Chapter 28 Dove #2
He blinked at Liv, as if truly seeing her, his shoulders shaking as he bowed his head. My heart bled for both of them in that moment. Ellis pressed her hand into my lower back, as if holding us both in place, and I turned to look at her.
Her green eyes held mine, filled with so much emotion I could hardly breathe. She gave me a small smile that said so much all at once, and nothing more was spoken as we allowed the silence to settle over us.
“So, fireworks over the Pacific?” Jedd asked as we all stood in the kitchen hours later, pulling out plates, the wafting smell of pizza rising from the cardboard box on the counter.
The tears had long since subsided, morphing into laughter, as either Ellis or I translated for Liv whenever she spoke. Jedd had relaxed, his face and posture carrying far less tension, and the conversation had shifted to the other reason we were here.
The fireworks.
“Yep,” I said as I gathered the plates, watching Jedd grab the pizza while Ellis carried cans of soda.
“Margaret wanted one last adventure before she died, and it didn’t happen.
So I took her ashes on the trip and have been scattering them along the way.
The final destination is the Pacific Ocean—she always wanted to be blasted out of fireworks into it.
It’s also where we scattered her partner. ”
“Nice,” Jedd said, approval coloring his voice. “Well, I can see why Liv thought of me for it. I’ve done this once before. Plus, you know, I have a boat.”
“Yes, I hadn’t thought about the boat part. I’ve not exactly been going about this the socially acceptable way, after all.”
Ellis snorted. “Yeah, from the moment we broke into her uncle’s house and stole the ashes, replacing them with vacuum dust—”
“What?” Jedd laughed as we all sat down.
“He was holding them hostage,” I countered. “Plus he’s an asshole. Liv caused some serious havoc when we were there, but she bought us time to escape too. He came home with his mistress while we were halfway through the transfer.”
Jedd snorted as Liv kicked her legs off the side of the sofa. “I can only imagine the shit she pulled.”
“So you can make the fireworks thing happen?” I asked, feeling hopeful as I took a bite of pizza.
“Yeah,” Jedd said with a shrug. “It’s easy. I can work on them tomorrow during the day, then we can take the boat out at dusk and let it go. You have fireworks, right?”
I nodded quickly. “Yeah, we got some when we were on the road.”
Jedd nodded, then frowned. “Where are the ashes?”
“In the car,” I said.
Jedd raised a brow. “You left your grandmother in the car?”
“Technically she’s in the trunk,” Ellis murmured, hiding her mouth behind her soda can.
“The ashes were the last thing on my mind when we got here,” I defended. “We literally had to brace ourselves to spill this wild story to you, Jedd.”
Liv snickered, and Jedd snorted at the same time.
“Where are you guys staying?”
Ellis stiffened for a fraction of a second, and I knew what was coming before the words even left her mouth.
“Um, I haven’t actually booked anything yet,” she admitted, a small flush creeping up her neck. “Today has been… today has been a lot.”
It surprised me. Ellis never let things slip through the cracks—hell, she had ordered Jedd to sort out food in his own home so she could take her tablets. I grinned at her, trying to ease the worry in her eyes at her own slipup.
Jedd shrugged and took another piece of pizza. “Stay here. I have a spare room. It’ll make working on the fireworks easier as well. Just bring your car in after. Very nice car, by the way.”
Ellis smiled shyly and shrugged. “It was my grandad’s. His words were, ‘Get the fuck out of Dodge, kid.’ And then Liv showed up and demanded I drive across the country, so, you know—fate or whatever.”
I took a sip of my soda as they spoke, my mind already flitting to tomorrow, fighting against the sudden lump in my throat. Tomorrow. That would be it. The last of Margaret.
I ate my pizza in silence after that, the sobering thought enough to take the air from my lungs.
By the time we brought the car inside the gates and grabbed our stuff, my eyes were burning and Ellis was yawning loudly.
The room we settled into had a small ensuite, pale blue walls, and a freshly made queen bed.
A chair sat in the corner with a set of drawers.
When we closed the door behind us and dropped our bags, I realized the silence stretched and wasn’t filled with sarcastic remarks, no playful whistles. No Liv.
Ellis perched on the edge of the bed, yawning softly. “I think Liv went up to Jedd’s loft.”
I glanced at her, noting the tightness of her jaw and the storm unburied behind her eyes—as if, now that the door was closed, all her hidden emotions were free to surface. As if here, in this room with me, she was finally safe enough to feel them.
I knelt in front of her, resting my hands on her thighs. “You okay?”
Ellis hesitated, her green eyes locking on mine, full of shadows but steady.
“I don’t know. I—it hurts. I hurt for her.
I hurt for him, and I hurt for Bri. All of them.
And—and I keep circling back to what Liv said.
How she thought she was a coward. How she thought she ran.
And she’s been living with that feeling for the last year.
” Her voice broke, and she gripped the bedspread.
“It kills me that she believed that about herself, and then had to watch me mope and wallow.”
I shook my head and cupped her face gently.
“Ellis, listen. None of this—none of it—is your fault. It’s not on you.
If you want to blame someone for why Liv died, blame the sick asshole who walked into that club with hate and bullets.
That’s where the fault belongs. Not with Liv.
Not with you. You’re entitled to your feelings, and you’re certainly entitled to whatever trauma you had after that surgery, and all the grief and trauma before it.
Just because someone else has pain doesn’t make yours any less valid or important. ”
Her lips trembled, and I ran my thumb along the soft flesh, sweeping her hair back with my other hand. Her watery eyes searched mine for a moment before she leaned in to kiss me, and I melted into her—melted into her softness and the sweet taste of her breath.
When she pulled back, her eyes were wet, but a small smile danced on her lips.
“How do you do that?” she asked, poking my shoulder.
“Do what?”
She shrugged and looked down at the bedspread, where her hands were still curled. “Make me feel like I don’t have to carry it all.”
“Because you don’t,” I told her simply, leaning my thighs against the wooden base of the bed and wrapping my arms around her waist, pressing my head into her shoulder tiredly. “Not anymore.”
She let out a quiet laugh and rested her head in the crook of my neck, and for a long moment we just breathed together—like a soothing balm spread over the burn of a long, emotionally exhausting day.
I was drained beyond belief, exhausted and emotionally destroyed, and I could only imagine how Ellis felt.
“I got a text earlier,” Ellis mumbled into my neck. “From Thomas. He’s in L.A.”
I raised a brow and leaned back to look at her. “Your brother?”
She nodded, biting her lip. “Yeah. Mom told him I made it to L.A., and he’s here too, with some friends from the army. They’re having downtime. He wants to get lunch tomorrow.”
My heart clenched for her. I understood the strained, fractured history between them—the way years of sickness and survival had carved wounds neither had realized until it almost seemed too late.
“Well, you should go,” I murmured, brushing a thumb across her cheek.
She hesitated. “But what if—”
“Uh-uh,” I said, cutting her off. “No what-ifs. Just go and see him. Not everything will get fixed in one lunch, but it could be a start for both of you, you know?”
Her smile was small as she nodded. “Well, okay. Will you be okay without me for a few hours?”
I grinned at her and gave her a wink. “I’ll keep myself busy. Laundry, for one. We’re running way too low on clean clothes, and I can’t scatter Margaret wearing my last-resort options.”
My words earned me a soft laugh before her eyes searched mine, and she tugged on a loose strand of hair from my space bun.
“How are you feeling about tomorrow, then? About Margaret?”
That dull, pulsing ache inside me grew, and I sighed, shrugging softly.
“It’s bittersweet. Scattering her along the way has been fun, and I fulfilled her wish for a final adventure.
But there was always still a piece of her left, you know?
I hadn’t fully scattered her, so she was still mine to carry.
But tomorrow…” My throat tightened. “Tomorrow I give her up forever, and then she’ll really be gone. ”
Ellis smiled softly and took my hands in hers, pressing them to her lips before lowering them to her lap. “She’ll never really be gone,” she told me gently. “Remember?”
My throat burned and my eyes stung at her words, but I also knew what she meant, and I wholeheartedly believed it. It was just hard to accept those words in theory, especially when I’d put so much weight on a physical object as proof Margaret was still with me.
But I was tired of talking. I was exhausted.
I leaned in and kissed Ellis once more, simply soaking in the silence and the peace her lips offered as she kissed me back, her hands resting at the base of my neck. I sighed into her mouth.
If I wasn’t so tired…
But we were in a stranger’s house, and there was no way I was doing anything like that here. Instead, I pulled back, grabbed her hand, tugged her up with me, and jerked my head toward the bathroom.
“Come shower with me.”