, even if it was only in my own head.”
“Your person?” He pulls back enough to look up into my face, and I know suddenly that I don’t have to be afraid to tell him the thing I’ve been working up to.
“My person.” I stroke my fingers over his cheeks, lingering over his beautiful freckles, wiping away tracks of his tears. “I’ve called you that in my head forever, because it’s what you’ve always been. To me. You were never just my friend. You’ll never just be my boyfriend or my—”
I swallow back the rest. I’m getting this all out of order, my mouth about to run on and blurt things I haven’t even really thought through in any kind of concrete way, beyond the fact that any version of my future I can imagine has Charlie in it. Front and center. My person.
“I don’t ever want to live without you again,” I whisper. “I’m not whole without you. I never have been and I never will be.”
“What are you saying?” There’s fear in his eyes, but that unseen thing that’s always bonded us doesn’t let it frighten me. This isn’t fear of what I am saying, it’s fear that he’s misinterpreting, even though he already knows he isn’t.
“I’m telling you that I’m not going anywhere. Ever again. Unless it’s with you. When you go back to Seattle, I’ll come with you, or if that’s too much too soon for you, I’ll stay here and—”
Charlie’s kiss knocks me breathless as he drags me down onto the couch, hands in my hair, mouth devouring mine, legs wrapping around my waist as I pull him into my lap.
Just like last night, when I felt him in me and around me, filling me with pieces of himself that just fit, I feel like, maybe, once again, I do finally have enough of him.
Only when both of us are panting, barely able to catch our breaths, do we break apart.
He pulls back, scanning my face. “You want to stay?”
His chest is heaving and his lips are puffy with the force of our kisses. And god, his eyes are enormous. Bright and hopeful; the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“I have to stay.” And then, because I don’t want him to take that any way other than how I mean it, “All I’ve ever wanted is you, Charlie, and if I can have a life with you, there’s nothing in the world I could ever want more than that.”
“I don’t want to take away your dreams.” More tears gather along his lashes. His breath comes in a shuddering gasp as he shakes his head.