Chapter 12
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Bailey rode in the passenger seat of Reeves’s truck for the second evening in a row. He hadn’t brought another bouquet of wildflowers when he’d picked her up a few minutes ago, and she’d barely looked at him before she grabbed her jacket and her purse and joined him on the porch.
He’d asked her something about bread—maybe her favorite type?
—but Bailey honestly felt like a thick wall of wax paper had been built between them.
She could sort of see the outline of him and hear the warbling of his voice, and she knew until she told him about OJ and Bryce and that part of her past, this opaque barrier between them would be their reality.
He hadn’t asked her another question, and he slowed the truck to come to a stop at the T-junction where the Eastern Highway met the road the two of them lived on. She focused on the bright red octagon: S-T-O-P.
That was what Bailey needed to do too.
Stop with this nonsense, she thought. Say what you need to say and accept the consequences of it.
Part of the reason she’d wanted to return to Coral Canyon was because everyone here knew about OJ. At the same time, Bailey had never wanted to date or marry anyone who knew anything about OJ, and she should’ve anticipated this conversation before now.
Well, you didn’t, she told herself, and she folded her arms across her chest and looked over to Reeves.
He looked left to check the traffic that way, and then looked right, his eyes catching on hers.
“I have to tell you something,” she said, her voice sounding a little bit like a bleat and a lot scared.
Reeves glanced into his rearview mirror, and Bailey looked into the side mirror on her right. No one had lined up behind them, and when she looked back over to Reeves, he gazed steadily at her.
“Go ahead and drive,” she said. “It’s kind of a long story, and it’ll be easier for me to talk if you’re not looking at me.”
His eyebrows went up, but he turned the other direction again, still found no traffic, and made the right. “Okay,” he said.
Bailey reached out to adjust the volume on the radio, which broadcasted country music. “It involves the Youngs,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve wondered why they seem to be as close as family.”
“I have,” Reeves said, his voice quiet and unassuming.
Of course he had. Bailey’s memory fired at her that he’d even asked how they all knew each other when she’d brought over three of the most well-known Youngs to help him clean up his farm.
She took a deep breath. The words she needed to say sat right there at the front of her mind. “OJ?” she said. “That teenager you met yesterday?” She looked over to Reeves. “He’s my biological son.”
Relief like Bailey had never known filled her, and the tiniest hint of tears pricked at her eyes as she looked back out the windshield. “Bryce is his father. We dated in college.” She felt the weight of Reeves looking at her, but she kept her gaze forward.
“We didn’t get married,” she said. “Though I loved him, and probably still do on some level. He said he’d marry me, and we could try to raise the baby, but in the end, we both knew that wasn’t the right thing to do.”
Some of Bailey’s memories had softened around the edges due to time and distance, but she could still clearly see OJ for the first time and feel his eight-pound body in her arms.
“Otis and Georgia couldn’t have kids,” she said. “And so Bryce’s uncle adopted OJ, and he’s raised him for the past fourteen years.”
She blinked and looked over to Reeves, but he’d focused on the road again. His knuckles didn’t seem white around the steering wheel, and while his shoulders had gone up a bit, he otherwise seemed relaxed and normal.
“I’ve been in Montana since OJ was born,” she said. “Until I moved back here at the end of last year. I didn’t really start talking to him until he was seven or eight, and we have a pretty good relationship now.”
“He obviously knows you’re his mother.”
“No,” Bailey said. “I’m not his mother. Georgia is his mother, and he knows that.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Reeves said. “I meant the adoption is open, and everyone knows about it.”
Bailey swallowed and tried to lower her guard. “Yes,” she said. “That’s true. Everyone knows about it, and well, I wanted you to know who he really is, so it wouldn’t be weird.”
Reeves reached over and tried to slip his hand under Bailey’s elbow, which had practically fused to her torso. She relaxed and lifted it, and he slid his fingers down the inside of her forearm and into hers.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said softly. “Your relationship with the Youngs makes so much more sense now.”
“They can be insufferable,” she said with a sigh. “They never let you get too far away, even when you try to run. They call and text and invite you to everything.” She scoffed like she had a terrible burden to bear.
“You’re missing a wedding this weekend,” he said.
“Yeah, because it’s in Texas,” Bailey said. “If Cole and Rachel—see how I know their names? And Cole is only twenty years old, which is far too young for me to even be friends with—had chosen to get married here, I’d be attending the wedding.”
“Would you, though?” He looked over to her, his eyes slightly narrowed. “You don’t have to go to everything they invite you to.”
“I skip plenty of things,” she said, and more memories flooded her mind.
“I missed everything and removed myself from my family—and theirs—for a long time.” She let the long years flow through her mind.
“Because my family never gave up, and the Youngs didn’t either, and God never gives up, I came home. ”
The same peaceful feeling Bailey had experienced when she’d finally given in to the promptings to return to Coral Canyon filled her.
“Now I know it’s the right thing that I’m here now,” she said.
“But it’s still hard sometimes, and it feels like every situation is a new one I have to figure out how to navigate. ”
“That’s because that’s all life is,” Reeves said.
Bailey drew in a long breath through her nose. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”
He made the wide, arcing turn that had them driving west, and Bailey simply enjoyed the feel of his hand in hers until he came to the stoplight where he flicked on his left blinker and eased into the correct lane to make the turn.
Neither of them spoke in the last three or four minutes it took to get to Westinghouse, which stood only about a half-mile north of the big red barn that Bailey knew the Youngs rented for huge family parties and holidays.
The restaurant sat in a parking lot with several other businesses, including a coffee shop down on the end that Bailey either visited herself or sent Marina to a couple of times each week.
Reeves pulled into the parking lot and then a space, took the truck out of gear, and turned fully toward Bailey.
When she looked at him, she found nothing but kindness and acceptance in his eyes.
It made her tears roar back into her eyes even louder and hotter.
Had she known it would be this rewarding to tell him about OJ and Bryce, she wouldn’t have agonized over it quite so much.
“I lost myself for a while after we gave up OJ,” she said. “I knew it was the right thing to do. I had career goals, and Bryce was only nineteen years old. We couldn’t be a mother and father to that boy, but it still hurt me in a way I didn’t understand for a long time.”
He nodded and moved his hand from hers to tuck her hair behind her ear and cradle her face. “It’s the past, my pretty wildflower. It doesn’t matter to our future.”
Bailey blinked and sighed out all her breath before taking another one.
“I think it does, though. Your past has helped shape who you are in the present. I lived a wild life in Montana,” she said.
“And I did a lot of things I wasn’t proud of.
It took me a long time to return to my roots, and come back to my God, and find myself again. ”
“I’m sure it did,” Reeves said. “But you act like we both don’t have thirty-five years of experience beneath our belts.”
She looked up and met his eyes again. “Have you got things?” she asked, her voice timid and small. She couldn’t believe she hoped he had horrible things in his past the way she did.
“Of course I do,” he said. “Everyone does, Bailey.” He dropped his hand and turned to look out the windshield.
“I’ll save mine for another time, all right?
” He looked at her, hope brightening his expression.
“I think this is enough for one date, and I don’t want to lessen what you’ve told me by trying to one-up you with my own stories. ”
“I’m sure that’s not what you’d do.”
He gave her a small smile, ducked his head, and shook it.
“No, but I still feel like this is enough for today.” He lifted his gaze to hers again, his eyebrows raised as well.
“Is there anything else you want to say? We can leave it all right here in the truck and go enjoy a good dinner and something a little easier on the conversation menu.”
Bailey thought about it for a moment. “I don’t have anything specific right now,” she said. “But I want to be able to talk about Bryce or OJ or the Youngs at any time. If I have a new memory or something comes up and I want to tell you about it, I want to be able to do that.”
“Of course,” he said. “You can share anything about them—about anything—with me at any time.”
He leaned toward her, and Bailey found herself moving in his direction too.
“The past is the past, wildflower,” he whispered. “And it’s only important if we want it to be. I still think you’re smart, and beautiful, and wild, and free, and able to bloom anywhere you are.”
A smile filled her soul and touched her face softly. Her eyes drifted closed with how near Reeves had leaned, and he whispered, “I’m going to kiss you now,” right before his lips touched hers.
Pure fire poured through Bailey’s body. She pulled in a breath and pressed herself closer to Reeves, the hard outline of the truck’s console between them.
He sifted her hair through both hands as he held her face and kissed her in a slow, passionate, mountain-man way in which Bailey had never been kissed before.
Yes, it had been a long time since she’d had a boyfriend—someone to hold hands with, share her life with, and kiss like this. She knew it had been a long time for him as well, but he sure knew how to kiss a woman so completely that everything else in her life disappeared.