Chapter 7
SEVEN
VIOLET
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, WEST VIRGINIA
Sunrise. Blue eyes and a kiss dusted under my ear.
“Morning, pretty girl.”
A chill zipped through me at the sleep-roughened words, at the familiar pet name, at the smell of his skin and the feeling of him surrounding me. A husky laugh melted into my neck.
“Made you shiver.”
Colton.
I lay on my back, and he was propped on an elbow on his side, tracing a gentle finger over my collarbones.
Those eyes: bright, deep, and more than anything, full of adoration. No one could make me feel cherished like Colton did.
Then he smiled. With teeth. Or perhaps, without teeth.
“Oh my god, your teeth!” I shrieked. “Where did they go?”
Colt let out a deep and hearty laugh. “Took ‘em out for the night. You sleep over, you see the party trick.”
It was so unexpected, so bizarre. “Geez, you think you know a guy, and then you see him with his teeth out.”
“Excuse me, I’m naked and the teeth is what makes you scream?” He pulled the sheets down to his hips and wiggled his eyebrows with an even bigger smile. “How about now?”
I patted his tight-as-a-drum stomach. “I mean, it helps.”
“Oh, so you hate my natural smile?” Colton made puppy dog eyes at me.
I slapped his chest. “Fuck off. I like your smile regardless of your tooth count. But it’s not natural to have a frozen piece of rubber knock out your teeth.”
“Potato, potato.”
I chuckled. “That’s not really what that phrase means.”
“No, but it made you laugh, so I got what I came for.”
I lolled my head his way to find him looking so pleased with himself. “Careful. I’ll make it my mission to lick the gap in your teeth.”
Colt cackled and slipped a hand under my ribs, drawing me closer. “That’s the spirit.”
I returned the cuddle, my stomach twisting at the thought that our time together could now be measured in minutes. We settled into each other, his head buried in my chest. He stilled, then let out a labored breath, the air steaming against my skin. “I needed this.”
I pressed a kiss to his forehead and he whimpered. His finger traced the bottom of my ribs.
“I never forgot about you.”
I bit my lip to keep it from trembling. I didn’t want to hurt him.
It would be cruel of me to give him effusive love declarations this weekend, only to leave him at the end.
But on this, he deserved my honesty. What if something crazy happened and one of us died and the other didn’t know how earth-shattering their presence was, no matter how brief? “I could never forget you, Colt.”
His eyes shot up to mine. “Then stay.” His voice took on a frantic edge. “Take a few days off and let’s just stay here. We don’t have to go to Minnesota.”
I clamped my teeth together. “I have to get back to the lab.”
He growled and flopped his head back onto his pillow. “Surely someone can cover for you.”
And this, this was exactly why I wasn’t dating him, or anyone else.
No one could understand the importance of my work.
“Colt, you can’t just do exactly what Guy did with Kitty and expect us to work like they did.
We can’t have a magical few days where we realize how good we are together and then one of us gives up everything. ”
“They didn’t give up everything,” he argued. “They compromised.”
I sat up, pulling the covers to hide my breasts. “I can’t compromise, Colton. It’s the same problem we had before. I need to focus on school. My school takes a lot longer than yours did.”
“Was that really our problem? Because before you broke it off, you were studying just fine. You said yourself that I made your grades better. And was it really about your parents? You’d already told them to shove it.” He sighed. “It’s always felt like there’s something you’re not telling me.”
Ice rushed in my veins, my blood screeching to a halt. He wasn’t wrong, and I knew it. It was definitely more than school.
It was that night before I left. The way he touched me scared me so badly that something flipped inside me. Something he said, but I couldn’t even remember what it was. Something he did. Trapped, panicked, scared, exposed.
My brain could briefly touch a different darkened room in my fuzzy head, a different guy, but just like that, I’d change mental tracks. My stomach turned at the memory, or what was left of it, and all I knew was I couldn’t be around Colton anymore.
“I took you home to my family, Vi. I . . . I was ready to make big future plans with you. I told you . . . the hard stuff. Stuff I told no one else. And you just bailed one day. There was the stuff with your parents too, but I thought we had that worked out.”
“It was a lot, Colt. All of it. I couldn’t just cut my parents out.”
“I didn’t ask you to!” Colt looked at me incredulously. “I was willing to put in the work, Vi. I was willing to do what it took to bring them around. You weren’t.”
“It was just too much!” I snapped. “I was, what, nineteen? My major was super demanding. Then I was going against their wishes by switching majors. I just wanted their support, and I wasn’t going to get it—”
“If I was in the picture.” Colt shook his head. “That’s some pretty conditional love, Vi.”
I didn’t breathe until my lungs felt oxygen-starved, too shocked by his statement. My eyes felt hot. “Not like your dad is much better.”
Colt sat up, putting his hands out and arguing at the wall opposite us rather than directly at me.
“Then let’s stop wasting our lives on love we’ll never get, and just be there for each other!
Be what we wanted to be.” He pressed his fist to his forehead.
“If you dated me, I’d be out of your hair most of the time.
Hang around in the summers maybe. Take a trip or two together. ”
I leveled him with a look. “And that would be enough for you?”
“It’s called compromise! What do you think we’re doing here at this wedding? It wasn’t easy for them but they compromised!”
“I want to. I just don’t know if it makes sense right now.”
“If you really want it, then help me make it make sense.” I turned to meet his gaze.
His hair was wild from sleep, but he was still gorgeous.
It was criminal. He must have slipped his fake teeth in at some point when I wasn’t looking.
He covered my hand with his, squeezing twice. “We could work this out.”
I drew a shaky breath, letting it out through my lips. Images rose unbidden in my head. Colt and I sharing a house. Picking out plants at a garden center and making him dig the holes. The three children we didn’t have wandering around our yard. Around his family’s lake house. Around their farm.
My throat was unspeakably tight, my lungs bound by lead weights.
A family. We wanted to make a family. Not when we were as young as we were, but someday.
“Do you even remember? What we wanted to be?” he whispered. I looked at him and in so many ways, he was still the sad boy I left in a grimy hockey house in Boston.
“Of course I remember. I know what we wanted to be,” I croaked. “But if it’s going to cause some big dramatic upheaval with my family, I can’t take the distraction right now.”
Colt’s jaw feathered and he bobbed his head. “How close are you to finishing?”
“About three more years.”
A warm hand met my back. “I don’t want to distract you or cause problems in your life. I get what you’re saying. I just wish it was different.”
I laid my head on his shoulder. “Me too.” Little shocks of pain surged through me thinking of what I needed to say. “Three years is a long time. You have a right to be happy.”
Colton’s lips pressed into my shoulder. “You make me happy.”
I scrunched up my face to stave off tears. “You don’t have to wait for me.”
His arm slung around my back and he kissed my temple. “If I wait for you, it’s because I want to. Not because I have to.”
Silence. I forced myself to take a breath.
The deepest part of my brain served up a terrifying thought: what if we did all this and I pushed him away again?
What if he was betting on the wrong horse?
Because he was right: it was more than my work and my family.
It was the hole in my memory from that one awful night.
But unearthing that would be the ultimate wrecking ball for everything I’d so carefully built.
We sat, holding each other, side by side, sheets draped at our waists.
Who knew this wedding was going to take such an emotional turn?
I thought at worst, we’d make out or do something stupid up against a wall.
Which, I could indeed check both of those boxes.
But I didn’t expect we’d go into how we’d hurt each other.
I didn’t expect how much he still wanted this, or how much I wanted it.
I thought I’d moved on, but if anything, seeing Colton again proved that he was even better than I remembered.
Adult Colton was nothing short of a dreamboat.
But our time was running out. I’d have to hold this moment sacred, a vacation from reality, a fantasy land where we existed without demanding parents and grueling studies and memories we couldn’t access.
“I need to go get ready for brunch.” My body resisted every word in that sentence, screaming at each syllable.
“Okay. Yep.” Colt slipped out of bed and stepped into the bathroom while I searched for my dress on the floor.
When I picked it up, a little streak of bright blue caught my eye, hanging from the edge of his suitcase.
I walked toward it, squinting. It looked strangely like one of my old ribbons.
Like a burglar, I crept toward the suitcase slowly.
Right as I was within striking distance, the bathroom door opened.
I jumped and held the dress to my front.
“Trade ya,” I said, walking his way and trying to act smooth to cover up my snooping. I used the bathroom and swished with his bottle of mouth wash on the sink.