Waiting Seventeen Years #4
I scold myself for staring and tear my gaze back to his. This isn’t the time to be distracted by his abs. A gust hits us, and my breath catches when he sways, caught off guard by the sudden blast of wind.
“You’re out here,” I point out, standing cautiously but keeping my back to the wall so I have something to brace myself against.
“I’m not carrying a baby,” he says, his gaze sweeping down my body. “Our baby.”
There’s a beat of silence before he raises his eyes to mine. Our gazes clash, and it about crushes me to see the question in his eyes. “Of course I’m carrying our baby,” I say. “That’s why I came to warn you.”
He rewards me with the slightest ghost of a smile. “A little late, aren’t you?”
I swallow and stare back at him. “Because they’re already here? Or because Harper already warned you?”
“It’s a small town,” he says. “Words gets around.”
“Then why didn’t you run?”
“I didn’t leave town when the Dolces came after our family, and I won’t do it now,” he says. “I’d rather die fighting than run like a coward.”
Maybe it’s the hormones, but I’m suddenly terrified at the thought of a future without him.
It’s the first time I’ve ever truly contemplated the idea.
Even when I was clear across the country, when I didn’t see him for years, he was here.
He was alive. I always felt his presence in my life, even when I didn’t acknowledge it.
“You have to hide,” I say urgently, taking a step toward him. “They’re going to find your grandfather locked up and arrest you.”
“Let them,” he says. “There’s nothing I’m providing this town that I can’t provide from prison.”
“Preston, you can’t,” I say, rushing toward him when I hear the sound of tires on gravel.
Either Magnolia let them in, or they came through the gate when Harper left.
The blue lights reflect off the roof and the bare, grey trees as they come around the house, mimicking the flicker of lightning in the clouds overhead.
The first few drops of rain begin to fall, but the roof isn’t wet yet, and Preston steps forward with a warning, catching my arms to steady me.
Car doors slam as they pile out in the parking area behind the west wing.
Time’s up.
“Why can’t I?” Preston asks, his stormy eyes burning into mine.
“You can’t leave,” I whisper, my words ripped away on the wind that shrieks around the eaves and through the skeletal trees. We grip each other’s wrists, staring into each other’s eyes as the moment of truth arrives. I can’t deny it any longer.
Somewhere in my heart, I always knew it would come back to us.
Even when I was too scared to fall, so I clung tight to Devlin, who was safe in comparison.
Somehow, giving everything to a man who would never love me was less scary than enduring a love like Preston’s.
What if I took his everything, and I gave him mine, and I still fell short?
It was safer to waste all my love on someone who showed me it wasn’t enough.
Because if I accepted Preston’s love, I had to be worthy of it.
I thought one day I could be. I hoped. From the moment I didn’t defend him against his father, I’ve known it.
It’s why I didn’t fight to be with him when we played house, and Devlin said he got to play my husband because he was oldest. I wasn’t worthy of Preston yet.
All that time I was just happy to be included in the Darling circle, I was there because I wanted him to see that I was good enough to belong with them.
That I was good enough for his cousin, and maybe one day, for him.
“Please,” I say, my nails digging into his wrists as a rush of sound approaches with the rain. “Please don’t leave me.”
He widens his stance, holding onto me as the rain hits.
Fat, icy drops splatter us and the roof, sweeping over us in drenching sheets.
Preston doesn’t even flinch, his gaze never wavering as he stares back at me.
My heart hammers in my chest, and I’m instantly shivering as I cling to him, not wanting to let go even when I hear the police yelling at us from the garden below, their words drowned by the howling wind that tears at the old house.
Preston opens his mouth, and I shake my head, unable to hear over the roar of rain that’s battering the roof around us. But I can read his lips as he speaks the words he’s said to me a hundred times now, a hundred nights when I never answered.
“Marry me.”
I hold tighter, warring with my heart. I never wanted to string him along, but I could never cut him loose, either.
He was my friend, my best friend, all my life.
I might not have seen it, might not have called him that, but he was always there, from the time when he’d punch kids for making fun of my early-to-blossom body to high school, when he’d scared everyone out of making those comments.
Even when I was with Devlin, even when I loved him, I never lost sight of his cousin.
Preston was the presence that I tried to ignore, like when you’re at a party and your ex walks in, and even though you’re having conversations with other people and dancing and having fun, you never quite forget that they’re across the room, that they might be looking.
You never quite stop yourself from hoping they’re watching, admiring, regretting that they let you go.
Maybe some part of me always wanted him to put his foot down, to tell me he liked me.
But he never did, and I was too scared and confused to confess to feelings he might not return.
I remember when I told him I was going to sleep with Devlin, how nervous I was, how I hoped for…
Something. I didn’t know what. Some reaction, maybe a protest. I was giving this momentous gift to his cousin. Would he stop me?
Later, I remember how weird I felt when he hooked up with Carmen.
He hadn’t told me he was going to do that.
He didn’t tell me afterwards. I had to hear it from her.
I’d told him everything, and he hadn’t done the same.
Things weren’t the same between us anymore.
In truth, they hadn’t been the same since I lost my virginity, though I didn’t know why at the time.
I only knew he was sleeping with girls now.
Not just a girlfriend, but different girls in his class, then girls in mine.
By my senior year, when he’d turned into a regular man-whore, we barely spoke.
But I never gave up hope. Not even when it became impossible because Devlin was dead.
Not even when I couldn’t forgive him for stealing my virginity in such a brutal, savage way.
Even when I was in LA, some part of me knew he’d come for me.
That he was endgame, no matter how much I denied it.
That somehow, we’d find our way back to each other. I knew he wouldn’t give up on me.
Even though he let me get on that bus two and a half years ago, I knew he was here, biding his time.
Every time he refused to see me on my visits home, no matter how much it hurt when he denied me, I knew it wouldn’t be forever.
Some part of me always knew he wouldn’t let me walk away that easily, leave me alone after years of showing me how much I meant to him.
Some part of me was waiting for him, just like he said he was waiting for me.
Now here he is. He’s been here. He’s been asking. He already thinks I’m worthy. For the past seventeen years, ever since he gave me that handful of daisies in the yard, he’s never once seen me as anything less. He’s been waiting all that time for me to see myself that way.
What am I waiting for?
I swallow hard and then nod, my pulse pounding and my fingers shaking in his, my whole body quaking from the January rain that’s soaked us to the skin.
Water plasters his thin, buttoned shirt to his body, soaking it through, so I can see every muscle in his strong, toned form outlined in the lightning and the flashing blue lights and the fading evening.
Even without his mask, with his blind eye and face gnarled with scars, he’s never looked so heartbreakingly beautiful.
That’s all I have time to think before he pulls me into his arms, his mouth crashing into mine.
I can taste the bitter rain on his lips, can smell the clean, masculine scent of him magnified by the wetness of his skin.
I cling to him, feeling the heat of his body through his frigid, soaked clothes.
His heart hammers against mine, his hands cradling my face roughly as his kiss deepens into something primal and possessive, a claiming, a binding.
A promise.
I pull back, and another sheet of rain hits us, the force of the wind tearing at us and making me stumble back.
Preston catches my arm again. I hear voices yelling below us, but I don’t look down.
I can’t let him go yet. The wind shrieks a warning, and then Preston’s body jerks backwards, and his eyes widen.
For a second, we just stare at each other.
Then a streak of red catches my eye, and my gaze drops to the tiny hole in his shirt.
Blood is visibly pumping from it, soaking his shirt in seconds.
I scream, and he stumbles back another step. Then, he falls.