Chapter 25 #2
“Yeah. They did. And he tried to shield her from everything he was going through, which only pushed her away. I started editing that first draft after you got hurt. You know how some people rage-clean when they’re stressed?
” I smile bitterly, remembering the way I’d almost erased the whole original draft while in a mood one day, ripping it apart at the seams, feeling like a child had pieced it together years before.
I’d tried reaching out to him so many times, asking when I could come up for a visit, or if he had any interest in taking a quick trip to the lake.
Maybe a reunion there with the four of us, but his answers had all been clipped and distant.
“Well, I rage-edited the story,” I tell him.
“I tore through that original draft, pretty much ripped it to shreds.”
His smile fades, leaving his eyes completely as I explain.
“I can imagine it.” He nods. “But why didn’t you just let yourself keep the fairy tale, Bay? Why didn’t you just hang on to it with the hope that you could have that version in the end?”
“Because contrary to how you see me, I don’t write love stories to make them pretty, Rhett.
I write them to be real. Writing is like this weird form of therapy, sometimes.
So, writing about two people who cared about each other enough to let their relationship simmer in the background while they worked on themselves felt more realistic than the fantasy it started out being when I was seventeen. ”
“And this — all this — this is how you felt about me while I was gone?” he asks, tapping the cover of the book. It’s full of earmarked corners, I notice now. Almost every page.
I shrug. There’s a lot of anger in that book now, but also a lot of hurt and healing and accepting someone all over again who’s had to change.
That’s the part of the story that, at the time, was still just a fantasy.
Rhett hadn’t allowed me in when this book went to print, but I’d imagined how it might feel anyway and had made the story into what I hoped it would be.
“Like I said, most of the books I write are inspired by real life,” I tell him. “If you’d ever gotten more than a few chapters into one, you might have seen that my characters tend to be incredibly flawed. But only because it makes them relatable.”
“Because being flawed is what makes people root for them?” he asks.
“No, it’s what makes people care.”
He nods, and I can see it all sinking in, or at least I hope that it is.
“I’m not the man you wrote in this book,” he begins, taking a slow step toward me. “This guy in here might be flawed, but I’d put money on having him beat.”
“Good,” I tell him, allowing a slow smile to reach my eyes. “Because I don’t know if I’m the girl in the book now either. Characters can’t evolve once they’re printed on a page. But that’s not us.”
“Bailey,” he starts, but stops. His voice is muddy, and I don’t know if he’s upset that I put all that on paper and published something that could have been kept private. No matter how fictionalized it ended up being, at its core, that story in his hands is about us.
“Rhett,” I jump in. “I’m not seventeen anymore. I know the difference between a fairy tale and reality. I—”
“Just let me finish,” he interrupts, and I tuck my lips in to stop more words from pouring out. I’ve already said — and written — enough. It’s his turn now. I close my eyes to listen, bracing myself. “I know you’re not seventeen anymore. I knew before I opened this book that you’ve changed, too.”
“I have.” I nod, hoping that he doesn’t hate what he’s seen of me now.
“But it was the memory of you that kept me grounded. Through all that happened.”
I open my eyes. That’s not at all what I expected him to say.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I thought about this place after every mission was over,” he begins, swallowing something back.
“Not just the lake. I thought about you. You have no idea how many times I’d be sucking on the tail end of a cigarette while thinking of you — and I don’t even smoke — just to try and get my hands to stop shaking after something horrific happened or some near miss nearly took one of us out.
Picturing the sunset here reflecting in your eyes, or that face you made every time you jumped off the dock, laughing once you came up, all of it.
Just trying to calm my nerves. More times than I can count.
The memory of you in this place was everything. ”
My heart begins to throb, and I try rubbing the pain away. Not realizing that my eyes are welling up until they start burning with too many tears to blink them all out.
“You did?” My voice wobbles. I try to imagine Rhett riding in some helicopter or armored vehicle back to some base, surrounded by his teammates who were just as shaken up and scared as he was. All the while, he’s picturing me.
He nods, taking another step closer.
“I did.” He smiles, and this time it reaches all the way up to his eyes. “I’d make myself drum up the exact angle of your lips when you smiled at me.” I grin, and one of my tears slips out. “Yeah,” he mirrors my smile and taps my chin with the top of his finger, “just like that.”
I bite my lip to stop my whole face from twisting up.
He leans in to swipe away another tear running down my face, brushing his knuckles against the damp part of my cheek once it’s gone.
“What else?” I ask, wanting to know every detail he’ll tell me from our time apart.
“Also, that goofy look you get when you tell a joke, mostly to make yourself laugh,” he says, grinning wider.
“I pictured everything I could remember. You were always there with me, Bay. The whole, entire time. As real as the tattoo I got before I left, so I’d never forget what this place felt like with you in it. ”
Another tear slips, and this time I brush it away with my fist.
“I love that,” I tell him, watching his eyes, wondering why, if he felt that way, did he stay away so long after getting back? “But if you needed me there, why didn’t you want me with you after you got back?”
“It might not make any sense, but I think I needed that safe haven I’d created in my mind to stay exactly how it was — using the memories I’d stored up as an escape.
I couldn’t risk changing anything I remembered about you or this place because I used the memories as a life raft.
But, all this time, I should have been getting to know you now. ”
“Because you don’t need those memories anymore?” I ask.
“Because there’s not one thing I can remember that’s better than this.” He cups my face in his palms, and I slide my hands over his forearms and wrists. He bends to press his forehead to mine. “You are my safe haven, Bailey. Now and then. When I’m with you everything else just disappears.”
Something inside me detonates, and I know I will never be able to pick up the pieces and arrange myself back into who I was before hearing him say any of those words.
I’ve imagined what things must have been like for him so many times, but never once would I have guessed that the memory of me was there, helping him get through the worst parts of it.
“I know the feeling,” I tell him. “I read my first draft of that book probably five hundred times, just to feel closer to you while you were gone.”
“Then you know exactly what it feels like to have your heart beating halfway across the world,” he says. “Because that’s how it felt.”
“No regrets,” I tell him as his thumbs brush gently across my cheeks. “Because without wading through the middle—”
“You’d never get to the end,” he finishes. “But I like to think I’m ready for a happier ending this time.” He grins.
“Oh, we’re nowhere near the end,” I tell him, raising a brow, like he couldn’t be more wrong.
That look — the one that spells nothing but trouble — rolls in across his face as he lowers his voice to that gravelly rasp that sets my limbs on fire.
“Okay then, kid, we’re just getting started,” he tells me. “I could get used to that.”
I bite my lip, about to respond, when he pulls me in. Finally, his lips find mine, and everything begins to spin.
His hands — the hands I’ve waited to touch me for years — are everywhere, feeling better than any words I could write to describe it.
Holding my jaw before slipping back into my hair, wrapping the strands around his fist, sending shivers down my spine, one after the other.
His kiss deepens, devouring my mouth, his body pressing against mine, rallying every nerve inside me until all I can think about is what I want his body to do to mine next.
Lost in a frenzy of hands rushing through my hair, down my sides, then back up to my cheeks.
He pulls back to look into my eyes, and his thumbs brush my lips, like he can’t stand to leave them. I bite gently on the tip of a thumb, grinning, before shoving it aside and diving back into his kiss again, driven by a lifetime of us waiting to implode together, just like this.
I open my mouth to his, and his tongue finds mine, tasting, then sucking against my bottom lip, while holding me steadily against him.
Pressing his hands against my hips, he walks me back toward the counter without breaking our kiss, then he sandwiches me in, the width of his shoulders engulfing my frame.
He hoists me up onto the counter, and I sit on the very edge so he can slide between my knees. He brings me back into his kiss with his hands clasping on either side of my jaw.
He’s hard between my legs already, and the feeling of Rhett wanting me is better than I ever imagined, better than anything I’ve ever written about, and I wonder how anyone — past, present, or future — could ever top a kiss or a feeling quite like this.
By the time we pull back, breathless, his eyes are more intense than I’ve ever seen them. Realizing that I’m the one who’s made him feel like this makes me dizzy when he plants his hands on my hips, lifting me closer.
“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” he growls into my lips. “Ever again.”