Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
OAKLEIGH
I’ve asked Finn where we’re going five times. You want to know how many replies I’ve gotten? Zero.
I was under the impression that after dinner, Finn would drop me home and that would be that. We’d be able to allow for things to go back to normal and I wouldn’t have to acknowledge that I like the way his touches feel against my skin.
But, when we reach the intersection that either takes you left toward my town or right to the edge of Eaglewood, Finn ends up turning right.
“Finley,” I sigh, sinking into the passenger seat and crossing one leg over the other. “Can you just tell me what the fuck is happening? I’m getting anxious.”
“Please just trust me. You’ll see,” he says, an obnoxiously confident smirk on his face.
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“I’m sorry, did you just say, ‘because I enjoy being an asshole’?”
Finn laughs loudly. “If that’s what you heard, Cherry.”
He drives carefully, the dark roads difficult to navigate.
Eventually, much to my surprise, he ends up pulling into Goldleaf Farm, the pumpkin farm that Gus and Bash own and where Wren hosted my thirtieth birthday party.
She even went as far as helping Gus to completely redo their barn so that they could hold the party there.
A barn that Finn helped to build for free. For me. Or, more likely, for Wren.
I notice that neither Bash’s nor Gus’s trucks are parked outside the main building, maybe because it’s currently under construction and so Gus has to do any admin work from home.
From what I’ve been told, Sam came across a fuck ton of money and is helping redo certain parts of the farm as a gift to his brothers.
With the help of a certain friend in construction, of course.
Finn puts the car in park and turns off the engine.
When he helps me climb out, I’m grateful that the ground is actually solid dirt this time.
My party last year was held during the fall, and so the majority of my visits consisted of my shoes becoming caked in dirt.
But this time, there’s nothing but hard dirt and the remnants of the summer sun left behind.
The breeze that drifts over my arms is mild and warm and yet I still shiver.
Finn’s shirt is still tucked around my shoulders, so I pull my arms through the sleeves and push them up until my hands pop out the holes.
Finn wordlessly holds out his hand.
“Why are we here?” I ask instead of taking it.
“Part two of our date,” he replies with a smile.
“Part two?”
“Part two.”
Done waiting, he gently grabs my hand and leads me over to the barn. He lets go to open the large wooden doors.
Now, it’s not that I don’t expect much from Finn.
From what I hear, he’s quite the romantic, but I just never expected that to be directed toward me.
Yes, I’m playing the role of girlfriend, but that’s all it is, a role.
There’s nothing real about it, nothing worthy of me receiving such attention from him. This is effort meant for someone real.
And yet, here it is, right in front of me … effort.
Rows and rows of fairy lights hang from the rafters, the balcony railing and even over some of the hay bales.
Somewhere, there’s a speaker playing some Alex Warren, and right on the floor in the middle of the barn is a blanket spread out, a picnic basket placed on one corner and a wine cooler with a bottle of wine in the other.
Flowers sit in watering cans around the room: a mixture of peonies and roses that light up the space without taking anything away from the soft flow of the fairy lights.
The entire thing is just … breathtaking. I don’t even know what to say. The words remain lodged in my throat, jumbled and useless, because what can I possible say to describe how beautiful this all looks.
“Tonight has really made me worry about you. This evening has probably been the quietest I’ve ever seen you.”
“I just—” I’m still struggling to find the words. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything, really. I just know that you always like to.”
He holds a hand out, inviting me to sit on the picnic blanket. I cross my legs beneath me, still staring at the room as if I’m looking at the Mona Lisa for the first time.
He sits beside me, long legs splayed out in front of him. He reaches for the wine, pouring the amber liquid into two glasses that were beside the cooler. When I see the label, a warmth coats my chest. That’s my favorite wine.
He hands me a glass and I take a sip as I see what else he’s done.
I finally notice that the flowers don’t seem to be real at all. Every single one of them is—
“Where did you find crocheted flowers?” I ask.
Finn shrinks in on himself. “I-uh-didn’t find them.” I let him take his time to elaborate. He takes a gulp of wine before adding, “I … made them.”
I look around at the number of flowers that are sitting in various vases. We must be talking maybe twenty-five to thirty, at least?
“You’re trying to tell me that you made every single one of these flowers yourself?”
The blush along his neck deepens to a dark red.
“Once you figure out how to do it, it’s actually pretty easy. I found it quite calming in fact.”
There really is another side to Finn that I never took the time to find or appreciate.
“But why did you do this?”
“It’s not obvious why?” Finn asks.
“Should it be?”
He scoffs, looking away briefly. “I don’t get you sometimes.”
“What’s not to get?”
“You’re always so observant. Nothing really gets past you, and yet … it’s as if you don’t want to see it.”
“See what, Finn?” I ask, a little exasperated.
He opens his mouth, but no words come out, just a strangled breath that makes his face contort in pain. He sighs and brushes invisible lint off of his pants.
“Nothing. Just sometimes, you say and do things and I think to myself that maybe there’s something I missed?”
“Oh, yeah, because you know me so well.”
His face drops and an awkward silence coats my skin in itch powder.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble, embarrassment heating my cheeks. “I suppose it’s a little bit of a struggle to break old habits.”
He nods in understanding, but the hurt lingers in the brown of his eyes. We sit in silence for what feels like an eternity, each minute stretching longer and longer. Finn fiddles with the hem of his tee, a loose thread seeming so unbelievably interesting.
Eventually, the silence suffocates me too much and his name is ripping its way out of my mouth.
“Finley, I—”
“What’s your favorite color?”
I blink at him. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I figure it might be easier for you if we started from the beginning.”
“And you thought ‘what’s your favorite color’ was the best place to start?”
“If it helps me at all, I am severely out of practice with this.” He chuckles wryly.
That does actually manage to drag a laugh out of me. “You don’t say.”
“Oh, so you think you got game?”
“Better game than you? Definitely.”
Finn’s eyebrow drags up. “Right now, that’s not particularly hard.”
“I’m just surprised and I have to admit, I’m slightly disappointed. I thought that you could get out of the best-friend’s-brother zone whenever you wanted?”
Finn’s gaze darkens and I find the walls of the barn move closer, and the space between us feel smaller.
Finn has a dark side and I don’t think it’s one that I’ll end up minding all that much.
I’ve seen that little dark tinted animal show himself a few times ever since that kiss outside my house and so I know the effect that it has on me.
It dulls my senses at the same time as it puts my nerves into overdrive.
It has every skin cell sensitive to only his touch and responsive to only his words.
“I thought I’d already warned you about challenges?” he whispers.
I lean back and leisurely take a sip of my wine; the entire time I can feel Finn’s heated gaze on the side of my face.
I wait until my wine glass is back down on the blanket before turning my head toward him.
“That’s the thing about disappointment, Finley, it makes the person stop believing what you say. ”
Finn’s tongue glides over his teeth as he grins down at his lap.
I’m about to retort, but his smile slides off of his face as fast as it was created.
His hand clenches beside him and he hesitates before grabbing his wine glass and downing the remainder of alcohol inside it.
He swallows hard and bares his teeth in an animalistic way that, despite me being concerned for him, makes the summer heat be the secondary reason for my warm skin.
“Finn?”
No response. He scratches the back of his head and scrunches his eyes closed. His entire body curls in on itself, trying to protect him from something that I think is happening internally.
My hand on his arm jolts him. “Does anything in particular set it off?”
“That, um—” he shifts uncomfortably “—wasn’t a compulsion or anything.”
“Oh? Then what was it? Did I say something wrong?”
He shakes his head violently. “You could never say anything wrong, Cherry. I just … remembered something, is all.”
“Remembered what?”
He looks up and I see the pain in his eyes, the way it stretches across his face, dimpling the skin on his forehead and dragging down the edges of his lips.
“Remembered why this can’t be real.”
He shrugs my hand off gently and shifts backward, giving us some space so that his words don’t cut off our air.
He’s right, of course, and deep down I know that I shouldn’t be hurt by those words.
We know that things could never be real between us.
There’s too much at stake—Wren, Finn’s family …
and our friends. Besides, I made a promise to myself, and I need to keep it.
I used to think that the world only sent me bad men, that at some point in my life I had done something to warrant such a punishment.
Now, seeing the way that Finn treats me and the implications he’s making, I’m starting to think that maybe I’m the problem.
Maybe I turn them into bad men, and if that’s the case then it really is best for Finn not to date me for real, because during our time together, I’ve realized that I don’t think I ever believed Finn to be a bad person.
He shakes himself off abruptly and when he looks at me again, this time it’s as if nothing happened. His smile is kind, his eyes honest. He’s just Finn.
“And to answer your question, my compulsions really are mostly caused by stress.”
He takes a few calming breaths, each exhale bringing his shoulders further and further from his ears.
When he looks over and sees my concerned expression, he elaborates.
“It’s more of a natural occurrence. Mostly happens when I need to have any sort of confidence in anything. Well, that and hygiene … or safety.”
I take in his words while I refill both of our glasses. “Do you have any plans to continue with therapy?”
“Eventually.” He nods. “My therapist has let me know that he’s back at work, so I will start seeing him again. There’s just a lot going on at the moment.”
He takes out a container of cherries and places it between us. “Besides, I go to him for maintenance. I’m not looking for an antidote, just a way to control it.”
“You know, when we were younger, right after you went off to college, I researched OCD.” When I see his surprise, I explain. “I wanted to know. I was curious. When I was reading, I saw that a mixture of therapy and SSRIs gets you as close as you can get to curing it.”
Finn immediately stops chewing the cherry in his mouth. “But I just said that I wasn’t—”
“No, I know.” My head tilts. “But wouldn’t you want to fix it if you could?”
“What?” he asks.
“I just mean that … um … I don’t know, don’t people prefer to cure things like this?”
“Cure.”
“Well, maybe not cure, but remedy it?”
“Remedy it.”
Every time he speaks, it’s like an echo, a voice of disbelief that makes me slowly regret every word I’m saying.
“Finn, I don’t mean to imply that you’re—”
“That I’m what, Oakleigh? Huh? That I’m broken?”
“No!” I answer quickly, moving to sit on my heels so I’m facing him as I hold my hands out in an attempt to steady this shaky conversation. “Finn, I know you’re not. When I said cure it, I only meant—”
“What, you think that I haven’t tried?”
I’m thrown off, lost for words. His voice rises in volume with each word, and even though he doesn’t sound angry per se, he for sure sounds tired.
“You think I haven’t tried to be out from under the control of my own fractured thoughts? I go to therapy to be better, to feel better, but what you seem to be missing is that it’s a disorder, Oakleigh, not a defect. I still work just fine.”
I just stare, my eyes stinging with unshed tears that make me turn away before he sees.
“You’ve known me for fifteen years, Oakleigh, and you still don’t know anything about my OCD or how I feel about it. You’ve never even fucking asked. So, please don’t come and offer advice about something that Google told you how to feel about it.”
I stare straight ahead as I nod stiffly. Finn stands up and paces the length of the barn, pent up emotions and energy leaking from him in a way that I just can’t watch.
“I try so hard, Oakleigh, so fucking hard to protect everyone. To protect them from the effects that this could have on them. On you. I knew that you hating me would be better than you liking me in any way, because you would be spared the burden of my troubles. I’ve made sure that I am perfect in everything, because one mistake and I lose my worth.
My usefulness equals my worth, Oakleigh, don’t you see that?
And I can’t be useful while I’m not in therapy, yes, true, but that doesn’t mean that I’m completely written off.
Broken, maybe, but not fucking pointless. I’m not your project to fix, okay?”
I don’t open my mouth. I don’t take a second to tell him that he’s contradicting himself, moving from defending himself to dragging himself down like a confused pendulum.
My heart thumps against my chest so hard, it feels like it might stretch the skin and burst out.
He watches me as if he can’t believe he’s just done that.
Shock fills every crevice of his being and mine.
What surprises me most, is the fact that his eyes are full of unshed tears threatening to escape.
“Finn, I—” God, what do I even say at a time like this?
He turns away and runs a hand down his face. When he turns back, I can see the smear of unshed tears on his cheeks.
“I should get you home,” is all he says before walking out of the barn.