Chapter 19 If You Love Her
IF YOU LOVE HER
FOREST BLAKK
OWEN
She left.
I’m frozen, the cameras long since turned off after Brooke hightailed it out of here, jumping into one of the production vans and hitching a ride with the unsuspecting driver to only God knows where.
The production team ate up the drama, with cameras following Brooke’s path out of the field, and I’m the fool left in her wake.
I'm not even sure how much time has passed. How much has happened since waking up this morning to Brooke’s lips on my throat, her hands in my hair, our legs tangled together. What could’ve changed in the last ten hours to cause our life to so massively implode?
I’m physically incapacitated. Only slightly aware of the scrambling happening around me. Of someone saying my name. The sun beats down on me with such an oppressive heat, it feels hard to breathe. Hard to think past the aching pain in my chest.
“Owen,” a voice breaks through the fog. “Owen, we have to move you downstairs. The other contestants can’t know you accepted the offer.”
The offer. A prize I don’t care about in the least, though someone tells me anyway. It doesn’t matter. Not without Brooke.
I vaguely register that Sumer Morrison has made her way to our roof. Mine and Brooke’s.
Before she says anything, though, Todd steps in front of me, not even bothering to take the camera off the strap that holds it to his chest. He puts his hand on my shoulder, and I realize he’s been the one calling me all along.
“What are you doing, Owen?” The first time I truly hear Todd's voice, he’s accusatory and angry. “Go after her!”
“I don't know if she wants me to.” My first response to Todd is filled with tears.
“I’ve filmed you two for eight weeks, and I’ve seen your B-roll from inside. I don’t know what you were before you came here, and it’s been abundantly clear to all of us that she didn’t either. But you have always known, haven't you?”
Sumer nods her head, lips pursed, agreeing with Toddy Boy. “We’ve seen fake couples here before, Owen—” I start to interrupt, worried they think we tried to deceive them, but she holds up her hand. “You and Brooke are not faking anything.”
We aren’t. We never were.
“She's just scared, man. And she needs you. She needs her husband. You have to go after her,” Todd repeats, and who would have thought that a quick pep talk from the silent cameraman and a musical mega star would be amping me up so much?
I half expect a slap on the butt and an atta boy, but, instead, they both just start herding me towards the ladder that hangs off our trailer.
They might very well just throw me off the thing, but Gloria begins causing a fuss, distracting their efforts.
“You better take that blindfold off of me right now, son. I’ve had about enough of this heat and your manhandlin’.”
“They’re just doing their job, honey.” Clyde’s hand shakes as he blindly puts it on his wife’s.
He can’t see her, but he knows exactly where she’s at.
Gloria leans into him, clearly more at ease in his arms than the crews’.
He’s her safe place. He talks into the air, barely giving notice to how his wife has softened beside him.
“It’s all part of the game. I think we’re winning, Sugar. ”
Suddenly, I know where Brooke is.
“I’m gonna need y’all to get off my roof,” I tell Sumer, Todd, and the small crew of people who’ve joined without my notice. “Now.”
Everyone scatters. I climb down the side of the trailer and take my first steps out of our suite in five days.
“Where do you think she is?” Sumer yells into her megaphone. It’s only then that I see Todd and a crew jumping in a van.
I don’t want an audience for this, so I only yell back, “Where Brooke feels the safest.” Then, I hop into the RAM 3000, peel out of the fair grounds towing our Tinkerbell behind me, and go to get my wife.
After an agonizing twenty-minute drive, I barely put the truck in park before jumping out and racing through the door.
“Brooke!” I shout in the entryway, seeing no sign that she’s here.
My confidence wavers as I flip on the lights and stalk through the living space.
I thought—I hoped—that as scared and unsure as she was, Brooke would have still come home.
To her safe place. To the sheets she loves and the room she swears isn’t hers, but she’s decorated and made her own. “Brooke?” I say again.
That room is the first place I look, but it’s untouched. A few of her belongings are scattered across the space after the chaos of moving in here the week before Suite Hearts. It smells like her, so much so that I have the urge to curl up in those sheets and stay there until she shows up.
But, instead, I close the door softly, look down the hall where my room shares the wall with hers, and that door opens.
Brooke steps out, wrapped in the comforter from my bed, her face is splotchy and her eyes swollen from tears, but she’s here. She’s home.
“Babe…” I whisper, so relieved I can barely speak.
“I got scared,” she cries, shrugging her blanket-covered shoulders.
When I nod my understanding and simply answer with, “I know,” Brooke walks straight into my arms and rests her head on my chest.
“I… I’m… I’m sorry, Owen. I shouldn’t have left.”
I pick Brooke and the comforter up in one swoop and carry her to the bed, because it’s the only place I can imagine us being right now.
We do some of our best talking horizontally.
Tucking her in tight so that she’s safe and warm, and she can’t run as easily, I curl my arms around her in a bear hug. She isn’t going anywhere.
Sobbing, now, in earnest, she mumbles incoherent apologies. So I simply hold her, wiping her cheeks occasionally, and do my best not to weep myself.
I found her. She came home.
Not to her apartment. Not to her room next door. She was here. In my bed.
In our bed.
“I don’t know what happened,” she says, finally taking a breath. “I was so happy…”
My stomach clenches. Was. Past tense.
“Even this morning, I just couldn’t imagine our life looking any better than it did when we woke up today. I didn’t want to leave, Owen. I don’t know why I left. I don’t know—”
“You’re here. And I’m here. Just you and me. That’s all that matters, okay? Let’s talk through it.” I use my finger to tilt her chin towards me, placing a light kiss there, and am filled with gratitude when she kisses me back. “Tell me your fears. One at a time… I’m not going anywhere.”
Her gaze flicks to my bedside table where years’ worth of small, toy Broncos rest. “He worked out of town a lot… my dad. He drove trucks and was gone for weeks at a time. Before every trip he gave mom and me a miniature. VW vans for me… anything and everything for her.”
In all our years of friendship, this is the most Brooke has ever divulged. I give her a small smile, encouraging her to continue.
“I’ve only ever seen the one,” I say, thinking of the mint VW that has rested on her station at work, or the kitchen counter in her apartment, or the bedside table in her room next door.
I’ve long suspected, but now it makes total sense.
Brooke’s been carrying the final piece of her father with her everywhere she goes.
“I threw the rest out before we moved to Honey Hill, but I just couldn’t part with this one.
” She pulls the collectible from somewhere inside the comforter, holding it between us.
“He was funny. He’d dance with me in the kitchen sometimes, and he loved birthdays.
I don’t know, O…” She shrugs. “He was my dad.” Her voice breaks again, and she tries to gather herself.
I’m so proud of her, I can barely contain it.
She just continues proving how incredibly brave she is, right now and every day that she chooses to love people even though she’s been wounded by such a broken form of it.
I know that’s what this confession means for Brooke.
The final brick wall falling piece by piece, but she’s the one tearing it down, allowing me over to the other side.
“Things weren’t always bad, but when they were, they were really bad. The problems he had…”
“The drinking?”
She nods, sniffs, and plays with the collar of my shirt. “Yeah. I think Mom shielded me from most of it. I know he loved me. At some point… he loved us.” She repeats it again, softer, reassuring herself. “He loved me.”
It breaks my heart, knowing the immense hurt Brooke has lived with most of her life because of his abandonment.
How long she’s carried the weight of this pain, a wound that never properly healed.
At the most basic level of her soul, Brooke’s still just a little girl who loves her father and needs to know that she’s loved in return.
I suddenly hate this man I’ve never met. A selfish man who inflicted so much lasting harm on the woman I love most. And I pity him for missing the chance to know the incredible woman Brooke has become.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.” I kiss the crown of her head, her temple, and her mouth, wishing I could erase the pain, even while knowing that this difficult piece of her life is a significant part of what’s molded Brooke into the woman I love.
“So sorry,” I repeat. “I hate that you’ve carried this for so long.
Have you ever talked to anyone about it? ”
She shakes her head. “No. But I think… I know I need to. I need… help, Owen. Don’t you understand? I’m afraid that—”
She stops herself abruptly, sucking in a breath.
“Go on. Tell me.”
“I’m afraid I’m too much. That these broken pieces of me won’t ever be put back together.
That you’ll get the broken bits, but you deserve a whole person.
” She sighs as if her confession is no small relief, then snuggles into me, wrapping her arms around my waist as we both settle into the bed a bit more.
“I’m afraid of what will happen if you sign in Salt Lake or anywhere else, but I’m also afraid of what will happen if you don’t,” she continues.
“That you’ll resent me, and, eventually, you’ll go anyway.
Because… I’m not enough to make you stay. ”
I start to speak, but she places her fingers over my lips, tilting her head to look me in the eyes.
She’s so beautiful. My astonishing, brave wife.
“I’m afraid I love you too much, Owen. That if this doesn’t work, I will never recover.
I’m afraid I’ll become my mom. Holding onto you, memorializing the pieces of our relationship that made it sweet, and never get over it.
What if… wedding vows and marriages become as temporary as seasonal color treatments.
” She clings tighter to me, but her big brown eyes are clearing as all the fears that have kept her from fully opening up come spilling out.
“I’m afraid I’ll disappoint you, or your family, or your friends.
She takes a steadying breath. “Most of all, I’m terrified that I’ll be like him… that I’ll be the one to leave. And today—” Her voice cracks. “Today I did leave you, Owen, and I didn’t want to. Not really. I just… I couldn’t stay.”
Brooke searches my face, looking for something.
Anger? Resentment? Understanding?
I hope all she finds there is resounding love. Acceptance. Compassion.
“When I was sixteen,” I begin, breathing her in, “I fell in love with a girl who made me desperate for her dinosaur T-shirts, her terrible baking, and the crazy confidence she had in my ability to graduate, to get scholarships, and to follow my dreams. She made me crave her love, her affection, her smiles and her belly rubs.”
Brooke laughs lightly through tears.
“That girl… that woman… taught me what friendship and support and unwavering commitment truly mean. What it means to selflessly love someone, asking for nothing in return. You may not have known that kind of love, Brooke, but you have shown it to me every day for ten years.”
I cup her cheek with one hand. She places hers on top.
“Your fears aren’t my fears, Brooke. Because whether it’s an away game, or an endless week between seeing you in college, a day without talking, or a wall separating us”—I gesture to the wall my headboard rests against, knowing the bed she picked out is on the other side—“every moment I’m not with you is a moment I’m not home.
We’re going to disappoint each other. I will let you down at some point.
We’ll fight, we’ll make up, we’ll make out… ”
She laughs again, kissing my chin.
I consider it encouragement to keep going.
“You will drive me crazy with your tiny shorts and your terrible birthday cakes and tantalizing haircuts. And when we’re apart it’s going to be difficult like it’s always been, but we’re gonna work hard at it—at us—everyday.
And we aren’t going to give up. Because we love each other, Brooke, and we always end up back here.
And if it means I need to reassure you everyday for the rest of our lives, I'll happily do so. I’ll fight your fears endlessly if it means we’re together. Babe and Ruth.”
“Babe and Ruth,” she echoes and rests her forehead on my cheek. “I’m sorry, Owen. For everything. Today… and we lost the Suite Hearts after all that time. I just… I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, we didn’t lose, Babe. Not a bit.” I could never consider where we ended up today a loss. “Plus, I think you’re forgetting your exit…”
Her head pops up, obviously remembering. “The offer?”
“Yeah.” I nod. “There’s a shiny new truck and Tinkerbell number four in our driveway with our names on them.”
She begins to settle back into my arms, but I stop her, holding her face in my hands.
“No more apologies, okay? Don’t be sorry, Love.
” I draw her mouth to mine, sealing my promises like the vows on our wedding day, my movements slow and intentional, so there’s no mistaking where this is going. “Just be my wife.”
This is how it will always be, I silently swear. Forever.
“Yes, I want to be your wife,” she says on a whisper, pulling away only to answer, but doesn’t need words again for quite some time.