Chapter 27 #3
He grabs his jaw firmly as he turns away from me as if to control his reaction.
But I can’t form the words to answer him.
The significance of what he just said is still catching up to me.
Caleb has been trying to contact me the whole time.
He’s been just as miserable as I have. He flew across the Pacific for me.
“Christ, Stella,” he says without looking at me. “Please say I didn’t ruin this for you. I thought you wanted me here. I didn’t think they’d ask me if you didn’t—"
I take a step towards him and put my hand on his elbow, pulling his hand down from his face until I can interlace it with mine. His fingers are limp, like he’s lost all the gusto that carried him this far. But I can still see something else flickering in his wild blue eyes. Hope.
And that’s all I need.
“Do you remember what you said to me on Mamanuca?” I ask him, gripping his hand like a lifeline. “When we were caught out in the rain?”
Caleb catches my gaze, the ghost of a nod lifting his chin.
“You told me that not going after what I wanted was the biggest risk of all. And you were right. I’ve been operating on autopilot for so long, I didn’t know how to turn it off.
Just going after what I thought I was supposed to—letting myself be blown around like a freaking leaf, and never actually asking myself whether I was happy.
The truth is, it had been so long since I’d really wanted anything, I forgot what it felt like. Until…”
Caleb swallows, and his hand returns to life, gripping hold of mine the way it did on that rainy cliffside. Squeezing back.
“Until?” he repeats, his voice unsteady.
Something bubbles up in my chest—an unwelcome pressure and dizziness that isn’t unlike nausea.
Oh god—did I eat a bad oyster? Am I going to throw up on Caleb and make this situation even worse?
I take in a few deep breaths and steady my eyes on Caleb’s.
It isn’t vomit that’s gurgling in my stomach.
It’s fear. Terror. Terror at the sheer irrationality of the choice standing before me.
If I tell him how I feel, it makes this real.
The awkwardness of telling the family. The struggle of starting a life with someone who doesn’t even live in this country.
The horrible, unthinkable risk that I could give my heart to this man I haven’t been able to stop thinking about in months, and it might all blow up in my face.
But beneath the ticker tape of impossibilities is another voice. Something louder—a sound I’ve been shutting out since that night in the lagoon. One that knows, with every fiber of my being, that I love this man. That no matter how much logic I try to stack on it, these feelings aren’t going away.
So instead of running, instead of reaching for the armor I’ve been carrying around since high school, I lean in.
“Until I met you,” I say softly, pushing through the fear. “You made me remember.”
With those words, the tension that’s been building between us for moments, for months, evaporates like spilt wine. Caleb wraps his arms around my ribs and I bury my face in his shirt, inhaling the sea salt scent of him.
This. This is what I have been waiting months for. Perhaps, I think, my whole life. Something I couldn’t have dreamt up in a thousand years.
A passion that burns stronger than my fear.
I look up at his eyes, wanting desperately for his lips to find mine, but he holds me back.
“Stella,” he tells me, his voice crackling with emotion, “When I thought you were done with me, it nearly broke me. I can’t go through that again. If we’re going to do this, I want to make sure you know what you’re getting into.”
For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought relying on others made me weak. But I don’t feel weak around Caleb. I feel brave. I feel confident. And this time, I won’t second guess myself.
Instead, I throw my arms around his neck and kiss that apprehensive look right off his face.
In every woman’s life, there are a few kisses she’ll always remember.
The schoolyard peck with her first real boyfriend.
The touch of her lips to another’s in the car after prom.
The kiss that precedes her first “I Love You.” Those are the kind you tell your granddaughters about.
That stick in your memory like urchin spines: recountable years later in perfect, shimmering detail.
But this kiss? This won’t be one of them.
For the first time since I started kissing Caleb, I know this kiss won’t be our last. That in five, ten, thirty years from now, this kiss won’t stand out, because it will dissolve into a sea of kisses so wonderful, each one of them obscures the rest.
More than anything, I want this kiss to become ordinary. Because this time, I don’t have to let him go.
Caleb bites my lip, softly, and I feel a familiar shiver unfurling in my stomach. When we pull back from each other, our hands are still clasped together.
He smiles at me as I tell him, “I’m sure.”
I hear a holler from the dance floor, and turn to see Jules standing beside Harry, her hand over her open mouth.
For a second, that old panic takes hold—the fear that I’ve somehow messed up Jules’s big day.
But when she lowers her hand, I see a smile on her face so wide it looks physically painful.
Her freshly-minted husband is smiling, too, his hand twisted into a clear “thumbs-up” of approval. Smooth, Harry.
But Jules knows what I’ve been too stubborn to admit: that I’ve wasted too many years of my life making the safe decision. The responsible one—the one to make everyone else proud.
This time, I’m choosing for me.
“Things are going to be different from here on out, you know,” Caleb growls quietly. “No more silk pillowcases. No more Mai Tais on the swim platform.”
“I think I can live with that,” I whisper into his chest. “Even if I will miss the action below deck.”
“Who said anything about losing that?”
He takes something out of his pocket and hands it to me. His phone. He taps in his password and pulls up a photo. It’s a blurry shot of a large, docked sailboat with peeling wooden rails that look like they haven’t been polished since 1995. On one of them hangs a sign: For Sale.
“When everything first imploded on board,” he tells me, “I thought my career was over. But I realized the advice I gave you on the mountain was advice I needed for myself. I didn’t have to wait for permission to live the life I’ve dreamed about. I just needed a little push.”
“Caleb…” I breathe as I thumb through the photos. “Is this boat yours?”
He grins and slips the phone from my slack hand.
“She needs a lot of work. And I’ll be paying off the loan I had to take out until my hair’s grey, but she floats. And she’s got plenty of cabinets for pencils and paint.”
I look up into his eyes. Reuniting with Caleb doesn’t mean I have my whole life figured out.
I still have a long way to go while I put the pieces back together.
But if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s him.
This is my Southern Cross- my guiding constellation in the night. This is how I’ll navigate home.
“I don’t care if she’s got dry rot and a broken mast,” I tell him. “As long as she’s got you.”
Caleb tightens his grip on my waist and pulls me close until our noses are almost touching. I could get used to this. And I plan to.
“Were those actual boat terms I just heard you use?” he asks with an astonished laugh.
I shrug.
“I’ve been studying.”
I bite my lip, and Caleb’s face breaks into a smile so genuine it rivals the half-moon above us. I want to bask in its glow until the sun comes up. I want to wake up every morning for the rest of my life wondering how I got so lucky. How someone so wonderful could be mine.
Caleb dips down to kiss me, and from somewhere in the crowd, I can hear Matthew shout, “get a room!” while Marianne screeches in delight.
I think about the first time I stared into Caleb’s eyes while he cradled my impaled left foot like a field surgeon.
Back when he was hot runner and I was flailing tourist girl, and anything outside of the university felt like a distant dream.
It’s almost hard to believe that girl was me.
I remember diving into the ocean with Joanna into a circle of reef sharks and wondering if anything so exciting would ever happen to me again.
I remember hanging onto the cliff edge on Mamanuca and thinking I was literally about to draw my last breath.
I remember feeling like Cinderella playing dress-up at the ball, dropped into a royal family I never asked to belong to.
But my story isn’t a fairytale. It’s not a story where Prince Charming and I float away on a superyacht, our problems as distant as the bottom of the sea.
It’s better.
It’s the kind where I say yes because I want to, not because I think I should.
It’s the story where this stubborn, overthinking princess finally chooses herself.