Chapter 15 #3
“Excuse me?” I interrupted. “I’m not moving, especially to a place without running water.”
“Don’t be picky,” she said. “If you’re in the cabin, we’ll be close to each other again. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Except for the lack of electricity, and the fact that it’s not a cabin. It’s a shanty where we clean our fish,” her boyfriend said. “Nobody can live there.” For once, he and I were on the same side.
“I’m not moving from where I am,” I informed them both. “At least, not right away.”
She muttered something about people not listening to good advice, which made him laugh and even I had to smile. I stopped that when Boyd spoke up again. “All Zoey used to do was boss you around and drive you crazy,” he told her.
“Because she loves me so much,” she answered. “Like how I made you wear pants today instead of shorts.”
“I make you brake early and stop at red lights,” he said. “Yeah, I guess that’s love.”
“What if someone is always concerned about empty roads?” I asked them.
“What if he did things like tell you to avoid a broken board in a flight of stairs and then watch to make sure that you did? What if he got upset when you were worried, and he wanted to have your mom arrested for stealing your money?” When I thought about it, there were a lot of examples where he seemed to be looking out for me.
“Who are we talking about, Everett Ford? I thought he was into you all along,” Boyd said. “Why the hell else would he have driven out to pick up Willow that night I got arrested?”
“Detained,” she reminded him.
“He wants you to come to all his games. He went over to that apartment and moved you out and into his own house,” he continued.
“He made excuses to talk to her, too,” Willow added.
“He told her some story about trying to get custody of a kid he doesn’t even know.
It’s like when that guy in the band kept asking you over to his house and you thought he just wanted to hang out and watch movies,” she said to me.
“I knew that he liked you. Why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t Everett Ford?”
“What? Now you’re on his side?” I asked.
“If he breaks your heart, I’ll still kill him,” she responded.
“He didn’t make up a story about a kid. Look,” I said, and I showed her some of what Eris had posted lately.
There were a lot of pictures of her with her son, but they were different from before.
In one, he sat on her lap and they were both laughing, and the woman who was his nanny was next to them and laughing as well.
I looked at that for a while, because it seemed like genuine happiness.
There were still posts of her alone (mostly nude), and others promoting a new movie she was in—the sequel to the one about the demons in the private school.
But most of them were of him, or of the two of them together.
“Why does Everett want that kid?” my sister asked.
“Because he thought that his ex-wife was going to do a bad job of raising him. He thought that she didn’t love him.”
“They look ok,” she told me. “Social media’s a lie, though.”
“Is that right?” Boyd asked her. “You believe it.” She told him to be quiet. “Half of the things people say about the Woodsmen is crap,” he continued. “Probably more than half.”
“There’s stuff about you, Zo,” she said. “There’s a picture of you talking to Everett at a coffee shop and you look so pretty. Your hair is really good.” She turned around to check me now, and nodded her approval.
Due to our parking pass, we got into the stadium without much trouble, and due to our sideline pass, we were able to go down on the field and get close to the players.
We were close to Everett, which was all that I cared about, and he came over to talk for a minute.
“Hi,” he told my sister and Boyd, and he looked at me and grinned. “Hi, Zoey.”
He stepped closer to me and I thought he might kiss me—and then he did, and when we broke apart, we were both smiling.
“Are you happy because you’re in the chill zone?” I asked.
“It’s because I’m so glad to see you here. I’m glad to see you anywhere,” he told me. “Even when I look at the dot that shows your location, I sit there and smile at my phone.”
“Oh, geez,” I heard my sister mutter somewhere in the background.
Everett cupped my cheek with his hand, then took off his glove. “Now I can feel you,” he explained.
“After the game, I want to talk to you,” I said.
“Jesus. Damn, what? What’s wrong? Tell me now.”
He was losing his chill. “No, it’s nothing,” I said quickly. “I heard some things about my mom, bad things, and it made me think a lot about you.”
“I’m doing bad things?”
“No, I realized that you were doing something selfless for Eris’s son. You wanted to provide him with stability and attention and that’s what kids need, but I haven’t been supportive—”
“I’m not going to do that. I’m withdrawing my petition for custody on Monday.”
“What?” I stared up at him. “What about the stability and attention?”
“I don’t think he needs those things from me. I was going to tell you yesterday but you had news, and then we were busy,” he reminded me, and he looked at me in way that made some muscles way down inside me clench up.
“Oh, geez!” Willow burst out, and Boyd laughed.
“I talked to Eris, just us and no lawyers. She thought I was fighting about her son to stay close to her or to punish her. Maybe I was at the beginning, but I kept thinking about that little boy and how nobody was loving him. But they do,” he said.
“He had the nanny who raised him and now Eris is promising that she’s going to take care of him, too.
Either she’s a better actress than I ever imagined, or she’s being honest. I don’t want to pull him away from that. ”
“Good.” I breathed out. “Because he needs that.”
“But I’ve been thinking about what you said before about parenting, about having that responsibility and giving that love. It’s something I want,” he went on. “I want a family of my own, a wife and kids, a house where we all live together with the right number of bedrooms.”
It didn’t hurt kids to share their spaces, but I understood what he meant. Also, Willow sometimes snored and I could have done without that when we had been together in the motel and the studio apartment. “I think you should have all of it,” I agreed.
“Zoey!” my sister exclaimed. “He’s talking about you—no, I don’t want to go,” she told Boyd, but he led her away.
“Did you really mean that you want those things with me?” I asked.
“I think we could have a future together,” Everett answered. “I’m not going to push you hard or go crazy and throw up on you. I mean that we could have it someday. Someday, you could tell me if you want it too.”
“Thank you for not puking, and just as a reminder, I don’t care about other types of your bodily fluids,” I told him. “But you don’t have to wait for someday. I already know that want those things too, with you.”
“You’re the future,” he said. “Whatever happens, I need you.” There may have been a photographer or two taking pictures as he kissed me again, but I didn’t care.
Unfortunately, the presence of those photographers, players, coaches, and a lot of fans made it impossible to strip off our clothes right at that moment.
Anyway, he had to go play in a football game, and he was still smiling as he went toward the tunnel.
“Well,” my sister announced. She and Boyd were standing together, his arms around her waist like he might have been holding her back. “Well, well. Well!”
“That was good news,” Boyd reminded her. “We all heard him say that she’s his future. Let’s go watch the game.”
He managed to get her to leave but I stayed just for another minute, and I saw Everett stop walking down the sideline. He turned around and started to jog in my direction, and then he ran. Was something wrong? Why was he—
“I didn’t tell you something important,” he said as he grabbed my hands.
“What? Is it something about—”
“I didn’t tell you that I love you,” he said. “I do.”
“You do? Oh geez, I’m so glad to hear that. Because I also love you,” I answered, and he smiled down at me again.
“You do?” he asked me back. He picked me up and I put my arms around his neck. “Damn. Jesus, I’m a lucky man.”
The Woodsmen won that game, but we had won something much more important—
“I love you,” I told him, and that was our future.