Chapter 36 #3
The kitchen was empty and the windows were streaked with rain. Noah’s radio was still seated in its charging station and his phone was on the table. As I stepped into my tall rain boots, I called up the stairs, “Gennie, I’m running over to the shed for a minute. I’ll be right back.”
“Aye aye, captain,” she shouted.
With my hood yanked over my head and my hands clutching the coat close to my chest, I jogged across the gravel drive toward the shed where Noah kept his four-wheelers.
I figured I’d find him in here, messing around with his gear and generally avoiding me, but the shed was empty and his favorite vehicle was gone.
“I guess that leaves this one,” I muttered to myself as I fired up the older vehicle. As I drove out of the shed, two other ATVs pulled up in front of the house. With the rain and all their weather gear, all I could make out were large, possibly male shapes. “Noah?”
“No, it’s Tony,” one of the drivers called. “Bones.”
I came to a stop beside his vehicle, the rain whipping at the side of my face. “Have you seen Noah?”
“We came here looking for him,” Bones said, gesturing to the farmhand in the other vehicle. “He’s not coming through on the radio. He must’ve broken down out there.”
“He left the radio inside. His phone too.” I climbed out of the vehicle and headed for the steps. “Come on,” I yelled to him. “I need you to stay here with Gennie while I look for him.”
“You—oh, no. No. He’d kill me if I let you go out in the dark, in this weather. No, ma’am. We’ll look for him.”
“I’m going, and if he has a problem with it, he can work it out with me.” I opened the kitchen door to find Gennie mixing a glass of pirate juice. “Mr. Bones is going to hang out with you for a few minutes while I help Noah with something. I’m sure he’d love some pirate juice.”
A soaking wet Bones came up behind me, saying, “Your husband is going to kill me and then fire me and then dismember me for letting you take an ATV out in a storm. We take our ATV safety seriously around here, in case you hadn’t noticed, ma’am.”
“Pirates dismembered some of their prisoners,” Gennie said.
I glanced between them. “Sounds like you have plenty to discuss.”
With a great sigh, Bones said, “Go down the hill, past the orchards, near the marsh. There’s a pumpkin patch down there, the one we use for wholesale pumpkins and squash.
Not the pick-your-own patch up near the farm stand.
It’s flat but you have to watch out for streams. In this weather, they’ll be running high. Don’t try to cross them.”
“Okay,” I said, reciting those words over and over until they imprinted on me. “Okay. Thank you.”
He grabbed the radio and pushed it toward me. “Take this. Stay on channel four. If I don’t hear from you within twenty minutes, I’m calling for the cavalry. I mean it. I’m calling everyone. All-points bulletin. All hands on deck.”
“Understood.” I took the radio and tucked it into an interior pocket to keep it dry. To Gennie, I said, “You know what to do. I don’t have to remind you.”
She dropped two cherries into her glass. “Nope.”
I wasn’t an expert when it came to this land.
I didn’t know it the way Noah did, not even the way Gennie did, but I knew where that pumpkin patch was because it leaned up against the Twin Tulip border.
I’d spotted a bunch of stray pumpkins when I went for a walk down there earlier in the week.
Without that knowledge, I would’ve been driving blind.
I was about ten minutes from the house and clutching the wheel so hard my fingers were numb when I caught sight of white goat fur. I slowed to a roll, waiting for the goat to wander through the headlights again. But it wasn’t a goat I saw next. It was muddy jeans.
Noah held a hand up to his face, shielding his eyes from the glare of the lights. There was blood running down his forehead and he had his other arm cradled against his abdomen in a way that said something wasn’t right. A pair of goats milled around him. “Bones?” he called.
I turned off the vehicle and sprinted toward him. “Noah!”
“Shay? What the fuck are you doing out here?”
“Someone had to rescue you this time.”
“You could’ve been hurt or killed out here,” he roared.
“But I wasn’t.”
“Goddammit, Shay—”
“I love you too,” I said. “And I’ll love you as long as you’ll let me if—”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” he called.
We could barely hear each other over the wind and rain but this had to be said and it had to be now. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to trust someone all the way and I don’t know how to put myself in a position where I could get abandoned all over again.”
“Shay—”
“But I think I want to do it anyway,” I said. “I think I have to do it, even if it scares me. Even if I think it could fall apart or that you might change your mind, I have to stay here and I have to love you.”
“I swear to you, I’m not changing my mind. I’m not letting you go. I couldn’t. Not after all these years.”
Right here, with goats nosing at my hand and a storm around us, everything shifted for me.
It was a lot like being in my wedding dress and having the rug pulled out from underneath me again.
My entire world flipped upside down. And just as I’d known then that all the fondness and affection I’d built for the ex was gone, I knew now that Noah loved me.
He loved me and there was no way to force that into existence.
Love like this couldn’t be cornered, it couldn’t be contrived.
It was real and it wasn’t about rescuing each other.
But I had to yell at my husband about cracking his head open first. “What are you standing over there for? We need to get that cut looked at and please explain what happened to your arm.”
He trudged toward me. “I think I broke it when the ATV rolled.”
“You rolled the ATV? What the hell were you thinking, coming out here in the dark, in a storm, on the ATV? Don’t you have rules about this sort of thing? Don’t you know better?”
“Yeah, I do.” He caught a fistful of my coat and yanked me closer. “So, why don’t you tell me what the hell you did the same thing, wife?”
“It was my turn to save you, husband.”
He pressed his lips to mine and I knew . This was all the proof I needed.
* * *
After Bones assured us that he could stay with Gennie a little longer—and Gennie assured us there would be no escape attempts—we headed to the local emergency room.
Noah grumbled the entire drive. He insisted his forehead wouldn’t require stitches and that he didn’t have time to deal with a broken arm and therefore it probably wasn’t broken.
Maybe a sprain, maybe a pulled muscle or a bad bone bruise.
Nothing that would require a cast. He went so far as to explain this to the triage nurse, who promptly laughed her ass off and pointed us to the closest exam room while muttering “Farmers!”
Once we were alone, Noah scowled and grumbled about everything in the entire world until I pushed out of the metal chair and tucked myself in beside him on the gurney. “It makes sense now,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“All those times you said we were high school sweethearts.”
“We were.” He shrugged and then immediately winced. “You just didn’t know it.”
I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
He brushed some dried mud off his wrist. “Sooner as in since you’ve been back, or sooner as in high school?”
“Let’s start with high school and then we’ll unpack our recent history.”
He stared at the medical instruments on the wall. “Do you remember me in high school? Because I was shy and awkward and struggling through a ton of issues. I was tragically uncool and you were perfect.”
“I wasn’t perfect. You know I wasn’t perfect. If those letters are proof of anything, it’s that I was far from perfect.”
“You were perfect,” he said. “Fuck, Shay, you came here from Switzerland . Do you have any clue how that sounds to kids from this town? You’d lived in London and New York City.
I couldn’t compete with that. And I couldn’t compete with everyone else.
The popular crowd, the athletes, the rich kids. Everyone wanted you.”
“I didn’t need you to compete. I just wanted you to be my friend.”
“I was amazed that you wanted that much from me,” he said.
“And the notes.” I dropped my palm to the center of his chest. “All those notes. I can’t believe you kept them. You had them all this time.”
“If you wanted me to die of embarrassment, you should’ve left me out there with the goats.”
“I don’t want you to die of embarrassment,” I said with a laugh. “I’m trying to love you and you’d be making it really hard on me if you died right now. Please don’t do that. But I do want to clear up a few suspicions that I have.”
He wrapped his good arm around my waist, tugged me closer. “Whatever you’re thinking, you’re right.”
“Tell me about Little Star.”
An enormous sigh rattled out of him. “It’s you,” he whispered. “It had to be you.”
“And those wonky stars?”
“Yours,” he said. “I did use your intellectual property without proper permission though I’m hoping you’ll forgive me for that.”
I thumbed some blood off his cheek and kissed the corner of his mouth. “Forgiven.” Then, “And the blue-gray?”
“There was no blue-gray without the wonky stars. They only ever existed together.” He blew out another breath.
“Every time you looked at my hat or the market tent or even the jam jars, I thought it would come back to you. That you’d remember and I’d be busted.
You’d figure it out and I’d have to explain… everything.”
“I think you wanted me to remember.”
“Yes,” he conceded, “but I wanted to find a way to make this work first. Make it work for real.”
I smiled at my husband. There was an ugly bruise spreading from his forehead down around his left eye but I loved him and I knew he loved me too, and all of that scared the absolute shit out of me. “I want to try to make it work,” I said, “if you want to try with me.”