by LJ Evans
He wiped at a tear that was running down my face.
“I’m so sorry I’m late. I’m so sorry I left. I’m sorry for the awful things I said. I was an idiot. Scared. Torn. But this, being next to you and our baby…” His voice was thick with tears and emotions.
Garrett didn’t cry. He wasn’t a man who wore his feelings on his sleeve. He kept them hidden, deep inside. It made it hard to know and understand him sometimes. It was why it had taken me forever, when we’d been dating, to recognize that he meant to keep me. That he loved me.
“Next to you and our baby girl is the only place worth a damn thing in this world. I’m just hoping you’re still willing to let me have that place at your side.”
I tried to say the words. I tried to get them out, but they were stuck in my throat along with the tears and the emotions. The hurt, the anguish, the overwhelming relief that he was there. My lack of words made him frown, worry drawing his eyes together, and I didn’t understand why. Not when he’d heard all my messages. My I love yous. He spoke again before I could clear the block of emotions away.
“I love you, Edie. I love our baby girl. I love you more than the distillery, or my family, or even all of Scotland. You. Us. It’s the only real thing that matters.”
“I love you, too,” I finally croaked out.
The worry left, and a smile so big it could have been its own country took over his face, and he finally wrapped us both in his embrace. I hid my face against his shoulder and cried, my body shaking, the baby fussing as we held her between us.
Then, he was kissing me, and it felt like the entire world that had shifted off its axis when he left was suddenly shifted back. He was kissing me as if he’d been gone a year, which it felt like it had been. He was kissing me like he’d never stop.
My heart, which had been sore and torn and wilted, bloomed back to life. He was the sunshine I needed. He was the life I needed. He was all I needed. Whether we lived in Scotland and traveled here to see my family, or we lived in Tennessee and traveled more often to Scotland, it didn’t matter.
All that mattered was being together.
Garrett
GREATEST TIME OF YEAR
“When everyone is filled with love and cheer
'Cause that's what matters.”
Performed by Aly & AJ
Written by Michalka / AJ Michalka / Armato / James
I was looking down at my brave, incredible, magnificent wife and wondering how the hell I’d been able to leave her a little over a week ago. I wondered how I had been able to stay away from her on Christmas. I wondered how I would ever forgive myself for not being there in the room when our baby girl was born.
She looked tired and heartbroken, my Edie did. She was crying, and I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand that I was the reason why. I wiped at her tears, and then I was kissing her. I didn’t care who was in the room. I didn’t care who was watching. I wouldn’t have cared if there were a thousand paparazzi taking pictures with their phones at the back or if Margery was cringing at the very public display of affection.
I didn’t even care if every single one of her family members thought I didn’t deserve for her to take me back, because they would be right. It had taken a gasp of pain, bad cell service, a lost phone, thousands of miles, and a snowstorm for me to know the one thing that was true: I couldn’t live if she wasn’t in my world. I had no other purpose.
A round of applause burst out in the room, and I belatedly remembered Edie had been in the middle of a speech when I’d entered. That she’d been trying to say happy birthday to her family. I lifted my lips from hers, kissed her on the forehead, and then turned so I still had my arm wrapped around her, still had her tucked up against me, but so she could see the crowd.
Her cousin Ginny was walking over to us, and she took the mic from Edie’s hand. “What Edie is trying to say is, we love all of you, and we hope this new year, this new chapter you all are starting…that we’re all starting…” She looked to the side of the room where some tall, half-kid, half-man was grinning at her. “We hope it’s full of happily-ever-after moments that stay with you for another fifty years.”
The room burst into applause again.
“I’m not the singer of the family,” Ginny said, “but my daddy made sure I could carry a tune. Shall we sing?”
The room broke into the familiar “Happy Birthday” song, the tune carrying itself around the brick and wood walls. The people smiling and laughing and singing. I understood how Edie wouldn’t want to lose this. As I looked out at the crowd, I found my grandmother, her face teary-eyed and smiling, and I realized we didn’t need to choose, Edie and I. We just had to accept.
After the song, a huge cake was wheeled to the front of the room, and all the people celebrating their fiftieth were asked to come forward and carve a piece of it. The cake was passed out, and the DJ started the music again as the buzz of the room became louder and louder.
My grandmother made her way from the back of the room to our side. She smiled at Edie and the baby with such warmth that it socked me in the gut.
“I see she has the Drummond nose, poor darling.” She kissed Edie’s cheek and ran a finger over the baby’s skin. “And you look absolutely lovely. Are you sure you just had a baby, darling?”
My grandmother was right. Edie looked lovely. Tired, but more beautiful than I’d ever seen her. Her hair was up in a twist with curls framing her face, and she was wearing a white dress covered in sequins on the top and tulle on the bottom. Like the snow fairy from The Nutcracker. A dance she must have done a thousand times as a ballerina.
“I’m… I’m so glad you could come,” Edie said to Margery. I knew that wasn’t what she’d started to say. She’d been about to say she was surprised my grandmother had come at all.
“I’m sorry we were late,” Margery said in return before drifting off to find herself a glass of wine I knew she needed as much as I did. We’d finally made it.
I looked down at Edie.
“Can I hold her?” I asked.
Edie looked down at the baby, hesitating. I couldn’t blame her, but she finally moved, and I took our daughter in my arms. She was so tiny, so indescribably precious, that my eyes filled with tears again.
“I’m sorry I missed your birth,” I whispered to her. “But I promise, I’m not going to miss another moment of your life. Not one moment that you let me have with you.”
When my eyes met Edie’s over the baby’s head, I saw the tears fall again.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t hold her in for a few more days,” she choked out.
“I tried to get here sooner. I had to buy a jet just to get us to New Jersey.”
Edie’s mouth dropped. “You bought a jet?”
I chuckled. “No one was flying out. Definitely not to Tennessee. Not with the weather. By the time I found a crew, New Jersey was the nearest even they would bring us. Margery and I drove straight from the airport, but the snow socked us in somewhere east of the state line.”
“I left you so many messages,” Edie said, her voice wavering again, but knowing she left them had a weird sort of relief flowing through me. At least I’d had a chance before I’d even shown up.
“I lost my phone. I bought a disposable, but with Myra in Tahiti, I was clueless on how to get anything synced up. I’m asshole enough to not know your number by heart. Tell me it right now. Write it on my wrist,” I said, showing her my left one. “I’m going to have it tattooed in place so I’m never without it again.”
Edie rested her head on my shoulder. “I thought I’d lost you. I thought…”
I hugged her as tight as I could with the baby between us.
“I said such awful things before you left.” Her voice was full of regret. Regret that was echoed in my own bones.
“We both did.” God, I had. If only I could take them back. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t take back the words or leaving her, so I’d just have to show her a
nd the baby every day from here on out that I was never leaving them again.
“I love you.” She said it like it was a fact. She put her hand on my jaw, rubbing the stubble that had grown since I last showered and shaved.
“I didn’t know that I could love anything this much. Anyone,” I told her the truth. “When I first asked you to marry me, I loved you. I knew I didn’t want to be without you, but I didn’t realize… I don’t think I understood that my love for you means I can’t even breathe without you next to me. Without knowing the day will end with us together. You’re not just my heart. You’re my lungs. My muscles. Every piece that keeps me going.”
She kissed me. Hard, deep, full of sadness and regret that we wouldn’t be able to take back, but also with love and hope and joy.
“You bought a jet,” she said again.
I chuckled. “I knew I’d probably already missed her birth, but I was determined to not bring in the new year without both of you with me. Without you knowing how much I loved you both.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Don’t you see? It’s our solution. If we own it, we can decide at any moment to go to Scotland or come to Tennessee. We can wake up in the morning, and you can say, ‘Let’s go see my mama,’ and we can.”
“We could have done that anyway,” she replied.
I nodded. “Yes, but who knows if they would have spots on the next flight. Maybe we’d have to wait a day. And there’s nothing really direct. This way, I can come and go as I please, do business from the plane. Be where I’m needed when I’m needed.”
“Except for an eight- or nine-hour plane ride.”
“Psh. What’s eight hours? It’s nothing when all the other flights take double that with the layovers.”
“And Margery? She approved this incredibly outrageous expense?”
“Honestly?”
Edie nodded.
“I didn’t care, but when I told her what I was doing, she asked why I hadn’t done it sooner.”
“Really?”
My hands wouldn’t stop touching her. I missed so goddamn much.
“What did you name her?” I asked, looking back down at our girl’s face. She was staring at me. As if she knew my voice.
“I didn’t,” Edie stated.
I frowned, confused.
“I couldn’t name her without you. So, right now, she’s just Baby Girl.”
I was stabbed in the heart…love absolutely to blame. My love for her. My love for the baby all mixed together. My heart hurt as it grew and twisted and was claimed by these two females all over again.
“What do you want to name her?” I asked.
“I was thinking of Leannan,” she said, and my breath was taken away once more at the Gaelic word she uttered. The fact she’d spent time finding a name that would represent my family even when I had left.
“Sweetheart,” the English form slipped out of my mouth.
“Do you like it?” she asked, brows burrowing together.
“I do. It’s perfect,” I told her, my breath shuddering back to life in sharp, aching movements.
A hand on my shoulder jerked me from gazing at the people who mattered most to me. I looked over to find Lonnie standing there, his face as unfriendly as I’d ever seen it. I didn’t blame him. Looking at my little daughter, I was already feeling anger rise at the thought of anybody and anyone who might hurt her in her life. And I hadn’t just hurt Lonnie’s daughter, I’d almost destroyed her. I’d almost destroyed us.
“Can we talk?” he asked.
“Dad, don’t,” Edie said, trying to protect me, even after everything.
“No, it’s okay, Edie,” I said. I kissed her on the lips, handed the baby back to her, and then went with Lonnie as he headed through the crowd to the back of the room.
We stepped outside onto the landing, the cold air hitting me.
Lonnie rubbed a hand over his face. “What the hell, Garrett?”
There was nothing I could say that would have been appropriate or sound anywhere near justified, so I said nothing. He was her father. He had every right to demand an answer from me, but I knew what I had to say wasn’t going to be what he wanted to hear.
“You can’t get that back,” Lonnie continued. “You lost something this week that you’ll never be able to have again. You’ll never be able to fix.”
Shit, it hurt. I’d already known it. Already said it to myself and to Edie, but it was true. It was a fuck-up that would haunt me for the rest of my days.
“I know,” I finally acknowledged.
“Do you?” he asked.
I faced him again, anger creeping in. “Yes, goddamnit. I do. I won’t leave her again. Them. Either of them.”
I glared at him, and he glared back before giving a curt nod. “Good.”
Then he left. I breathed in the cold air. As cold as it was, it wasn’t the same as Scotland’s cold. It was different. Hard to explain. This world was all new history, and my other world was ancient and old. But at the merging point was a beautiful babe named Leannan. A way to join the two. A way for me to have a foot in both places.
I turned back, and as I went to go in, Edie was coming out. She had her hands full with her purse, a diaper bag, and the baby. I went to grab the bags out of her hand, but she stopped me.
“Why don’t you take Leannan?”
I met her eyes full of love and something akin to determination.
“You can’t let me make this kind of mistake again,” I told her gruffly. “Bash me over the head, stuff me in a stove. Hell, have one or all of your cousins hog-tie me and drag me behind a horse, but don’t ever let me walk away from you again.”
“Same. Except you can sic Margery after me,” she said with a gentle curl to her lips.
I laughed because the thought of my perfectly coifed grandmother hog-tying anyone was comical.
Edie handed Leannan back to me. Her little head rested on my forearm. She was so tiny and yet so huge. She and Edie were the reason all the holes inside me were filling up. And I knew that, no matter what came, no matter what happened, as long as we let love lead us, we would make it through.
CURIOUS ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED WITH DALTON AND REESE THAT HAD TY AND STEPHEN READY TO TAKE ON HER EX?
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Here’s a tiny snippet from Eli and Ava’s happily ever after story:
She went down the hall with a drunken walk, bumping into walls and making so much noise that I was sure Mac a
nd Truck were going to come out of their rooms ready to start a fight.
“Where are you going?” I asked as I followed her.
“To bed,” she said and entered the master suite.
“Not in here, you’re not.”
She was already on the bed, feet going under the sheet and head landing on the pillow I’d been using. The king-sized bed was huge, and yet, somehow, she was in the exact spot I’d been lying in.
“Ava,” I said her name, and it sounded strange. Throaty. Like a word I shouldn’t be saying.
Her eyes popped back open at her name, or the way I’d said it, or both, and I had to fight off every nerve in my body that was demanding I jump into the bed beside her.
“There’s plenty of room, Mr. Grumpy.”
It sounded like an offer. An offer we both knew that I wasn’t going to accept. She patted the bed behind her as if to reemphasize her point.
“You won’t even know I’m here,” she continued.
There was no way I was climbing into that bed. Just as there was no way I wouldn’t know she was there. But when I moved toward the bed, her lips curled up in a sly smile as if she actually believed I'd join her. I reached over her to grab a pillow.
“Sleep good, drunkard, because tomorrow your sweet little ass is out of here.”
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