Chapter Nineteen
Paisley
“YOU OKAY?” MY MOM ASKS as we stand on the football field, waiting for my grandparents and Aunt Rose to join us before we head to our seats.
“Yeah, why?” I force a smile to my lips.
“Because you look like you’re about to lose your breakfast on the turf.” She gives me a knowing look.
“Do I?” I attempt to laugh it off, but it only makes me sound more freaking nervous.
“It’s okay, you know? That boy loves you today the same way he loved you when you were kids. Maybe even more so.”
“What makes you think the way I’m acting has anything to do with Nash?”
“Because I’m your mother, and I know you.” She grins, her eyes catching something over my shoulder. “I know a lot has happened, and your father and I will support any decision you make. But if you think you’re going to find a man who loves you the way he does, you’re lying to yourself. You were lucky enough to find your soul mate when you were only a child. Some people search their whole lives and never find theirs. Don’t let fear dictate what you do now.” Her hands come to my shoulders, giving them a gentle squeeze. “Now turn around.”
I feel like my heart has lodged itself in the center of my throat, cutting off my ability to circulate air through my lungs.
I do as my mother says, though as I spin, it feels like I’m moving in slow motion.
I feel him before I see him, the familiar hum filling the air, like an invisible tether, pulling me toward him. I blink once, then twice, spotting him easily as he moves through the crowd.
His eyes meet mine, and like someone has just performed a silencing spell, every sound falls away until all I can hear is the fierce pounding inside my chest that vibrates through my entire body.
I haven’t even registered that I’ve moved until the distance between us is suddenly much smaller. But I’m not just moving, I quickly realize, but I’m running. Sprinting through the crowds of people with a single destination in my sights.
“Nash.” His name touches my lips.
We collide with so much force that I’m certain that if his arms hadn’t closed around me in that split second, I would have ricocheted off him and onto the ground.
I wrap my arms around his shoulders, burying my face in his neck as I breathe in his familiar scent. His arms tighten around my waist, lifting my feet straight off the ground.
“Hi, P.” His deep voice reverberates through me.
Suddenly, every moment we’ve ever shared hits me like a wave, pulling me under with their weight.
Every touch. Every kiss. The pain. The joy. The heartbreak. The love... It’s like photographs being shuffled through my brain. I can see them all, but I can’t focus on a single one. They all blur together into one beautiful mess.
I don’t know how long we stand there, our arms wrapped around one another, holding on to each other like we’re both afraid to let go. All I know is that when Nash finally lowers me to my feet, all I want to do is jump right back into his embrace.
“God.” His eyes trace my face as he pulls back to look at me. “You’re even more beautiful than I remember.” Emotion swims behind his stark blue eyes.
I want to say, you too, but that seems stupid. How do you say to someone that they’re so handsome you feel like you could die just from staring at them for too long? And my God, do I. Long gone is the boy I once knew or the young man I left behind four years ago. Today, a man stands in front of me. I mean, there are fragments of that boy everywhere, but physically, he looks so different, so grown. Then again, I guess I probably look different too. Age does that to a person.
I reach up and touch the side of his face, letting my fingers linger on his square jawline, hidden beneath a short, well-kept beard. The hair is course to the touch and all I want to do is spend every waking moment touching it, committing every thread to memory.
His hair is different too. Shaved close on the sides but long enough on top that a small piece falls across his forehead, nearly reaching his eye.
But his eyes, a crisp blue like the summer sky, those are exactly as I remember. The kind of eyes that make you feel like you’re being looked straight through.
“You don’t look so bad yourself.” I attempt to lighten the sudden heaviness that settles over me like concrete. It’s not dread or uncertainty, though, it’s love. Paralyzing and undeniable love. It bursts out of me from every pore, threatening to rip me apart at the seams.
A part of me feared I wouldn’t feel this way. That despite our letters and all we’ve shared with one another while I’ve been away, the spark would no doubt have faded. But it hasn’t. If anything, it burns brighter and hotter than it ever has before.
“You’ve been working on Mr. Miller’s farm again, I see.” I take in the ripple of his arm muscles, accentuated by his deep tan.
“Someone has to help the poor man. He’s pushing ninety these days.” The smile that touches his lips makes me feel weak in the knees.
“It’s really good to see you,” I tell him, having been drinking him in since the moment our eyes met and yet feeling like I haven’t made so much as an impact on my proverbial glass.
“It’s really good to see you, P. You have no idea.”
“I think I might have an inkling.”
“Paisley. Nash.” My mother’s voice can be heard over the roar of conversations that surrounds us.
I turn to find her waving us over, my grandma and grandpa Mathews on one side, my mother’s father on the other.
“Looks like we’re being summoned.” Nash chuckles, the sound like velvet against my ears.
“I guess so,” I agree, turning back to him.
“Shall we?” He offers me his hand.
I take it without hesitation, my heart skipping inside my chest like a rock might be skipped across the water when he tangles his fingers with mine.
“Let’s,” I croak, the word sticking in my suddenly too-dry throat.
The rest of the afternoon goes by in a blur. I barely remember taking our seats, let alone the three hours of graduation speeches and diploma awarding that followed. From the moment Nash took my hand until the moment he released it after walking me to the car, all I could focus on were his fingers intertwined with mine. How right it felt. How complete I felt. Like having a piece of myself returned to me after years of surviving as only part of one’s self.
“You sure you want to drive me?” I ask, hesitating when he pulls open the passenger door of his truck. “I can ride back with my parents.”
“We’re going to the same place,” he reminds me. “Besides, I’ve spent four years waiting for this moment. Do you really think I’m letting you out of my sight for a single second?” He smiles, grabbing me around the waist and lifting me into the truck like I weigh nothing more than a feather.
My heart kicks against my ribs, reminding me once again who she belongs to.
“Okay then.” I smile to myself as he closes the door and walks around the front of the truck before joining me inside. “When did you get this truck?” I ask, feeling an overwhelming need to make conversation. After sitting in silence for the last three hours, forced to listen to the thud of my own heart and my rapid breath, I need it.
“I bought it last year. Remember, I told you about it in one of my letters.”
“Oh, right.” I feel stupid for asking. “Your dad’s old truck went kaput.”
“That’s one way of putting it. I needed a more reliable vehicle to get me back and forth to work and to the shelter.”
On top of working as a farm mechanic at Hoppers ranch and helping at Mr. Miller’s farm, Nash also spent a lot of time volunteering at the local shelter, running errands, picking up food, spending time with the animals. He never said so, but I’ve always known he was doing it for me, or at least because it made him feel closer to me. I used to make him volunteer there when we were younger. It has always brought me such joy to help animals. Guess you can see how I made a career out of doing just that.
“You’ve really made a home for yourself here,” I say, looking out the window as we finally find a small break in traffic and are able to exit the parking lot into the street.
“I’d hardly call this place home. It hasn’t been that since the day you left, but I’ve made the best of it.”
His words steal my breath.
“I’m honestly surprised you stayed,” I finally say after too long.
“I told you I would. I said I would wait for you, and I meant it.”
“Nash—”
“I know you’re not coming back,” he interrupts before I can say more. “Truth be told, I don’t want to be here either. My home is wherever you are, P. It always has been. There isn’t a place on this earth I wouldn’t follow you. All you have to do is ask me to.”
I don’t know what to say.
On one hand, it’s all I want. For him to move to California, for us to start our lives together. But I’m also not forgetting the fact that this is the first time I’ve seen him in four years. There are a lot of things we need to figure out before I ask him to leave everything he’s built behind.
“Have you seen him?” I don’t want to ask, but in some weird way, I feel like I need to.
“Felix?” He doesn’t need my confirmation, but I give it to him anyway.
“Yeah.” I nod softly, keeping my gaze out the window. We’ve talked about him in our letters, of course, but he’s never really said anything about him that didn’t pertain to the past.
“Here and there. He doesn’t speak to me. He’s smart not to.”
“Is it weird that I feel bad for him?”
“Not at all. Because that’s who you are.”
“Being back here, it feels weird.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. It just feels strange. I expected everything to come rushing back the second I crossed the town line, and while I have thought about things more than I have in a while, it also feels like a lifetime ago. I don’t feel the pain I left here that day. I realize now it was never the town but my inability to let go of what happened here that was holding me back. And now that I’ve moved on and found a place where I truly feel like I belong, all of this —I gesture around at nothing in particular—“it all just feels so much smaller and insignificant.”
“I think that’s what people call moving on.”
“I guess. But there are things that happened here that I don’t want to let go of. Like you—our carefree summer days. Lazy afternoons swimming in the pond. Evenings filled with catching lightning bugs and counting the stars. Those are things I will carry with me always.”
“Me too,” he quietly admits.
“Do you ever think about those two crazy kids?”
“Every day.”
“We were quite the pair back then, weren’t we?” A smile touches my lips.
“We still are.” I feel his eyes on me for a brief moment, but when I glance his way, his gaze is back on the road. “You haven’t told me about seeing your sister again. How did it go?”
I had expressed in my letters leading up to this trip how nervous I was to see Celine again. Nervous and yet hopeful.
“Better than I could’ve hoped for.”
“Really?” He seems surprised, and really, who can blame him? I’m surprised myself.
“I’m not saying we’re going to be best friends anytime soon, but maybe, just maybe, we can learn how to be sisters again.”
“I’m sorry, you know. For the part I played in the Celine and Felix mess. I should have told you the second I found out, but by then, I was so fucked up, I don’t even know if I actually cared.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“But if I had told you, if I had intervened...”
“Don’t do that to yourself. We can’t change the past. Besides, you weren’t yourself back then. Remember what you told me they teach in your meetings—the only way forward is to forgive yourself and move past the things that were beyond your control.” I don’t say it, but I’ve used that mantra on myself a few times. You don’t have to be in recovery to appreciate the message.
“You’re not hard enough on me, you know that, right?”
“Maybe it’s because you’re hard enough on yourself for both of us. Have you ever thought of that?”
“I’ve worked really hard to atone for the things I’ve done, P. I hope you can see that.”
“I can.”
“I know I can’t change what I did, but I’ve spent every single day of the last four years trying to be a man deserving of your love.”
“You never had to work for my love, Nash. You’ve had it since we were kids. I don’t think there’s a single thing you could have done to make me stop loving you. Everything you’ve told me, everything you’ve been through, it doesn’t make me love you less. It makes me love you more. Because it shows me how resilient you are. How strong you are. I’ve known it since the moment we met. I’m just happy that you can finally see it too.”
“I fight because you’ve shown me there’s a life out there for me that’s worth fighting for.”
“If you could go back and tell your younger self one thing, what would it be?” I ask.
He thinks on that for a brief moment.
“I think I would tell myself that sharing your darkness makes escaping it a lot easier. If I could do it over again, I would never have taken that first sip of whiskey or swallowed that first pill. At the time, it was the only thing that numbed the pain. I was too blind to realize it then, but I had everything I needed to survive right next to me. I was just too self-absorbed to notice.” He blows out a hard breath. “What about you?”
“I would tell myself to wait for you.”
“P...”
“I’m serious. If I had just waited, things could have been so different.”
“But if things were different, maybe we wouldn’t be here right now. If I had never known what it meant to fight for you, then I wouldn’t know how to fight for myself. You did what you had to do to survive. I’m just so fucking thankful that you did.”
He doesn’t have to say that he’s thinking about my letters, the ones I wrote him after he left. I was in a really dark place, darker than I’d ever been before, and while it shames me to admit, there was a point where I almost gave up. Felix is what kept me from slipping over the edge. So I guess, in a way, I owe him my life. There won’t be a day that I’m not at least grateful for that.
“We both did.” I reach for his hand, which he readily gives. “Now the real question is, will we survive the remainder of the evening?” I tease to lighten the mood.
“With Celine being the center of attention, it’s hard to say.” He chuckles, following my lead into much easier conversation.
“I’m just glad my parents decided to throw her graduation party the same day as graduation so that we can get it all over with in one fell swoop.” The drive is over way too soon as Nash pulls his truck onto the curb outside of my parents’ house.
“At least you’ll have me to keep you company.” He grins.
“Is that a threat or a promise?” I narrow my gaze at him.
“I guess that depends on what you want it to be.” His smile turns wicked.
“Well, the last graduation party we attended together didn’t quite go as planned. Maybe today is the day for redemption?” I unlatch my seat belt, pushing the door open.
“Oh, I’m counting on it, P.” The way he looks at me this time has my nerves misfiring in rapid succession.
With a shaky smile, I slip out of the truck before Nash can even kill the engine.
I expected to feel a lot of things seeing Nash again, and boy have I ever, but nothing could have prepared me for the intense desire that swam in my stomach at the sight of his dark gaze and crooked smile.
God help me...
I swore to myself that I would take things slow. That we would ease back in and see how things go. But now, I’m ready to throw myself back into the flames with reckless abandon, consequences be damned.