Chapter 39 Elijah
ELIJAH
One week after Kelsey returns from her honeymoon, I’m on a flight to Boston. Easton meets me in baggage claim, even though I told her not to, and I’m not complaining because I don’t know how I’d have stood to wait the twenty minutes it would have taken to get to her apartment.
I pull her against me tight. How did I go for so many years without this? I suppose you just get used to pain over time. But the time apart is unthinkable now. I don’t think I could go through it again.
These weeks haven’t been easy for her, either, but for different reasons.
Thomas has been polite, and they still text each other when an interesting study comes out—I’m mostly not jealous about this—but she has gotten the cold shoulder from several people she once considered friends.
She’s also working her ass off to make sure no one can say Thomas was carrying her research until now.
This semester has only begun, but when I video chat with her, I can hear the exhaustion in her voice and see the circles under her eyes.
Half the time when I call late at night, she’s still in the lab—when I apologize, she laughs and reminds me that she would be a lot less happy if she were with Thomas right now.
Which is true. The next year will be hard on both of us, but it will be worth it in the end.
“So, you got everything covered?” she asks once I put her back down.
“Yeah.” The guys who work for me are more than competent, and hopefully that means they will be ready to take over my business when I eventually leave.
At the moment, everything is up in the air—Easton doesn’t even know where she’ll be next fall, and I’ll still need an income until then.
But my mom’s decision has changed everything—not simply with Easton.
I’m applying to doctoral programs for next fall, in the Boston area and elsewhere, waiting to see where Easton ends up.
“The guys had no problem with being left in charge,” I tell her, twining my fingers through hers as we walk toward the parking garage. “The real problem was my mother.”
She stops in place. “Your mother? I thought Kelsey was watching her this weekend?”
I laugh. “She wanted to come with me this weekend and didn’t understand why I said no.”
Easton grins. “She could have sat on the couch with my roommates while we were in the bedroom. Nothing awkward about that at all. They’d probably make her watch The Kissing Booth, however, all three movies.”
“I don’t have that sort of relationship with my mother, and I don’t care to have that sort of relationship with your roommates either.
” I suppose I’ll need to start saving money if I’m going to be a grad student again, but I’m not taking any half measures during this first weekend of having her all to myself and knowing she’s mine.
“I got us a hotel room for the next two nights.”
“How’s the bathroom?” she asks, unlocking an ancient Jetta. I may not have Hawk’s income, but we need to get her another car. This thing barely looks like it’ll run.
“You hate baths, remember?”
She bites her lip. “I don’t mind being bent over a sink once in a while, however.”
I grin. I’m sure we’ll end up there eventually, but first I’m going to undress her, and have her show me all of her scars—the place where Kevin once broke her wrist, the place on her temple when she got swung into a wall, the cut on her thigh from a barbed-wire fence.
I’m going to kiss every last one of those marks and do my best to carry the weight of her past. And then we’re going to map this future of ours out, once and for all.
After that, and only after that, I might take her into the bathroom.