35. Eternally Yours
Eternally Yours
Blaze
My hand shakes around hers. “Come with me. Josephine.” My knees feel weak, and I don’t fight it when they bend.
I shuffle to kneel closer to her, offering up my other hand as well.
“Come with me or please...” My voice cracks, but I don’t bother trying to clear my throat or hide it.
“ Please, let me stay,” I whisper, lip quivering as hot tears cut down my cold face.
“I’m begging you, wife, don’t make me live in a time without you.
I don’t care when that era is—I’ll happily stay here with you until we’re old and gray and Gus can make us a double-wide casket. ”
Jo chuffs from behind the hand covering her mouth. She’s crying too.
“Or you can come with me, fuck everyone else. Start a new shop in my time—I know damn well you’d go big.
You don’t even have to come for me—I don’t care if you come with me and then leave my ass in a cornfield to take over the world!
Please, don’t make me jump in that water and know that when I surface, you’ll be dead and I’ll never be able to see your smile or hear your laugh ever again.
I’m a weak man, Jo. I can’t do it.” I barely have the words out of my mouth before she’s on the ground with me, arms thrown around my neck while she sobs into my collar.
“Do you truly want to be with me that badly?” Her answer is muffled, but I hear it anyway and laugh.
“Jo, my darling wife, I am eternally yours.” I throw the very words she penned to me back at her. She flinches, then pulls her head back to squint at me.
“Did you?” She tilts her head and squints a little harder.
I just smile and nod. “Find your goodbye letter? Did you think I wouldn’t?”
“Not while you were here, I admit.” She shrugs sheepishly and wipes a trail of tears with the back of her hand.
“So, Josephine, what do you say? Will you be my wife for real and not just in name? Will you allow me to stay with you eternally?”
The most beautiful smile that I’ve ever seen spreads across her face.
“Blaze.” She takes my face in her hands. “I can’t think of anything that would make me happier.”
Don’t ask me who moved first, but of all the kisses we’ve shared, this one feels like forever.
“Should we get the hell off this ice, then?” I pant when we finally break for air.
“Yes, I think we should—before I worry too long about how cold it will be.”
“Too…cold?” I blink a few times, trying to understand what she’s saying. I’m assuming we’re staying in her time, but that almost sounds like…
“Yes, too cold.” She nods towards the massive hole I just hacked into the ice, and I sag with a relief I’ve never experienced before in my entire life.
I really would stay in 1813 for this woman—in a heartbeat with no regrets—but I’ve daydreamed before of what it would be like.
Mom would—will—love her, Pops too. Sure, there will be some culture shock, but she’ll thrive in a time that isn’t full of people calling her a spinster at twenty-six for not wanting to marry some old geezer who needs an heir.
“You mean it? If this works…Jo, I don’t know if it’s a door. I don’t know if this will work, and I damn sure don’t know if it could work again after that.” I stand, pulling her to her feet as I do.
“Then the door is closed and I still mean it.”
God, I love this woman.
Jo hugs my almanac to her chest with one hand and holds tight to me with the other as we step up to the icy portal.
“Don’t let go?” Jo asks, staring down into the frigid pond.
“Not if my life depended on it.”
We steal one last glance at each other, take a breath, and jump.
I know as soon as my head goes under that it worked. The water isn’t cold, it’s warm, and a violent feeling of vertigo comes over me. I squeeze Jo’s hand even harder. I don’t want to hurt her, but I cannot lose her.
It’s working.
Oh, fuck. It’s working. In the six months that I’ve been trying to get home, I never considered how it would work.
Now that it is, I realize I may have just doomed us both.
Unless we pop up in the same place I fell in, at the same time I went in, there will be no ship.
We’ll be stranded in the middle of the Bering Sea with no shore in sight.
I fight my instincts and open my eyes, searching for that familiar light when the water stills.
I can’t see a thing. It’s not dark, not really, but the water is so murky I can barely see my hand in front of my face.
Jo’s hand squeezes mine, and I quickly squeeze back, not sure who is reassuring who.
I stretch out, turning my head for any sign of the surface, and it takes everything in me not to gasp when my heels hit the bottom of whatever body of water we’re in.
I angle myself and place my feet flat on the soft earth, prepared to push with all the strength I have to propel us to the surface, however far that may be.
I’m not sure who is more surprised when my head breaks into open air before my knees are even completely straight: me, or the real-life alligator I’m staring down like fucking Ace Ventura.
Jo breaches a second later, and as soon as she does, I let go of her hand. Her protest dies before it fully starts when, I assume, she spots our new friend. It’s really comical how still all three of us are right now.
Until we’re not.
The gator twitches, and I channel every single minute I spent watching The Crocodile Hunter as a kid.
I wrap my hands around the gator’s mouth—noting right away that it’s a smallish gator that I pray is alone—and shout for Jo to get out of the water.
Bitch-ass reptile chooses this time to initiate the roll sequence, and we both go spinning in a water, air, water, air limb-flopping dance.
My feet scrape the sandy bottom, and I fight to stand again, succeeding just long enough to see my crazy wife swing a massive stick.
“I’m the only one allowed to bite my husband!” she cackles maniacally.
When the contact reverberates through my wrists, I take a chance, letting go and scrambling to the shore.
“What! The fuck! Was that?!” Jo screeches while I gasp for air next to her and we both watch the offending reptile disappear into the swamp—because of course, since we didn’t travel to the middle of the sea, we would surface in a swamp.
“Jo, was that gator wearing your bonnet?” I ask, far beyond perplexed.
“It took some time to find a stick I could wield! At least I was trying to help…” Jo pouts.
I chuff at that and sling my arm around her shoulders, pressing a kiss to her temple.
“You ain’t ‘posed to catchum that way,” a voice calls out from behind us. We spin to see a man leaning over the steering wheel of a UTV. I hadn’t even heard him pull up. “Guess it ain’t my job t’tell you folks how it’s done though. Chère got a nice swing in, I seen that.”
I start laughing, the gut-wrenching kind that makes you wheeze, because holy shit. We’re back, at least in a time modern enough for vehicles, and instead of drowning in the Bering, we’re ankle-deep in the Bayou.
“You good, brah?” the man asks, clearly concerned.
“Yeah, yep, I’m good, totally fine. Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a phone I can borrow, would you?”
According to Larry, we were in a cellular dead zone. We had to drive ten minutes into town before he had enough service for me to make a call. Bless my poor wife’s soul, she didn’t pass out, but she did throw up the second the side-by-side parked outside of a little diner named The Croc Pot.
Now Jo is sitting in a back corner booth, sipping water and staring at everything like it’s a threat, and I’m holding Larry’s phone with shaky hands.
I dial the number I’ve known by heart since I was five and wait while it rings.
“Nate! Who do we know from Louisiana? Oh! Oh, I’ve already answered—yes, hi, hello?” The voice on the other end of the line has me immediately choking back a sob.
“Hi, Mom.”
Watching Jo walk around my farm arm in arm with my Pops is the craziest thing—and that’s coming from someone who portaled two-hundred years into the past and back.
It’s nice to see she’s finally relaxing a little, though.
After I got off the phone with my very, rightfully so, hysterical parents, we let Larry treat us to lunch at the diner because, “Gator wrastlin’ made you hungry. I know it.”
Jo got a steady dose of 2025 from there on out.
We stayed two nights at a hotel Mom reserved online for us while we waited for her and Pops to drive down to get us since Jo obviously didn’t have an ID for a plane ticket.
A grocery delivery showed up an hour after we did with everything either of us could need for the road trip home—including a pair of pink giraffe socks that forced me to confess I had intentionally left my socks behind so that Jo would have something to remember me by.
Jo’s fascination with the T.V. was quickly overshadowed by her losing her mind over the box of condoms my mom slipped into the order.
“There are how many in one parcel? How does it stay up with no strings?”
“I’ll model one or three for you after we get you out of those wet clothes,” I’d promised. I always make good on my promises.
Jo had her first hot shower, and wasn’t even mad that she said it was almost better than the sex, because after six months without, I was inclined to agree with her.
It only took twenty minutes for her to go from mortified to fascinated, to embarrassed, and lastly to enamored after we finally got dressed to leave our room.
She was in a matching mint green hoodie and sweatpants set, and wasn’t sure what was worse at first: the bare ankles or a being woman in trousers.
When we stepped out of the hotel lobby and saw my folks standing next to Pop’s Chevy, I ran, crushing my mom in a hug and sobbing like a baby, then laughing when Pops smacked me upside the head for the trauma I put them through.
Jo surprised me by loving every second we spent on the road to Kearney, especially our little dinner-detour to Joe’s Crab Shack in Fort Worth. She owns all of their merch now.
As I predicted, my folks loved every second they spent with Jo. They both took one look at Jo and declared her a part of the family, “Regardless of whether you keep him around or not.”
It seems crazy that we’ve only been home for a few hours as I walk out of the kitchen into my childhood living room on Christmas morning and find Jo pouring tea for two, smiling up at Mom who is spinning to show off her asymmetrical tie-dye skirt.
The Christmas tree casts a colorful halo behind them, and I truly understand how the Grinch must have felt when his heart grew three sizes.
I glance to my left and see my dad leaning against the banister.
“You know, I haven’t said it yet, but I told you you’d fall off that damn boat one day,” Pops says when I come to stand next to him.
“Yeah,” I agree with a laugh, “but thank God I did.”