Chapter 19
chapter
nineteen
Jules
I find it at eight fifteen on Saturday morning, when I open the front door to finally water my damn basil plant.
His handwriting on the front. Just my name, Jules, in the particular way he writes it—the J slightly too big, the rest catching up.
I stand on my porch in my socks and my oldest sweatshirt and I read it twice before my legs decide they're done cooperating.
I sit down on the porch step.
I read it a third time.
The basil plant is right there, the Mason jar of water I carried out forgotten next to me.
I examine my feelings, sitting on my cold porch step with the letter in my hands, and what I find is this: I am not surprised.
Not by any of it. Not by the love, not by the ending, not by the fact that he said both of those things in the same breath.
Because he is Payton and he does not do anything halfway, including loving people who have done everything in their power to make it difficult.
While I am not surprised, I am completely, entirely undone.
I've been in love with him, and I’ve known it, and I have spent weeks ignoring my feelings. Pretending I feel nothing complicated in a stupid effort to protect him from me, from my history, from the very real statistical likelihood that I will find a way to ruin this because that is what I do.
It turns out the universe doesn't actually care about my noble and protective intentions. It just went ahead and ruined it anyway, in the most Payton way possible—gently, honestly, with a signed letter that tells me exactly how loved I am while also telling me it's over.
I fold the letter.
Then I do something I haven't done in a very long time. Since I learned that falling apart is a luxury and when you have no one to count on, putting yourself back together takes longer every time.
I cry.
I'm still crying—less dramatically, more the quiet, stubbornly persistent kind—when Cora's car pulls up twenty minutes later, Hope in the passenger seat.
They get out, each carrying contraband. Cora has a cardboard caddy of coffee cups.
Hope has a pink box from Sugar Bakers, the best bakery in six counties.
I have a particular weakness for their glazed croissant doughnuts.
I glance down at my phone on the porch step next to me, and through my blurred, watery vision, I see the SOS text I sent them. I don’t even remember doing that.
"Oh, honey," Cora says, coming up the porch steps, and that's all she has to say before she's sitting next to me and Hope is on the other side and I am thoroughly, helplessly flanked.
"I did something stupid," I say.
"You did something scared," Hope says, which is not the same thing, and she knows it, and I know it, and the distinction makes me cry a little harder.
"He said he loves me."
"We know," Cora says.
I look at her. "You knew?"
“I told her how he took you out for tacos the night at the hospital. Then all the times you weren’t available for some things we invited you to. You mentioned you were in a situationship.”
“Your complexion has never looked better. Good sex can do more for your skin than anything Sephora can concoct,” Cora says. “So we knew you were getting some.”
“Well, I fucked it up. No surprise there.” I shake the letter at them. “He ended it."
Hope rubs circles on my back and Cora holds my hand tightly.
“He ended it because he loves me and he can't—" I stop. Press the letter briefly against my chest like that will do something useful. "He said he's ready whenever I am. He said if that day comes—"
“Here’s what I’ve learned from being with Oliver for a few months, you can love and be loved and still be scared. No man can ride in on a white horse or whatever and erase our broken pasts. No one can change our history and make us whole,” Cora says.
“What about you and the new sheriff,” I ask Hope.
“Same thing. Griff has his own wounds too. All of that can exist and we can love each other through it. Just like the three of us have done.”
“That’s the thing, Jules,” Cora says. “You already know how to let yourself be loved. You already know how to be part of a family. Payton isn’t asking you to dull your sharp edges. He doesn’t love some perfect version of you. He loves you. This broken, snotty one.”
“The overly tired and kind of mean you,” Hope adds.
"I'm scared," I say.
“We all are,” Hope says.
"He's twenty-two."
“Which probably means he has amazing stamina?” Hope says.
Cora and I both look at her since Hope has never been very vocal about anything sexual. We all laugh.
“Ew,” Cora finally says. “That’s my brother-in-law and I don’t want to think about him like this.”
“Okay,” I say, “but at some point, we have to share brief notes about whether or not the enormous dick is a Blankenship trait or if Payton just won the weiner lottery.”
We laugh again and then a wave of sadness rolls through me and the tear start anew.
"Jules." Cora takes the hand that isn't holding the letter. "Do you love him?"
“He’s fixed a ton of problems here at my house. Always stealthily, while I’m not looking. And always leaves me notes. Little messages that make me laugh and give me a stupid amount of joy. And I’ve kept every one of them like I’m in the sixth grade.”
I take a deep breath. "Yes," I say. "I love him."
"Then the rest of it is just excuses," Cora says. Not cruelly. Just plainly. "He's not too young. You're not too damaged. You're just scared, and scared isn't a reason. It's a feeling."
"The person who keeps leaving," Hope says quietly, "isn't him."
She’s right, of course. I know that. But hearing someone else say it out loud somehow breaks through my stubborn self.
The person who keeps leaving is me. I even told him that the first night we had sex. When I randomly and spontaneously shared part of my past with him. Maybe that should have been my first clue that there was something different about Payton Blankenship.
I've been leaving him every day. Putting him on a shelf labeled “booty call” all the while knowing he was falling for me.
"Okay," I say finally.
"Okay?" Hope raises an eyebrow.
"I need to write him a letter."
Cora squeezes my hand once, firm and certain.
"Then let's get you inside," she says, "and find you some paper."