Will
Chapter Thirty-Five
There was no world that existed in which Theo and Elsie should be a ‘we.’
“We’re going to the Fall Fest.”
“We’re looking for parking.”
Give me a break.
Ava and I walked a few feet behind them while I tried to wrap my head around what the hell was going on. This morning I’d been laying the groundwork to ask Elsie out, and several hours later she’s going on a date with Theo?
I knew it was a date because Elsie looked absolutely stunning in a way that made it hard to look at, because I knew it was for him.
She always looked beautiful, but it was clear she put in more effort than usual tonight. She was in a dress, showing off legs I hadn’t seen before, and while half of me wanted to find her sweatpants to keep her warm in the chilly November air, the other half of me couldn’t help but stare.
Her hair was sleek and shiny, all brushed out and coming down to her mid-back. I hadn’t seen it completely down like this before, and if I hadn’t decided already, after this moment, the precise shade of red that made up Elsie’s hair was now and forever going to be my favorite color.
And her eyes looked…bigger somehow? I don’t know. I didn’t know what the hell girls did when playing around with makeup. All I knew was that the green eyes I’d become particularly fond of staring into were suddenly emphasized to a degree that made me unable to look away from.
Not that she was meeting my eyes too much.
There was a decided shift in her behavior toward me, and no matter what, I wasn’t letting the night go by without clearing the air.
At least to apologize for whatever misunderstanding had happened between us, and promise I wouldn’t try to kiss her again.
And maybe convincing her that even if she didn’t want to date me, she shouldn’t date Theo either.
At least, not where I had to be witness to it.
“Hey,” Ava said, distracting me from my current mission of glaring a hole into Theo’s back as he walked Elsie toward the town square. “Are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, you sort of look like you’re going to punch something. Or someone.”
“This is how I always look,” I said, maneuvering around a group of kids running headfirst in my direction.
“You’re upset. About Elsie and Theo.”
I said nothing.
“I’m sorry, Will,” she said, keeping an impressive stride beside me. “I really am. I know it’s hard to see her with someone else.”
I paused, letting Elsie and Theo get farther out of range of our conversation before turning to Ava to deny it. But when I opened my mouth, I realized I was too exhausted to lie anymore.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It sucks.”
“I know,” she said, her words holding more weight than either of us wanted to discuss. “It hurts.”
I didn’t want to feel sorry for Ava. In fact, I’d spent the last five years so furious with her, telling myself that she should’ve had better control over herself. Her emotions. That she should’ve been better at suppressing her feelings for the sake of all parties involved.
But now? Watching Theo reach out to grab Elsie’s dangling hand, I wondered if maybe I could understand her better now.
Because no matter how in control of myself I prided myself on being—there was nothing I could do to suppress the overwhelming, confusing explosion of feelings that the redhead in front of me had drawn out of hiding.
“For what it’s worth,” I said, exhaling five years’ worth of sighs in one, “I am sorry.”
For how I treated you. For holding onto the grudge. For ruining our friendship and never being able to move on from the past.
She shrugged, her slim shoulders moving up and down quickly, trying to brush off what she perceived as my empty words.
But this was important. And I couldn’t let us go on like this any longer. Like it or not, she was family. She would always be family, whether or not Matthew was here. Whether or not they had gotten married. She’d been one of us since we were six years old, and nothing could ever change that.
“No, Ava, listen,” I said, needing her to hear it. “I’m sorry for the way everything happened. And I’m sorry for the way I reacted to it.”
She sniffed, blinking up at the string lights around the gazebo.
“The truth was, you were a good wife to my brother. You made him happy. You made his life better. I should’ve been thanking you all this time for that, but I was too busy blaming you for something I’m just realizing you might not have had as much control over as I thought.”
She blinked, eyes narrowed at me in what looked to be a fight between suspicion and hope.
“Thank you for the sacrifices you made for him.” I tried to sound as earnest as I felt. “Thank you for making him laugh and smile and have something to look forward to every day. And thank you for taking care of his heart. I’m more grateful to you than you know.”
She inhaled, and I no longer doubted she felt the weight of the loss the way I did.
“I did love him, you know. Even if it was in a way you don’t understand.”
“I know that, Ava.” I nodded, because why else would she have stuck around all those years if she hadn’t?
“I do. I’m sorry if I put you in an unfair situation.
I had no right to try to change your mind about something that important.
I think I played a bigger part in our dynamic than I’ve ever been able to admit. ”
She stared at me, incredulous at the words I was saying, as I was to be saying them. But it was long overdue.
“Look, family fights sometimes, right?” I asked, staring down at her watering brown eyes. “Maybe five years was a little excessive, but we have plenty of time ahead of us to make up for it, okay?”
For a minute she said nothing, and then, all at once, she launched herself at me, wrapping her arms around me in a hug of such gratitude, I couldn’t help but give her a pat on the back in reciprocation.
“Thank you,” she said, pulling back. “You don’t know what it means to me to hear you say that.”
I shrugged, feeling guilty that I’d had the power to fix things for so long and had chosen not to out of sheer stubbornness.
“You know what else family does for each other?”
I raised a brow, a silent tell me in my expression.
She smiled and then looked over to Theo and Elsie with a look of absolute determination.
“They help each other.”
I never would’ve expected Ava to be a good wingwoman, let alone mine, but she was proving to be an extremely helpful ally.
Every time Theo looked on the verge of grabbing Elsie’s hand or trying to pull her away from us, Ava was there to swoop in and distract him.
Solely because of her, Theo and Elsie’s solo date had turned primarily into a group one.
Which, as it turned out, might’ve been a relief for Theo, who quickly realized that Elsie had little to no interest in his high school glory stories he continued to reminisce on.
When that didn’t work, he reached for her hand, and right before I was about to launch between them to put a stop to it, Ava beat me to it by leading Theo to the pumpkin carving display, declaring that we all had to cast our votes.
Ava chose the objective best: a near perfect replica of the Mona Lisa.
Theo chose the one most aligning with his interests: a giant, if unremarkable, Yankees logo.
Elsie chose the most ridiculous one: a pumpkin carved to look like it was retching, with its pulp overflowing out of the mouth in a completely disgusting way.
And me, after a fair amount of pestering, landed on choosing Elsie’s favorite.
The four of us stuck together like glue, and if I didn’t have any opportunity to talk to Elsie privately, at least Theo didn’t, either.
Around the time we stopped at the apple cider stand, the sun was setting, Elsie was shivering, and all I wanted to do was put her in my truck and drive her away from all this insanity.
And all she wanted was an iced cider slushie.
A request she made through chattering teeth, after the rest of us ordered the perfectly sane choice of hot.
Everyone had started walking off, but I lingered at the food truck, buying a donut that I slipped into my pocket for later.
As the last of the daylight faded, I hoped the darkness would be enough of a reason to drive us out, but then the square lit up by the artificial lights strung up around the perimeter, and I realized the night might only be starting.
“This is perfect,” Elsie breathed out. “The only thing missing is—hayride!”
Her eyes lit up at the sight of Tom pulling around the bend in his pickup truck. It didn’t matter to her that the hay wagon attached to the back was currently filled with families and small children—I knew right then that Elsie wouldn’t let us get away with skipping out on it.
After the families unloaded, Theo climbed on first, and before Elsie had a chance to go up after him, Ava cut in front of her and planted herself firmly in the seat next to Theo, leaving Elsie and me at the end.
Theo looked pissed, but I didn’t care, and before he could object or ask to switch spots with someone, Ava had him engaged in one of her conversations that left little room for him to escape.
I bit back a smirk. I’d been on the receiving end of one of those talks more times in my life than I could count, and now for the first time, I was oddly grateful for Ava’s uncanny ability to hold someone hostage with words.
Tom waited a few moments for the back of the trailer to fill up with more people, while Elsie and I sat in silence, staring at Theo and Ava on the seat across from us.
Ava spared one glance toward me in the midst of her monologue, her eyes widening in a way that I knew was my call to action.
The opening she left me would be a waste if I couldn’t figure out what to say to the redhead sitting beside me.
I cleared my throat.
“Are you having a good time?”
She looked over at me, as if surprised that I had broken the silence.
But why? Talking was the one thing that had never been an issue between us. What had changed so drastically between us since the morning?
“I am,” she said, and then after a moment’s delay asked, “Are you?”
I couldn’t tell her that I could watch paint dry with her and have fun, so I just nodded while we slipped into silence once more.
The truck started with a rumble and set off on its course around the town square.
Elsie’s legs bounced up and down restlessly, and at first I thought it was nerves or maybe excitement, but after a few minutes I realized.
She was cold. And I was sure the slushie she was sucking down didn’t help.
I slipped my jacket off. If she wanted us to sit in silence, that was fine—but I wasn’t going to let her freeze, no matter how pissed at me she was.
“What are you—” she started, as I draped my jacket over her legs.
“You look very pretty, but I can’t watch you shiver anymore, okay?”
She smiled at me, grateful. And to my relief, her shivers subsided. “I think I have brain freeze,” she admitted glumly.
“I know.” I snorted, taking the slushie from her hands and replacing it with the hot cider I hadn’t touched. “That’s why I made sure to get you a backup option.”
She beamed at me with gratitude, as if I’d handed her the moon. It was too easy to make her happy. Dangerous, too. Because it made me want to keep pushing it, to give her more, if only so she’d keep staring at me like that.
But then, before my eyes, her face fell.
“What?” I asked quickly, ready to remedy whatever it was.
“You don’t need to do this, you know.” She stared down at the jacket, and then back at the cider. “Make yourself uncomfortable to take care of me.”
“I’m not uncomfortable,” I told her. “What made me uncomfortable was seeing you freeze your ass off, okay?”
She was silent, which, in a way, said everything.
“Are you pissed at me about something?”
She shifted uncomfortably, staring out at the town so she didn’t have to look at me.
My heart plummeted.
“Els?”
“I shouldn’t be,” she said finally, hands gripping the paper cup hard enough that I worried it might spill on her.
“Shouldn’t be, but you are?” I angled my head down, trying to see behind her curtain of hair.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Could I bribe you for the truth?”
Interest piqued, she arched a brow at me.
“Check the pocket.” I nodded down at my jacket on her legs.
“Is it going to be something creepy?” She eyed me skeptically.
“What type of creepy thing do you think I’m keeping in my pocket?”
“I don’t know,” she laughed, “it just sounds like some type of line.”
“Just look.” I rolled my eyes, nodding down toward it.
She stared at me suspiciously before reaching inside and pulling out the bag with the donut.
Green eyes raised to mine, wide with surprise.
“For me?” she asked in a small voice.
“I figured you’d need a snack at some point,” I told her.
Her eyes watered, and I couldn’t tell if I’d pissed her off more or what the hell was going on. She stared down at her lap, fingers tugging at the paper wrapping.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” I leaned in closer. “Elsie, if I did something to upset you, you need to tell me so I can fix it.”
“Will, I—” she started, voice so soft that I had to lean in even closer to hear.
She whispered something, and I prayed to God that I’d be able to focus on her words instead of the smell of her hair around us, or how tauntingly close her lips were.
I could do it. This time I wouldn’t hesitate. I just had to lean in and—
Thump.
Our foreheads collided, bodies springing back at the unintended contact, and we both looked around, only to realize that the truck had puttered to a stop, back in the spot we’d been picked up in.
I guess the thing about a hayride around the town square was that there was only so much area to cover.
“Ouch.” Elsie rubbed the spot where our foreheads had smacked together. “You have a hard head.”
I didn’t have time to say anything else, because Theo was already coming over to get her, as if she were supposed to be with him and not me.
And I had a feeling he wouldn’t leave room for any other opening that night.