Chapter 15
I woke up the next morning wrapped in Caleb’s arms, and it was like its own affirmation.
Today will be wonderful, it told me.
It was a gift.
But Sir was nudging me, telling me that it was also the time to get up because he needed to go out in the yard.
I let him and then went into my bedroom, but instead of putting on my running clothes, I changed into something different.
I brushed my hair and my teeth and then looked at myself in the mirror.
“You’ve changed,” I said to my reflection.
“You really have.” It wasn’t a question anymore.
“Sir, stay here,” I told him, patting my bed, and he found a good spot and settled in.
I went back into Caleb’s room, where I could hear the water running in his bathroom, and when he came out, I had settled myself against the pillows and was ready.
I felt really, really ready.
“Uh…” He stared. “Hell. What are you doing?”
“You love me,” I stated, and he nodded.
His jaw hung open. “You want more between us, and you want us to be together.” He nodded again.
“I want that, too. Because I love you, too.”
Then a big smile spread across his face, one he didn’t try to hide.
“You do?”
“My Lord, with your background in math, you could have added up all the signs! Or maybe we should have shown you more Scooby Doo demos about detective work.” I smiled back at him.
“Yes, I do. I love you.”
He walked to the bed and sat next to me.
“Is that why you’re wearing, uh, that?”
I also looked down at the teal bra and little shorts.
My cousins had been right, and this had been a great purchase.
“It is.”
He picked up one of the packets I’d placed on the nightstand.
“Is that why you brought condoms?”
“It is,” I repeated.
“Sir’s in my room, so he won’t bother us or be traumatized.”
“Look at you,” Caleb said again, and he did.
“I’m having trouble remembering…I’m sorry, I’ve lost the thread.”
“This is the thread,” I said, reaching up to kiss him.
I tasted the mint of his toothpaste.
“We’re the thread.”
He put his hands on my shoulders and then rubbed them up and down my arms. “You feel so nice.”
It did feel nice, and even nicer when he leaned to kiss me again, putting his chest against the teal bra and my skin.
His hands slid around me so that he could pull me closer.
I wanted his touch everywhere, because it felt soothing and exhilarating at the same time.
It was just right.
So was the kissing, which started slow and easy but then, unlike before, built to more.
We kissed harder and deeper, and he pressed me onto my back, then turned us over so that I lay on top.
“Do the knee thing,” I said.
I was already out of breath.
“This?” He tilted his thigh, his quad hard and strong from the years of running, in between mine.
That pressure was amazing.
“Yes, that.” I rocked my hips, and I licked my lips and closed my eyes.
He unclasped my bra and palmed my bare breasts.
“This is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. Keep doing it.” He massaged and rolled my nipples between his fingers.
“Caleb, it feels so good,” I told him.
I moaned and his eyes widened.
“Hell. Kayleigh, we have to take your clothes off.”
I couldn’t do that fast enough and there was nothing slow and easy now.
His mouth was on my neck, my collarbones, my nipples.
His hands gripped my butt, slid up my thighs, and felt how ready I was at the crux of them.
“You’re really good at this,” I gasped.
“This?” His fingers moved in a circle over my clit.
“You like this?”
“Yes, but…oh, Caleb…yes, but all of it,” I managed to say.
“You’re really good at relationships.”
“I love you,” he told me again, and I couldn’t hear it enough.
I also couldn’t get enough of how he was touching me, and he liked when I did it, too.
His body froze and tightened when I caressed him, up and down the soft skin of his shaft and cupping the sacks behind it.
I watched as pleasure overtook all his features and his eyes closed.
Then he slowly blinked them back open.
“You’re good, too. You’re good at making me love you.”
“You like this?” I asked, just as he had.
“Yes,” he hissed. He breathed and tried to focus.
“And I like everything else, too. I like how you stir your coffee and sing along to the clinks. I like how you try to carry all the groceries in one trip. I like how you…I like everything,” he said, but now he was breathing so hard that it was difficult to understand.
“Let me.”
He kissed down my body, from my breasts to my thighs, not missing too much.
He buried his face between my legs and moved his tongue like he’d moved his fingers, massaging my clit as he reached inside me.
My head turned from side to side on the pillow and I heard myself talking, telling him that I loved him and it was just right—just right!
And then it washed over me and I arched my back, wanting him more.
“Now,” I said, and he answered yes.
We moved together, fitting so perfectly and with the rhythm perfect, too.
Caleb touched me and it was almost too much, like I was going to go to pieces, and then, suddenly, he surged his hips and was so deep inside me that I lost my breath and came again.
He shuddered, his movements frantic, and he pulled us onto our sides so we could hold each other.
“I love you,” I whispered.
It might have been too quiet for him to hear, but I knew that he felt it.
I knew that I felt his love in return.
“I think we should tell your family today,” he said.
“I think they’ll see, anyway.”
“Tell them what?”
“That we’re together, and that it’s permanent. It may be that some relationships don’t work out, but ours is going to.”
“They’ll be very happy for us,” I answered.
“I’m very happy for us.”
“I know someone who isn’t.”
“My Lord, that’s Sir?” I picked up my head.
“I thought there were a lot of ambulances driving past.”
“He’s been howling for a while. Should I go get him?”
He did, and then we felt like the dog needed to understand the new situation, too.
“You’ll always be our first baby,” I explained, “but I’ve been thinking that I might want one or more of the human variety, sometime in the future.”
Caleb, whose chest I was lying on, took that opportunity to palm my butt.
“It sounds like the beginning of plan,” he agreed.
“Sir will be an excellent big brother and I don’t have any doubts about your skills as a mother. I don’t have any doubts about you at all.”
In not too long, we had to get up for real, because we were picking up Aunt Paula and bringing her down the mountain for church.
Sir was going to stay with Marc, who had texted to request his presence, so we had a few things to accomplish before the service started.
“Hello,” my aunt greeted me when I knocked.
“Good morning. Are you ready for your ride?” We had made up since Sir’s party and I didn’t hold a grudge anymore, but she was still wary and I knew that she was watching what she said a lot more carefully than before.
“Here, you take the front seat,” I directed as we walked out, and she got in and then looked at Caleb.
“Well, there it is,” she announced.
“Y’all have finally gone and—”
She was watching what she said, but you couldn’t change everything about yourself.
“Aunt Paula, do not talk about our sex life,” I warned, cutting her off.
“As long as you’re admitting that it exists,” she said, and chuckled.
At her heart, she wouldn’t change, but she could polish off rough spots or maybe even chip out any serious imperfections, as you could with a gemstone that wasn’t ersatz.
It was just like how I was still the same Kayleigh, but better after some work.
And she did do an admirable job with self-restraint, although I was certain that she wasn’t the only person in my family with something to say.
After we dropped off Sir and attended church, we drove over to Aubree and Wyatt’s.
It was a lot like I thought Caleb’s place could be in the future: a farmhouse that was cute and non-scary.
It was full of McCourts who grinned at me and did things like hit Caleb in the arm, telling him that he was a lucky man.
“I am,” he kept answering them, very seriously.
Then he would look at me and smile and I nearly swooned.
“KayKay, I’m so happy for you,” Aria said and she got tears in her eyes, because that was Aria.
“I’m so glad you got that bra set,” Cassidy added.
“The three of us are doing pretty well, aren’t we?”
“We are,” I agreed, and we hugged each other.
We really were.
With a cooler of leftovers loaded up, Caleb and I got ready to meet Marc and Sir and find out what they had been up to.
His mother and sisters had their suspicions already.
“Taygen,” Michaela stated.
“Apparently, she told him that she wanted to see Sir today.”
“She’s always welcome to visit him at our house,” I said.
“Unless Sir isn’t the only thing she wanted to see.”
“Obviously, she’s using your dog as a blind to creep up on Marc. Like Birnam Wood!”
“Uh, that does make sense. It’s from Macbeth ,” Caleb said to me, and that made sense, too.
Their branch of the family had always been very literary.
“We should read that play when we’re done with Hamlet .”
“We haven’t gotten very far with it,” I reminded him, and he blushed because the night before, we’d done things besides reading and then this morning, those things had gone even further.
He was so cute that I had to kiss him, and multiple members of my family whistled.
But it was time to go, and my parents were clearly concerned.
They pulled me to the side as Caleb waited with Aunt Paula on one arm and the cooler under the other.
“It’s a wonderful thing,” I assured them.
“He’s a very stable and normal person. You don’t have to worry about him.”
They nodded but their expressions didn’t change, and I understood that Caleb wasn’t the problem.
“You don’t have to worry about me, either,” I continued.
“But I know you will because you love me. That why I worry, too, like about Cassidy’s baby and if Sir’s diet has enough calcium, and if dogs need calcium. Before, I gave you so many reasons for concern but I won’t do that anymore, I promise. I’m going to be perfect.”
“We’re not trying to punish you for the past, Kayleigh,” my mom said, and my father nodded.
“We also don’t expect perfect, baby,” he told me.
“We’re going to try hard to let go some.”
“Maybe that should be the deal,” I answered.
“We’ll try our hardest. I’ll do everything I can to deserve your trust, as well as your love.”
“You already have both,” my mom said, and we all hugged to seal things.
“Good,” Aunt Paula said as we left.
She breathed out a deep sigh.
“That’s enough.”
“Do you mean that you’re glad to get away from the family?” I asked her.
“It’s always a bit of a relief to be back in my house, where it’s nice and quiet. No large dogs,” she put in, and I saw Caleb smile.
“But I meant that I’m glad your parents are going to let up on you. It’s not good for anyone to fret that much.”
“I certainly don’t want to cause more problems for them,” I answered fervently.
“I’m talking about you and how you worry about them,” she said.
“You’re so concerned about what everyone in this family is thinking about you, but I could tell you a story about every single one of them.”
“Really?” Caleb asked her.
“Like what?” But then he shook his head.
“Better that I don’t know,” he said as she opened her mouth to share.
“There’s a lot of McCourt lore going back generations,” she went right on, ignoring his last statement.
“There are so many secrets. Some are no good but some don’t matter a fig, not anymore. Why wouldn’t we talk about how, when her children were all grown, my great-grandma McCourt left her husband to live with her best lady friend? They weren’t only friends,” she continued.
“They used to call those kind of relationships ‘sapphic.’ What’s the harm in saying it now? It won’t bother her or anyone else how they lived out their days happy together.” She related some other tales about olden-times McCourts, like their illegal stills and various crimes.
Then she got into a very surprising story about a relation who’d tried to set up his own country on an island in the South Pacific.
It hadn’t worked.
“I never knew any of this,” I said, amazed, and it was certainly more pleasant to hear about my great-great…
was there one or two more greats in how that grandmother had related to me?
Anyway, it was better to learn about the distant cousin who wanted to be royalty on an island, rather than Aunt Paula going on about some of the more recent secrets in our family.
She started to work her way toward the present, though, and I shook my head.
Caleb glanced at me in the mirror, and he seemed to agree that we were skirting too close to the secret I had kept, the one that had hurt me so much.
“I don’t know much about my family,” he commented to turn the conversation.
Aunt Paula had things to say about his relatives, too, things that surprised me even more than about the would-be king McCourt.
“You resemble your grandfather,” she mentioned.
“Walter Woodson. I remember him coming to our high school when your mother won a medal for a science fair experiment that she’d done. He was a very handsome man,” she continued, examining Caleb closely.
He blushed again.
“What about my grandmother?” he asked.
“Did you know her, too?”
“As I recall, she didn’t leave the house much. I’m not sure why that was, if it was natural shyness or because something was wrong. Maybe that was what made Lara-Lee…you know, the way she was.” She patted his arm.
“Since you caught my niece’s eye, I’ve been thinking a lot about those days. I talked to some of my old girlfriends from back then, too, the ones who aren’t dead yet.”
“Aunt Paula…” I murmured.
“They remembered your mother as haughty, rude, and supercilious,” she said.
“That sounds about right.” Caleb sighed.
“But now that I’m older, I have a different perspective on her behavior. I’ve been thinking that she was an unhappy girl. Lara-Lee was probably lonely,” Aunt Paula told us.
“She didn’t have any friends and she didn’t have any boyfriends, either.”
“I think she was very lonely,” he agreed.
“She never understood how to treat people, that you have to give love to get it. Kayleigh, don’t get upset.”
He hadn’t had to look in the rearview mirror to know that I was.
“I’m just sorry that you had to grow up with her not giving you any love,” I said.
“It was probably why she took up with that man,” my aunt mentioned off-handedly.
“What man?” I asked sharply.
“What did you find out?”
Aunt Paula twisted in the car seat to look back at me and raised her eyebrows.
I didn’t apologize for my tone, so to make sure I knew that she didn’t appreciate it, she frowned and glared at me as she answered.
“Lara-Lee made a special friend at one point,” she said, but then turned apologetically to Caleb.
“I mean, she was seeing someone romantically.”
“I understood that,” he replied.
“What man?”
Before she answered his question, she shook her head.
“You know, I did her a disservice and so did the other girls at our school. We weren’t very nice to her.”
“If she acted the same way that she did as an adult, then I’m sure that she wasn’t very nice to anyone herself,” he pointed out, and she shrugged slightly.
“Well, that’s true. Loneliness and sadness are an explanation rather than an excuse.”
“What about the man?” I pressed.
“What were you saying about her taking up with someone?”
There was more story to tell, first. As she’d already mentioned, Aunt Paula had been asking people for their memories of Lara-Lee Woodson—she’d been asking many people.
She’d attended her regular meetings of the native plant society, the library guild, her birding group, and the knitting club, but she hadn’t learned anything new or significant.
“I decided to see what the quilters thought,” she continued.
“I haven’t been around in a while but they’re a very nice group of ladies. They never say a word about how poor my hand-sewing is. It’s just terrible.”
“Aunt Paula, what did they say about the man?” Caleb asked.
Well, she was getting to that.
“The Woodsons had a housekeeper, the same woman for years. Her niece is a quilter and she told me that your mother never got along with her parents. They were disappointed that she didn’t want to follow a more traditional path, and no one was surprised when Ellie moved away and never came back. ‘Ellie’ was what they called her, because of the two Ls in Lara-Lee.”
“She had a nickname?” he wondered.
He sounded amazed. “I never thought of someone knowing her well enough for that.”
“Her father always kept tabs on her, especially after her mother died. He was almost in his nineties when she got pregnant and he was very upset about it.” She paused.
“I’m sorry,” she told Caleb.
“That’s all right.”
“He made it his business to find out who the father was,” my aunt went on.
“It was a man from Virginia who had come to work with Lara-Lee on her plants, something about a tree she was trying to develop. He had left behind a wife.”
“He was married,” Caleb stated, and Aunt Paula apologized again.
“He didn’t want to get a divorce and he wasn’t interested in being a father. He didn’t have any other children, either. As far as your grandfather knew, their relationship ended when he went back to Virginia and Lara-Lee never had any more contact with him.”
I thought about all the papers she’d saved in her desk, glove box, and bedroom, all the irrelevant scraps that she’d never seen fit to recycle or throw away.
No, there hadn’t been anything from a man in Virginia, not a love letter or a message about his son.
“He’s deceased, now,” Aunt Paula said.
“I looked him up. He was even older than your mother at the time.”
“What was his name?”
“Arthur Calebaugh,” she said.
She spelled it slowly.
“I think that’s how you came by your name, too.”
“Arthur’s Precious Gem,” I said, and I saw Caleb nod slowly when he heard the name of the new peach variety that Lara-Lee had developed.
Aunt Paula really didn’t have any more to add and for the rest of the way out to the farmhouse, we were all very quiet.
She broke the silence when we arrived.
“That’s Marc’s truck, the dumb giant thing,” she said as we turned into the driveway, “but whose car is that?”
“It’s Taygen’s,” I answered.
I had parked next to her at the loan office when we’d worked together, and I knew it well.
“She must have come out here with him.”
“That’s interesting,” Aunt Paula said.
“I wonder.”
“Don’t start on them,” I warned her, but she was out of the car as fast as she could move.
It wasn’t very fast, but it gave me a moment to talk to Caleb as we got out, too.
“Wow,” I started. “That was…” I wasn’t sure of what to say, though.
Overwhelming, upsetting, shocking?
It was a lot for a car ride.
And he looked like he felt all of those things, and also angry and confused.
“Do you think Aunt Paula is right about any of it?” he asked me.
“I think we can try to find out more,” I offered.
“We can look up that Arthur Calebaugh and his family. I didn’t see anything about him in her papers but we didn’t read through all the science stuff very much, and…” There was one clear clue.
“It seems like she used his name for her peach and maybe for you, which is a very strong indication unless it’s just a crazy coincidence. And those do happen! Once, at a pageant, it turned out that I was singing the same song as a girl from Mississippi, and that girl was the daughter of a woman that Aunt Amber had competed against. She and the mom were none too happy…” I trailed off again.
“I’m sorry you heard like that.”
“I don’t know what would have been a good way to find out. Now, at least, I have some more information. Without the quilters’ gossip network, I might never have known. It shouldn’t make any difference to me now.”
“Of course it makes—slow down, Sir!” He had come barreling out of the barn fast enough that I took a protective stance, but he skidded to a stop before knocking us down like bowling pins, and he sat politely while nearly bursting with excitement.
“You need him,” I told Caleb, and he knelt down.
“Sir, you’re a good friend,” I heard him say, and I thought I would give them a moment.
Aunt Paula was currently trying to get up the steps to the farmhouse, which had not yet been repaired and weren’t exactly all the same height.
“Wait,” I called, and hurried after her.
“Marc and that woman are in the barn and all over each other,” she informed me, her face sour.
“My Lord! Is the engagement back on?” I asked.
“They said no, but they’re going to work on things. That work seems to involve a lot of tongue.”
“Aunt Paula!”
“Their behavior was more than I could stomach.” She looked around the sad, decrepit porch.
“I must say, this farm surprises me. It’s tacky and I expected more from Lara-Lee, being a Woodson and all.” She opened the front door and strolled in.
“Shh!” I told her as I followed.
“Be careful!” Her eyebrows raised, so I explained.
“There’s something going on in this house. Lara-Lee is still, um, present.”
“What are you saying? You mean that she made her mark on the place?” She stared at me.
“No, you think her ghost is here!” Aunt Paula considered the idea.
“Well, if anyone would be too mean and stubborn to go ahead and die, it would be Lara-Lee.”
“Aunt Paula! We were just at church! And you just finished telling us in the car how you’d done her a disservice in the past.”
“I’m only being honest about her faults, of which there were many,” she answered piously.
I looked around, too, making sure that nothing was going to fall on our heads or jump out of the walls.
“I’m not saying that there’s a ghost here, but there is something. It may be only bad memories because she made Caleb’s life so miserable.”
A door slammed in the floor above us and I jumped at least a yard into the air.
“Kayleigh Lynn McCourt, settle down,” my aunt ordered.
“I saw a window open in the second story and when we came in, we created some kind of vortex.”
“We did?”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
I told her about the fire going out, that something had touched my leg under the desk, and how the workmen had been scared.
“Sir barks and he watches things that aren’t there,” I added, but taken as a whole, my evidence sounded scanty.
“Why would she hang around in this hellhole?”
“Aunt Paula!” She was tempting fate.
“Maybe she believes that things aren’t finished and maybe she thinks that she left her life incomplete. She definitely didn’t resolve her relationship with her son! She should have told him about his father.”
“She could have been ashamed. She could have been hurt by it, so much so that she couldn’t bring herself to remember,” my aunt added.
“The past really can haunt you.”
I looked at her and wondered if she knew those things from personal experience.
I sure did, but I also had a strong feeling that the days of hurt and shame were behind me.
“Many people leave issues unresolved but they don’t get a chance to fix them,” she continued.
“We should try to resolve those for her now.”
“I thought you just told me that there was no such thing as ghosts.”
Aunt Paula ignored that and cleared her throat.
“Lara-Lee, if you’re here, we have something to say,” she announced in a loud voice, and then she looked at me.
“Go on,” she prompted.
“Me? What am I supposed to tell her?” I asked, and she lowered her eyebrows.
“Fine! I mean, yes, ma’am.” I deepened my tone and tried to speak reverently.
“Miss Lara-Lee? Hello? This is Kayleigh McCourt.”
“Wouldn’t she know that?”
“Sorry! This is my first time communicating with the dead. Oh, maybe this is about her peach tree!” I whispered.
I cleared my throat.
“We found your patent,” I called, looking in the corners of the room.
“Caleb talked to an expert from the University of Georgia and he’s going to try to save the orchard and grow your peaches, the Arthur’s Precious Gems.” I waited again, but the feeling in here, that oppressive sadness, seemed the same to me.
Aunt Paula shook her head to signal that no, it wasn’t working.
Ok. I also cleared my throat and tried again.
“Miss Lara-Lee, I’ve made some ugly remarks about you and that was very rude of me. However, I do think that what I said was correct.”
“That was a terrible apology,” my aunt commented, shaking her head harder.
“I’m not apologizing,” I informed her, and then directed my next remarks to the air around us.
“You were not very nice to your son. And I understand that you may have been sad, angry, and disappointed by a lot of things and a lot of people, but that was no reason to mistreat him. Is that why you’re here? You want to say sorry?”
The house was quiet.
“No matter how he grew up, he’s wonderful now. He’s content and I’ll spend my life making sure he stays that way. I’ll give him all the love and happiness that he deserves. So, if you’re still here, you should know that your son is going to be fine. We both will be, because we’ll take care of each other. We’re going to be great.”
Aunt Paula smiled.
“I’m glad to hear that,” she said.
“I’m very glad.”
“Do you think she heard me?”
We looked around the house, which remained quiet but somehow didn’t feel so still anymore.
“It’s brighter in here,” I said, and maybe it was just that the sun had come out from behind a cloud.
Maybe.
“Let’s go find that man of yours,” my aunt said, and we walked out onto the porch.
Sir ran up the steps, his tail wagging, and the front door closed quietly behind us.
Aunt Paula and I looked at each other.
“I didn’t feel a breeze, but that could have happened due to the vortex you mentioned,” I said.
“I don’t know anything about a vortex. Oh, look at them,” she sighed.
Sir and I both turned to see Taygen and Marc, who were kissing next to his truck.
“I’ll go have a word.”
I went down the steps and right to Caleb, in order to give him some of the love I’d mentioned.
“What were you doing in there?” he asked as he hugged me back.
“Just straightening things out. You know, that place doesn’t feel scary, not anymore.”
“Really? I’m glad. After there’s plumbing and heat, we might live there,” he suggested.
Maybe. I wasn’t quite ready for that.
“I was looking at the trees,” he continued.
“I hope they can make a comeback like the farmhouse is. She was so disappointed by everything and those were her life’s accomplishment.”
“No,” I told him.
“You are. You’re the best thing she could ever have done, and I think she knew that. I’m sure she knew it because she named that peach after you.”
“It’s Arthur’s Precious Gem,” Caleb reminded me.
“The man who might be my father.”
“Exactly. You’re the gem that came from him,” I explained.
He smiled. “You’re more precious than any peach.” He kissed me.
“You’re more precious than anything.”
“I think that we have something very precious together,” I told him.
“It’s real, not ersatz.”
“This is real,” he agreed.
“I really love you.”
And that was sweeter than the best peach of the summer.