Chapter 19
Rhett
I wake up to Bailey’s arm thrown over my waist. It’s still early enough to be dark out, and I don’t risk moving in any way to get my eyes on the clock. I don’t want to cut this moment shorter than it will already be.
She’s using my forearm as a pillow since refusing to use any of the ones that were on the bed last night, and her breath is still rhythmic and slow. Her long, copper hair is fanned out across my arm, blown gently by the rattling AC blasting cold air over by the door.
This room is horrible in every way, except for one thing: it has Bailey sleeping right beside me. I’d almost forgotten that moments in life could still be this easy. This calm. And this hard to let go of.
I close my eyes and enjoy the stillness until a bit of sun begins to find its way through a crack in the window shade, falling across the bed in one long sliver of early morning light. It’s going to be time to go soon, when I’d rather stay right here forever.
Shifting my gaze up to the ceiling and, with the new light coming in from outside, I make eye contact with myself in the mirror hanging above.
The intensity I’ve grown used to seeing in my own reflection has dissolved into something that looks startlingly soft.
Content. And my God, if the sight of her sleeping beside me like that isn’t the most gorgeous thing I might have ever seen.
I close my eyes to lock it in before anything else changes, imagining what it might be like to wake up with this feeling again one day.
Minus the motel room, but maybe somewhere else, with the weight of her body sinking into the mattress right next to mine.
Hell, I’d even take this exact room again, every night forever, if it meant waking up like this.
Despite the squeaky springs and the tub, the ridiculous mirror and all the other hellish details that make up this place, I already know the smile I saw on my face just now will return every time I think back on this awful motel, because it gave me this moment.
And it might be the only one I ever get just like it.
I could lie and say that I don’t know what it was about last night that made me nearly throw all my self-control out the window to kiss her.
I could claim temporary insanity from the adrenaline of running away from this guy, or being stuck in a motel room together with only one bed, making me do things I would otherwise never do, but I know that the real reason has nothing to do with any of that.
It’s much simpler, although simple isn’t always better.
It’s because Bailey is my weakness.
My one and only.
There’s no hiding anything when she’s got her eyes on me.
Last night, as she was tracing her fingertips across each one of my scars, it was all there in her eyes. Acceptance, zero blame, as if what made my skin mangled was just another piece of who I am, instead of everything that I have left.
Despite all the time and space we let build up between us, she still gave me that.
I could teach a class on how to distract myself from her. I’ve been doing it for years. As a teenager, I kept my feelings hidden; Axel or her parents were always just a step away, and I could never break their trust by acting on a teenage crush.
And then it was my future with the SEALs, telling myself there would be plenty of other girls, girls I’d find and love much more than I’d ever loved her.
But I’ve been out in the world since then. And I’ve seen other girls.
There’s no one else like her.
I wanted to see the world when we were younger, but it took seeing the worst of it to realize that I’d already experienced the best it had to offer.
Watching her sleep soundly, the tilt of her nose, the perfect rim of her lips. She’s somehow impossibly, unmistakably here. And even more impossibly, it’s up to me now to protect her. To not let these feelings blind me to whatever else might be lurking around the next corner while we run.
Every lesson I’ve taught myself about how to distract myself from Bailey is about to be put to the test because I can’t fuck this up.
My chest constricts, heavy with the weight of knowing that someone outside of this room right now might want to hurt her, and that I’m the only one standing in his way.
Mistakes are not an option for me this time around. And neither is forgetting why I’m here at all. Bailey needs me. It’s just that I’m now starting to realize how much I might need her, too.
* * *
Two hours after checking out, we’re driving down the main street of Cedar Shores, the one with three blinking lights and a few more stop signs than the last time I was here to keep weekend and summer traffic in order.
We left early enough that there was no trace of that red truck on the road, leaving town behind us, or any of the rest of the way here.
It must have been a false alarm, or we lost him by leaving so early.
Driving down the same shops and restaurants now feels like stepping back in a time capsule that hasn’t been opened in years. There are a few more businesses that have popped up or exchanged hands in recent years, but it’s mostly all the same.
“Emerald’s is now Ridley’s?” Bailey exclaims as we pass the one and only grocery store in town.
“Looks like the Prices put an addition on the lodge,” I answer when we pass the old lakefront lodge owned by our friend’s family.
“I wonder if Savannah still works there,” Bailey muses. “It’d be so fun to see her again.”
She’s practically bouncing off the passenger seat, peering out the window, calling off every new name printed on a shop sign as we make our way down the narrow road with sidewalks nearly as wide as the street itself on either side.
It leads down a small hill toward the sprawling alpine lake where the town presses up against its shores, curled around it like a cat keeping warm by the fire, the very heart at the center of this town.
The water shimmers, almost blinding us with the light of the sun, but I don’t care to look away.
I’d rather be blinded than miss the view.
It’s so beautiful here.
Directly across the surface of the water, I try to spot the cabins. The lake is a few miles across, so each house looks more like a tiny dollhouse sitting on the horizon, nearly swallowed up by the line of trees and mountains looming behind them like a movie set.
We take our time, circling the lake slowly on an unpaved road we used to fly down on our bikes, until Bailey points out the windshield and we finally see it.
“There it is!” she yells, turning to me with a grin, as if there’s a chance that I’d miss it.
Tattletale Lane. That old double drive.
I pull onto the gravel that’ll lead us to the Jones and Monroe cabins sitting side by side, quietly awaiting our return all this time.
Rows of towering pine trees rise up on either side of the car, and their pine cones crunch beneath our tires as we slowly make our way down toward the water’s edge, lapping up behind the houses.
A huge gray squirrel sprints across the path before scampering up one of the trees, shaking its tail at us, as if it’s cheering us on.
Heat pours into the car as the wind that had been billowing through the windows the whole way here slows to a stop just as we do.
“Wow,” Bailey breathes, sounding stuck in a daydream. “I can’t believe we’re here.”
She leans forward to peer through the windshield.
Her parents’ cabin is red with white gingerbread trim, while ours is made of thick, side-stacked pine trees — a proper log cabin tucked into the woods.
They sit about a quarter-acre apart, while everything between them is a bit overgrown, filling the air with pollen from wildflowers and weeds.
Our parents share the cost of a maintenance company that checks in on the cabins, making sure everything doesn’t get too overgrown, but like most of the cabins around the lake, the yard is kept a bit rugged and raw.
Everything looks just as picturesque and perfect as I remember.
I should come back more.
We should all come back.
Without another word, we get out of the car and stand shoulder to shoulder at the bumper.
Blue-gray water shimmers behind the cabins in the early morning light.
There are no other structures in sight other than the boathouse and the town’s shoreline on the far side of the water, straight across, which looks just as microscopic as these two houses did when we first drove into Cedar Shores.
It’s as quiet as I remember, with not much more than the breeze rustling through the trees and the slow, gentle waves lapping up against the sand. There are other cabins around here, but only through thick groves of overgrowth, hidden down dirt paths that I can barely make out anymore.
The air is thinner up here, too, I think. And drier.
“Hello,” Bailey whispers up at the houses. “I’ve missed you.”
I smile. “It’s been too long, hasn’t it?”
“I wonder if they’re as happy to see us as we are to see them,” she muses, staring up at the trees.
“Almost like reuniting with some old friends, right?”
She nods. “Picking right up where we left off. A little older and overgrown, but still the same beneath all this, I think.” She turns to me, eyes shining, then adds, “I hope.”
Standing right here, within hours of waking up beside her, is going to make staying at this spot, with no one else around, nearly impossible. It’s like something I always dreamed of, but now it’s happening, I’m not sure how to act or what to say to keep it all light and easy.
I turn to get the bags out of the trunk.
“Wait,” she says. “Let’s leave those. I don’t want to wait another second. We’ll grab them after we go down to the water.”
“I like that idea,” I tell her, pressing a hand to her back, encouraging her to lead the way.
She smiles over her shoulder as she starts walking, and I fall in line behind her.