Chapter 16 #2
“So he wrote to you? Where were my letters?” I asked.
I took another drink of my beer. My insides were starting to heat.
It wouldn’t have been that hard to drop something in the mail for me too.
Something like, Sorry I left you hanging or I’m in the military now traveling the world—maybe I’ll be back someday. Something, anything.
“He didn’t like that you saw him like that, that night on the beach. He was embarrassed,” Dean said.
For nine years? I’d forgotten about a lot of embarrassing things that had happened to me in nine years.
I’d never forgotten about Bower, though.
The way he’d made me feel. He’d been embarrassed?
He had saved me that night from getting in trouble with the police.
Who knew how that would have gone over with my parents.
Maybe we would have never come back to Agate Harbors.
“What about social media? He couldn’t have found me somehow and reached out?” Even a thumbs-up or a smiley face would have been something. Something to show me he still cared.
“You think that guy has social media? He wrote me letters for nine years, Mia. Letters. With a stamp. Not even an email,” Dean said. He popped off the top of the beer bottle and left to deliver it to Johnny.
“A guy like that is rare,” said Ruby. Her eyes were on Dean as he walked away. Was she talking about Dean or Bower?
“I can’t do this.” I finished the beer Dean had given me and looked at my sister. “It wasn’t even real.”
None of it. Was what I remembered between me and Bower what had actually happened? Sometimes when you were younger, you remembered things more magically than they really were. Like looking through a pair of heart-shaped, rose-colored glasses.
“Oh, it was real.” Ruby laughed.
“Nine years was such a long time ago.” I rested my forehead on top of my hands, my palms flat on the edge of the bar.
“You disappeared with him for a week each summer. You left the resort every year happier than when you came. I was a teenager and I pretended I couldn’t see it, but I could. Mom and Dad could see it too.”
“Mom told me that night that young love never works,” I said, talking to the floor. At least from here I couldn’t see Bower.
“Maybe young love doesn’t last…” Ruby put her hand on my shoulder. I turned my head to the side to look at her. “But you aren’t young anymore. You’ve grown up. Maybe that love grew with you.”
Tears welled in my eyes. Bower and I had both changed. Growth was unavoidable. But had our feelings grown with us? Or were they just a magical childhood memory we were trying to relive?
I scrubbed at my face, sighing. I’d been crying all too often for it being my bachelorette party.
“I can’t hear how he asked Dean about me all these years,” I said. “It brings back too many feelings.” Feelings of safety, warmth, magic. Everything I felt as a girl at Agate Harbors with Bower.
“Those feelings you’re having…” Ruby said, shaking her head. “I wouldn’t be getting married if I felt them.”
“Mia, can we talk?”
That voice. I’d heard it for the first time outside the bathroom today in all its baritone glory.
I lifted my head. Bower was standing there, in front of me, his arms tensing through his shirt. I quickly wiped my under eyes.
Ruby grabbed my forearms. “Talk to him. Just give him a minute.”
I nodded, taking a deep breath.
“Cover me for a minute, Dean,” Bower called out.
His friend gave a wave of his hand in acknowledgment. He was bent over the bar trying to understand the girls’ latest drink order. Good luck to him.
Bower stepped out from behind the bar, then grabbed my wrist, like he had when we were kids, and pulled me outside the building.
It was late, but they wouldn’t close until the people stopped buying drinks.
We walked far enough down the gravel drive that the music and voices from the bar turned into ambient sounds.
“What do you want, Bower?” I pulled my wrist out of his hand. I felt too comfortable with him holding it.
“Do you love him?” he asked.
“Love who?”
“If I have to tell you who, you must not love him.”
I shook my head. I hadn’t forgotten about Archer. It was just this place, the memories. All I could see was Bower.
“I’m engaged to him,” I said.
“That wasn’t my question.”
“Don’t do this to me, Bower.”
“Do what?”
“Confuse me with…everything.”
He knew what this place meant to me. Now that he was here, in my favorite place, looking like he did, I was second-guessing myself, the choices I made when he wasn’t around.
Bower took a step closer to me. I could smell him. It was his body wash or something—no, it was the lake again. It flooded my senses.
“How about this? I’ll make it less confusing for you,” he said. “Don’t do it. Don’t go back to him. Give me a chance, a real one this time.”
I didn’t know what to say; I just stood there like a deer in the headlights. Bower grabbed my left hand, then dug into the pocket of his jeans. He dropped an object into my palm, bending my fingers around it before I could see what it was. It wasn’t heavy, but it was solid.
He still had his hand wrapped around my wrist, used it to pull me close to him.
I stood like a statue, scared to move—to make the wrong move.
He bent down, his warm breath against my cheek sending goose bumps down my legs, and hovered there for a minute. I couldn’t breathe. My brain still wasn’t functioning.
His lips touched my cheek, lingering longer than a greeting or a goodbye kiss. This felt like a promise. “I never left you,” he said with his mouth against my skin.
Bower let go of me all at once. The absence of his warmth left me feeling like I’d jumped into the lake before ice-out. He turned around, heading back to the bar. I didn’t look away from his silhouette, and he never glanced back.
When he disappeared back into the bar, I took a breath of air. It burned my lungs like they’d been deprived of oxygen for minutes.
What had he left in my hand? I got brave enough to look. Finger by finger, I unfurled my hand, revealing what he had given me. An agate. Like the one at the bottom of my purse. A memory of happy times. A promise of more memories made together.
I let the tears fall and my knees hit the gravel, ignoring the abrasive grain on my skin.
I cried because I now would have to wash my knees off in the bathroom sink.
I cried because Bower had left me with an awful decision to make: Leave my fiancé to give him a chance, or marry Archer and live with the what-if of Bower.
I cried because Agate Harbors was always my favorite daydream and now it was turning into a nightmare.
“Mia? Is that you?” Ruby bent down next to me, wrapping her arm around my shoulder. “What did he say?”
I opened my hand to show her. That said it all. She knew I kept the agate from summers ago in my purse.
“Ah, fuck.” My sister pulled me up to standing and bent down to brush the gravel debris off my knees. “Let’s get you to the bathroom and cleaned off.”
“No.” I suddenly wanted to feel the grit against my skin. It distracted me from the way my life was tumbling down around me.
“Okay. Drinks.” Ruby grabbed my wrist as Bower had earlier.
Only this time, I wasn’t pulled toward a man but to a bar. With alcohol. Lots of alcohol.