Chapter 21
Bryn
“You’re sure you’re going to be okay?” I ask Gran for the umpteenth time.
She shoos my hands away with her good one when I try to adjust her blankets. “I won’t be if you keep fussing. Go.”
Heaving a sigh, I put my hands on my hips, glancing around the expansive master bedroom for something to give me strength, but unless I’m throwing her cream armchair out the window, nothing is going to do. “Gran.”
“Bryn, you haven’t left this house in days. I’m fine. It’s time you went and saw that hunky man of yours,” she tells me, a sly smile creeping along her lips.
A fractured wrist, countless stitches in two different places on her head, and bruising on her face that makes her look like she went ten rounds with a pro boxer hardly equates to fine.
Not to mention the concussion that has her memory not quite right, and headaches persistently bothering her. Not fine.
Running my hand over my stomach as an anxious bubble swirls within, I sigh. “I won’t be gone long. You promise you’re going to stay in bed until I get back?”
“It’s been three days, Bryn. If I want to get out of bed, I’m going to get out of bed.”
Dropping onto her white, plush comforter, my face pulls into a frown. “Gran.”
Her eyes roll, but it’s accompanied by a slight wince.
She pats my hand and smiles to cover the throb in her head I’m sure that caused.
“If it’ll get you out of this house, fine, I promise.
Though if you’re going to fuss this much, I don’t know why you don’t just invite him here. Then I could finally meet him.”
Forcing a smile onto my face that I don’t feel, I give her hand a squeeze and stand up. “That’s the kind of excitement you don’t need right now.”
It’s only half the truth, but I turn so she can’t see my face. If she knew what I was about to do, she’d try to talk me out of it.
“Excitement keeps me young, dear. Bring him here next time,” she says to my back as I head towards the bedroom door.
Lifting a hand over my head, I call back, “Promise.”
But my stomach churns, knowing there won’t be a next time, no matter how badly it makes my chest ache.
I haven’t seen Wyatt since our breakfast for dinner, which was really somewhere in between lunch and dinner.
My mom had called until we woke up, telling me to get back to the hospital so her and my dad could leave.
I’d wanted to get back there anyway, but Wyatt had insisted on feeding me since neither of us knew when I’d have an opportunity to have a good meal again.
He cooked for me while I took a shower, blew my hair dry, and put on a layer of makeup that would make my mom happy.
The teeth stayed in the back of the bottom drawer in my bathroom, though. Ones she’d forced me to get after I’d snapped my first ones.
The sun shines on my favorite strip in Santa Rosé overlooking the surfing spot Brody frequents as I look for street parking.
I see old Betty a block away and know Wyatt beat me here.
He surprises me, though. I’m expecting a cowboy hat to be on top of his head, but instead I find him on my favorite bench wearing a black baseball hat, backward, a curl peeking out.
He looks so…Californian, wearing board shorts and a loose Santa Rosé Fire t-shirt on this blistering hot July day.
He’s the best thing I’ve seen in days besides Gran, and it has tears filling my eyes because nothing feels right.
But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe if things aren’t right, it’ll make it easier.
He jumps to his sandal-covered feet, cowboy boots nowhere to be found, a boyish smile breaking across his devastatingly handsome face, making that right dimple appear.
I rejoice in it for just a moment. The happiness he wears so easily all the time.
It comes naturally to him, and I love that because it never ceases to be contagious.
Even now when I don’t want it to be, I can’t help but smile back at him, though something splinters in my chest as I do.
How can it feel like this already? How can it hurt so badly?
It’s been just over a month. Two dates, a few other encounters, and a million memes.
That doesn’t seem like that much in the grand scheme of things, and yet it feels like a lifetime of heartbreak is about to wash over me like the waves breaking on the rocks below.
Hard, fast, crushing, with the power of a thousand seas.
Is this a sliver of what it felt like for Gran to lose Grandpa?
I can’t seem to take a full breath. Can’t stop the shards of pain from slicing through my chest. Maybe I shouldn’t want them to stop.
Maybe it’s better that I feel every ounce of pain—it’ll remind me of what Gran went through and how I don’t know if I’d survive that kind of loss when I don’t even know how I’ve survived Grandpa, or how I’ll survive when she leaves me.
“Hey, beautiful,” he greets, engulfing me in a hug where he pulls me into him.
I give into the desire to be near him, wrapping my arms around his waist, my face burying into his chest. Inhaling deeply, I fill my head with his scent, committing it to memory so that I’ll always know it. A little citrus, a lot pine, and a handful of crisp winter.
Pushing back on the emotion desperate to climb up my throat, I mumble into his t-shirt, “Hi.”
“How’s Gran?” Wyatt asks, pressing a kiss to the top of my head, and it nearly tips the scales in the emotions favor. That he would ask about her first, above all else, even though he’s asked constantly the last three days through text.
“Sassy,” I tell him, and feel the rumble of laughter in his chest.
His hands run up and down either side of my spine, hitting the softness of my exposed upper back in my tank top.
The heat from his hands tells me how cold I feel inside, despite the sun beating down on us in the middle of the afternoon.
It makes me wish I hadn’t ditched my hoodie in the car before getting out.
Wyatt eases back, his hands sliding to my neck, up to my jaw as I lean back. He’s halfway stooped to my height for a kiss when he pauses, and I watch his expression slowly fall as his eyes move all over my face.
His thumbs drift across my cheeks on either side, his brow pinching together. “What’s wrong?”
I hate this. Hate every second, which should tell me that I shouldn’t do it, but I have to.
My priorities have been screwed up since I met Wyatt.
I thought I could do it all, have it all.
But Gran could have died, and I wouldn’t have any more time with her.
I’m not willing to miss out on all the moments I still get to have, even though looking into this man’s green eyes makes me want to crumble, knowing he’d put me back together.
“B, you’re worrying me,” he whispers when I don’t answer. His thumbs brush across my skin again, and it’s then that I realize the tears have fallen.
A nickname. Even if it is as simple as the first letter of my name. It feels more intimate than him using my name, and it has a noise drifting up my throat that sounds close to a sob.
His eyes aren’t dancing like they normally do. There’s no excitement lighting them up from the inside. Intensity, worry. I’m reminded of that very first night we met, when I had the thought that he looked at me in such a way that made me want to confess all my secrets while laughing.
There’s nothing funny now. No hint of laughter. Not even a smile in sight.
Just the pieces of me I already shared with him shattering.
“Is it Gran?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“Your mom?”
My head shakes even harder, and I take hold of his wrists, forcing air into my lungs as I pull his hands away from my face. Blinking the moisture from my eyes, I glance to the bench he vacated to greet me, and nod at it.
“Sit with me?”
Out of my periphery, he nods his head. “Of course.”
He lets me take the lead, and we sit down, shoulder to shoulder, my small hand in his larger one. I love the way he fits around me. It makes me feel safe and secure, and it’s been like that since our very first dance.
“You were never part of my plan,” I tell him, looking out over the water, unable to bring myself to look at him. “My priorities have always been work and Gran. It had to be that way. I left my parents when I was seventeen and still a senior in high school, but after a… uhm, incident, I left—”
“Where you wrecked your dress?” he interrupts, and my head snaps in his direction, eyes wide. “Your mom mentioned it in the waiting room.”
A humorless laugh erupts from me, and I close my eyes, gritting my teeth to take a breath. We haven’t talked about my parents or what he witnessed. I couldn’t the other day, and we haven’t seen each other since. Besides him checking in and memes, we haven’t spoken a lot.
“Of course she did,” I sigh, my shoulders slumping.
She’d hate my posture right now, but I do nothing to correct it.
“I was fed up. I cut my hair off right in front of her, broke these stupid veneers she always made me wear, and ruined the most expensive dress she’d ever bought me.
I hated that thing. It was itchy and hot and poofy.
My coach made a comment about me picking at it and looking uncomfortable right before that part of the program.
She said if I couldn’t get it together then I truly was hopeless and she couldn’t help me anymore. ”
Wyatt squeezes my hand and I glance over to find him watching me. He leans over then, pressing a kiss to my temple, and I breathe out some of the tension I’m holding in my shoulders. This wasn’t the confession I expected to give him, but he effortlessly pulls truths from me.
Lifting my head, I look out at the water again, focusing on a lone surfer waiting for the next set of waves.
“Everything was captured on video. It went viral within the pageant world and around Sonoma. My mom was humiliated, and I couldn’t stand to be around them. My grandparents took me in after that.”
“Sounds like you were better off with your grandparents,” he says quietly, thumb stroking the back of my hand.
The smallest smile tugs at my lips, and I nod.
“I was. I was miserable there, but here I slowly started to climb out of that. My family has money, lots of it. For generations my family has been in the wine business, and they’ve done well.
But I wanted to make my own life, and I’ve been trying to do that.
To pay and pave my own way, despite Gran reminding me that one day I’m going to inherit plenty from her. ”
“I understand that,” Wyatt nods, and I peer over at him. He’s staring down at the waves crashing against the rocks, the white water splashing up and drenching the boulders so often that the warm sun has no chance of drying them. “The need to create your own path.”
Turning on the bench, I bring one leg up to rest on it as I face him.
Our hands lay in my lap, the wolf on his forearm peering at me with those haunted eyes.
It says it knows what I’m about to do and doesn’t approve.
Howls at me in the wind coming off the ocean to stop and reconsider.
It makes me wonder, briefly, if that’s what Wyatt’s brother would do if he knew what was to come.
When Wyatt turns his green eyes in my direction, I know he sees it coming, and it breaks my heart.
“One of the stipulations of me leaving Sonoma was that I’d help my grandparents. Keep an eye on them. Do the things they were getting too old to do. I swore I would, even at seventeen, but I carry that even closer to my heart now, years later, after all they did for me.”
Shaking my head, I try my best to keep the tears at bay when the light in his eyes dim, but they pool anyway. “I really thought I could make room for you in the plan, but after thinking I’d lost Gran, I just…”
Unable to look at him any longer, I turn my head towards the water, my chest filling with splinters that slash me from the inside out with each breath. For a long moment, he doesn’t move, and I don’t say a word, but then I feel his gentle fingertips at my jaw, pulling my gaze back to his.
It’s only been a few weeks. It shouldn’t hurt like this.
It’s stupid that it does. It hasn’t been long enough to feel this much.
But his eyes tell me he feels it too, and maybe that’s what has the tears finally spilling over.
I’ve opened up to him. Told him things I don’t normally share.
It’s because of that, I’m feeling the way I do.
Feeling every little piece of the loss about to come.
“I need every moment I can get with her, because one day the only thing I’ll have left are the memories, and I want as many of those as I can,” I tell him, my voice dropping as the thickness of emotion clogs my throat. “It’s my job to take care of her the way she took care of me.”
“Which means there’s no room for us,” he concludes, clearing his throat on the last word.
Our hands are gripping onto each other’s, like neither one of us wants to let go, but the heat of the day has our palms sweating, and it feels like he’s going to slip out of my grasp. My free hand presses against my stomach, trying to calm the dread pooled there as I shake my head.
“I’m sorry.”
That’s when he makes the first smile I’ve ever seen him fake. I didn’t even know he was capable of such a thing, but no part of it touches his cheeks or his eyes. It doesn’t light him up like it should, and I hate that it’s because of me. I’m the reason for it.
“I get it, B,” he nods, and the smile climbs a little further, breaking my heart a little more. Releasing my hand, he brings both of his to my face, cupping my cheeks in his palms. “Friends?”
I should tell him no. I should tell him that it’ll be too hard. That I won’t be able to be around him or see him with some other girl who is going to be the luckiest in the world. But I also know the reality of the situation, and how small our circle is.
And truthfully, I don’t want to fully let him go. I’m selfish enough for that.
So I nod. Despite my chest caving in over the idea. Despite knowing that it might break me. Despite wondering what it might do to him knowing the way he looks at me. I can’t deny him this.
“Definitely.”
Wyatt presses a kiss to my forehead and releases me.
As I get to my feet, my knees nearly buckle when his smile drops and he averts his gaze towards the water.
One sole tear slides down his cheek, his throat bobbing with a swallow.
It kills me. Makes me want to take every word back.
But I don’t. I press a hand to his shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze before I leave him there, sitting on my favorite bench, looking out over my favorite part of the ocean, watching that lone surfer I’m almost positive is Brody.
I hope it is. I hope maybe someone can pick up any pieces I just left Wyatt in.