Chapter 25 #3
She tensed. She hated it when he talked like this. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Doubt yourself. Doubt us.”
“I’m just being realistic.”
“Well, me too. And my reality is that I want everything. Call me selfish, but I’m not settling for anything less.”
He swallowed, long and slow. The reflection of the dying fire wavered in his eyes. “Okay. Then I’ll be here, waiting.”
“You won’t change your mind, either?”
“I won’t change my mind ever,” he said, his voice thick.
“Good.” She kissed him. “That reminds me, actually. I have a letter for you.”
Aubrey kept two-thirds of her promise to her father.
Part one: she fell asleep by nine, albeit with Nick wrapped around her like a blanket.
He didn’t say much after she gave him the letter, just read the words several times with the intensity of a hawk bearing down on a mouse.
Then he looked up at her, wonderstruck, and pulled her into a whole-body hug that lasted into sleep.
Part two: she pulled into the cabin’s driveway well before ten the next morning, fully rested and more bright-eyed than ever.
Aubrey waltzed right into the cabin without knocking. She felt . . . new. Freshly forged.
Her dad sat in an easy chair, reading the newspaper. His bushy eyebrows hiked to his hairline. “Morning. You’re here early.”
Aubrey shrugged off his obvious surprise. Nothing could touch her today. Except perhaps the aches in places she’d never had
them before, and the fact that this marked one day down, six to go.
To her relief, the week passed easily enough. She moseyed around the shores of the lake, working on her tan and breathlessly
reliving every moment of her night with Nick.
God, if it got any better than that, she really would pass out, next time.
In the evenings, she played cards with her parents and stayed up late with her father, who surprised her on the last night
by offering her a beer. Her first. Maybe he had ulterior motives, but she chose to see it as a gesture of camaraderie. Like
he’d acknowledged her as a full-fledged adult. An equal.
Still, as they lounged in the living room’s worn leather armchairs, their voices lowered so as not to wake her mother, the
conversation finally—inevitably—turned to New York.
Aubrey sipped, trying not to wrinkle her nose at the beer’s sourness, and endured her father’s questions. She wrapped her
responses in velvet, but nothing could soften the steel at the center.
Yes, Dad, I’m sure. No, Dad, I’m not leaving Henderson yet. Yes, I love Nick. Yes, I’m still going to NYU. Just not this year.
Her father finally gave up and went to bed, shaking his head. Aubrey stayed up to polish off the beer, wishing she had access
to a phone. She wanted to tell Nick about the way the alcohol made her thoughts shimmer at the edges. Had he ever been tipsy
before? What was he even doing right now? Not suffering through too much contact with his father, she hoped. Most likely,
he was lying in bed, dreaming about her.
In the morning, Aubrey woke in a cold sweat. Her head pounded. Her stomach heaved like a rollicking sea. And someone had apparently
taken a hammer to her bones overnight.
She staggered into the kitchen to find her parents leaning over the breakfast table, conferring in low tones. They jerked
apart at her entrance.
Aubrey didn’t stop to wonder why. She just lurched across the room, leaned over the sink, and puked her guts out.
Chairs clattered. Within moments, her mother had her hair pulled back and a soothing hand traveling up and down her back.
“Are you okay?”
Aubrey finished up and spat bile into the sink, clinging to the lip in an effort to keep her legs from giving out. “I don’t
know. I think I’m hungover. I mean, is this what a hangover’s like? Can you even be hungover from one beer?”
“I don’t think so.” Her mother’s hand found her forehead. “Oh, honey, you’re burning up. No, this is something else. You look
like you have the flu.”
Aubrey swayed. Her whole body had gone into revolt. “In July?”
“It happens.” Her mother spoke with the stoic certainty of a nurse with twenty years’ experience behind her. “Come on, let’s
get you back to bed.”
Aubrey did, in fact, have the flu. A fact she only admitted to herself once she’d spent the entire day bed-ridden and aching, lashed by fever and wondering what she possibly could have done to invite such punishment.
Her mother stayed at the cabin with her. After calling to extend the rental, her father headed back to Henderson, having already
used his vacation days. Aubrey grasped at his hand before he left, begging from amid the sweat-dampened sheets. “Nick will
come looking for me. You’ll tell him I’m here, right? That I’m coming back soon?”
“Oh, sweetheart.” He swept a damp tendril away from her forehead. There was something in the way he looked at her. Something
vast and pointed and frightening.
Probably just the fever spiking again. An hour ago, Aubrey had watched a swarm of black butterflies amass on the ceiling.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said.
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
Her relief lasted only moments before misery wiped her mind clean of anything but the sickness.
Aubrey barely slept. For eight days, she thrashed from one contorted position to another, racked by heat and a cough so deep
it tore at her lungs.
The world continued, somehow. Her mother brought soup and crackers that went ignored, and folded-up ice-water washcloths that
didn’t. When the fever finally relinquished its grip, Aubrey slept for sixteen hours straight, then woke on a bright, sun-soaked
Thursday morning with a miraculously clear head. Grit clogged her eyes and her chest ached, but the storm inside her had subsided.
She wriggled out of the sweat-soured sheets and stumbled to the kitchen.
A pan of scrambled eggs sat on the stove.
Beside the coiled burner, a platter offered triangles of toast slathered in butter.
She piled a plate high and scarfed enough food to make her wasted stomach press against the elastic waistband of her pajama shorts.
When she looked up, her mother leaned against the doorway, fondness in her eyes.
“You survived.”
“Barely,” Aubrey croaked.
“Are you ready to go home?”
“God, yes.” She hadn’t seen Nick in over two weeks. It felt like a lifetime. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Her mother drove. On the way, Aubrey dozed, and the extra sleep restored her even further. When Henderson came into view,
she peered past her smiling reflection to the hulking steel mill that would watch over her for another year.
She’d run the gauntlet. Descended to hell, fought through, and clawed her way back. Now her father had no choice but to take
her decision at face value. Because she would not, under any circumstances, allow life to come between her and Nick Thacker.
Of course, Aubrey had no way to know, then, that it already had.