20. Lucy
I was toohigh off of the insanity. The wonderful, sexy insanity of the night. I had given up any hope I had of falling asleep, and instead, I dragged myself up out from under the covers.
I had another date with Sawyer to get ready for—an early morning date.
My hands shook with excitement as I filtered through the closet today. I was humming old Motown tunes as I flipped through my options. I was—without a doubt—giddy. I threw on a simple blue and white pinstripe maxi dress so I could match today’s pickings of hydrangeas from Tiff’s garden.
Sawyer
Good Morning, sleepy head. My vehicle has four wheels this time and I am a couple minutes away. No need to rush, just letting you know. I’ll wait for you.
I locked my phone screen and slid it into my crossbody.
He climbed out of the truck as I was walking down the steps. “You look good when you’re sleepy,” I yelled out as I approached him. But he looked far from it. He was fresh-faced, wide awake. You’d never guess we re-lived early college-year antics last night.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing? I’m supposed to come and greet you at your door.”
I shrugged and giggled. “Guess I’m too impatient.”
He leaned down to kiss me as I approached him. Those damn butterflies that seemed to only visit when I’m around Sawyer, whirling around nonstop, had crashed our date.
Billy popped his head out the side of the passenger side door, wagging his whole body in anticipation. “I hope you don’t mind a third wheel, he wouldn’t stop begging as I was putting my shoes on.”
“Of course not!” I walked over to the truck, rustling up Billy’s ears. “Hey, bud!” his cold, wet nose gave me a little boop on my inner wrist.
“Ready to go?” he asked as he reached for the door handle.
“Yes, but before we go, I want to talk about something.” Sawyer dropped his hand from the door and I slid in between him and the truck. I leaned my back against the frame. “Last night… I don’t want you to get the wrong impression of me. You said you wanted to get to know me and I didn’t want you to think I was someone that just throws myself at people. Because that is not what I do. I’m sorry for basically groping you, I will make it a point not to drink around you if that’s how I end up acting.”
He smiled and let out a curt laugh. “I promise you don’t have to apologize for ‘groping’ me. We were making out and you were just being very touchy, nothing wrong with that. But if you want future makeout sessions to be very PG, as PG as they can be, I will tie my hands behind my back if I have to.”
“I don’t know,” my voice raised about twenty octaves, “that sounds pretty kinky to me.”
He snorted out a laugh, “Get in the car!” He opened the door and I slid in beside Billy. Sawyer stuck his head in through the window after closing it and kissed my temple. “You’re something else, you know that.”
I reached for his hand and brought it over to rest on my thigh. Every so often, he’d remove his left hand from the steering wheel to shift gears.
I unlaced my fingers from his as I noticed. “Oh, gosh…I’m sorry. That’s right, you need to drive.” I felt a heat crawl up my neck, landing on my cheeks. “I didn’t mean to?—”
“Don’t start with me.” He grabbed my hand back, this time resting it on his leg. “As long as you let me, I’ll hold onto you any chance I get. I can shift gears just fine, okay?”
I looked over his way as he stared straight out the windshield. His side profile was almost as perfect as his entire face. And the scruff was doing him all of the favors. With his grasp gripping tighter over my hand, he shifted once more. He truly had a handle on things.
“If you say so,” I spoke softly into my lap, though I felt my chest getting tighter knowing he didn’t want to let my hand go. He didn’t want to let me go. And then I couldn’t really imagine being that close to him without touching him either.
Even the slightest graze against an elbow, or a brush of a shoulder—Sawyer’s touch sent shivers down my spine all while setting my body aflame. How did that work? I had yet to know.
I’ve always had an interesting relationship with physical touch, but all of a sudden, he makes it my favorite love language. That was something I never expected to get used to. But I noticed I was doing a lot of that lately when it came to Sawyer.
Passing Hummingbird Lake, we headed up the main street with the windows down and my hair blowing all around. Four storefronts down from Jitters, what was once the general store, now housed Bird’s Nest, a farmers market.
The exterior looked like it belonged along the coast of Cape Cod Bay with its shingle siding and vibrant blue awning.
Consisting of homemade jams and freshly grown produce, the walls were lined with wooden crates used as shelving. Billy instantly ran up to the store workers, they started shoveling dog biscuits down his throat.
“Hey, Lionel, Rachel,” Sawyer went in for a hug with the two who were wearing matching linen overalls. “This is Lucy Collins.”
“Collins?” The couple asked in unison, almost taken aback. “You’re Sunny’s girl, aren’t ya? Wow, you sure have grown up.”
I recoiled at the mention of my mother. I had been in the clear so far since being back, anyone who knew me and my history, knew not to ask about her. Gus and Leanne had done a wonderful job of not bringing her up.
“We heard you were off in California becoming a nurse. She talks about you all of the time!”
“Arizona,” I said bluntly. “I just received my MD at the end of May.”
I shifted my posture and stood firm, but my insides were set to crumble any second and my knees turned weak. Sawyer’s hand appeared on the small of my back to steady me. I started to fidget with my necklace.
“Are you okay?” he whispered over my shoulder.
I gave a single nod.
“I’m sorry, but how do you know my mother?” I cut into their side conversation with one another. I didn’t remember them in the way they clearly remembered me.
“We spend tons of time together when the time allows it! She and I go on walks, Lionel helps her with taxes every spring, and we do ‘paint and sip’ parties once a month at our place. She comes to every one of them. It’s sort of like a book club, but with?—”
“With painting and wine,” I finished Rachel’s sentence.
The talk of my mom in general struck a chord as it was, but talking about her to people I never even met, let alone heard of? I was even more out of touch with her than I thought I was. She did paint and sip. She still painted. She made time for friends and clubs and herself. It was like I was hearing about a person I barely even knew.
But that’s exactly what it was, she was someone I barely even knew.
“It was great seeing you two, but I’m going to show Lucy out back.” Sawyer snapped his fingers at Billy, who was trying to get into the treat bag beside Rachel.
“Of course. Oh, and Lucy? Tell your mom we say hi.”
“I’ll tell her,” I mumbled under my breath, though it seemed like they would hear from her before I ever did.
Out through the main store, there was an enclosed cemented patio that had weekend vendors scattered around. Farm fresh eggs on one table, and wildflower bouquets on another. People were chatting and laughing, everyone was admiring handmade accessories and sipping on samples of smoothies. And there was no mention of my mother out here.
My jaw unclenched itself somewhere between the table with the palm reading and the salt water taffy lady.
This is my version of heaven.
Billy pranced around from booth to booth, vacuuming up scraps of dropped food and getting back scratches along the way.
“I knew you would like it,” Sawyer pulled me in towards him.
He knew what I was thinking, and how I felt without saying a single word. A rare moment where I could hold my emotions to myself, and not feel like I had to verbalize them. He just understood.
“Here, for you,” Sawyer plucked a single flower and sniffed it before passing it over to me. “Thanks, Roger,” he waved to the florist as we walked away.
“What’s this?”
“A peony.”
“No, I know what kind of flower. I mean?—”
“Promise you won’t run the other way, completely weirded out?”
“I make no promises, Banks.”
“I was bummed that I had to leave in such a rush when you came into The Hideout, the second time that first day that you arrived. I wanted to sit there and talk to you for hours if I could. I was fully prepared to run through all of Leanne’s baked goods in the dessert case if it meant we had a chance to talk longer.”
My cheeks became warm.
“And, well… Mel caught wind I was sort of, just a little bit, kind of, crushin’ and turned into an FBI agent. It was scary. She pulled you up in zero point two seconds. Anyway, I saw the recent photos you were tagged in from your graduation. And I know that these were the flowers on the dress you wore.”
My heart was seconds away from falling out of my chest and onto the ground.
I bought my graduation dress at the beginning of med school. It sat in the back of my closet and I promised myself I would never wear it. Not until everything fell into place, and I was certain that I would walk across that stage.
When it was evident that I would graduate, that all of my dreams were coming true, I moved it to the front of my closet. It stared back at me every time I opened the doors to get dressed for yet another long, draining day. And then I had it hanging there, front and center for at least five months before I was going to walk across the stage. I didn’t care that I had to push it off to the side every day.
It was a form of motivation.
“So what you’re telling me is you’re obsessed with me?” I smiled up at Sawyer and lifted the flower to my nose for a single sniff.
Of course, I could have been weirded out, feeling as if my space and identity were invaded. But then I’d be a hypocrite—that’s what social media is all about.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much when I looked him up. At least nothing more beyond the tabloids and town magazines, declaring him to be an insensitive disappointment. From where I was standing, he is anything but.
I could have said thank you, I could have held onto the moment more. Acknowledged and appreciated that he took the time to learn bits about me. But instead, I deflected. I used humor to push away the slightest amount of feelings that I felt growing inside of me. So what you’re telling me is you’re obsessed with me?
“How could I not be?” he said through an ear-to-ear grin before placing a kiss on the side of my head.
We stepped off to the side and listened to the small bluegrass band, staying for a few songs of their set before the market got busy. Lionel and Rachel sure made the most of their space here, but it still felt too crowded.
“Want to get out of here?” Sawyer asked. I nodded before his full sentence left his lips. I was enjoying the day, but back-to-back, highly-populated outings had become overwhelming.
He whistled for Billy and we made our way out and back to his truck. He opened the door and I climbed on in.
Instead of turning on the road that took us to the cottages, he continued down a winding road. At the end sat the entrance to Sawyers’s lake house. I had only seen the backside of it, but it was even more captivating from the front.
Rows and rows of sugar maple trees separated his property from the hillside. Whenever I had cut through the woods on my way to the lake, I had always seen the A-frame roof pop out over the trees, but the snippets of imagination never did it justice.
There was a small river that ran before the front yard. He stopped the car at the start of a wood plank bridge that crosses the river into his perfectly landscaped yard. Billy ran up ahead of us, his nails clanked along each of the panels.
“Here, let’s go around this way.”
We walked along the side of his house, he had to hold the low hanging branches that hovered over the stone walkway. The short trail wrapped around his house and led to the backyard.
The Hideout looked so small from this side of the lake.
“Thank you for today. I’m sorry if I seem uninteresting or dull today, though. I can’t say I got much sleep last night.”
“You don’t seem uninteresting or dull,” he repeated back to me. “You seem calm.”
Calm wasn’t a word I often used to describe myself.
Something changed in me once I crossed state lines. I left Arizona, and somehow, so did my usual avoidant disposition. I did feel calm. I felt safe. I felt open.
Sawyer had that effect on me.