Cole and Sav

by Cole

  © 2018 Sunshine and Faith, Inc.

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  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by W Publishing Group, an imprint of Thomas Nelson.

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  ISBN 978-0-7852-2295-8 (eBook)

  Epub Edition September 2018 9780785222958

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018907012

  ISBN 978-0-7852-2290-3 (HC)

  Printed in the United States of America

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  Ebook Instructions

  In this ebook edition, please use your device’s note-taking function to record your thoughts wherever you see the bracketed instructions [Your Notes]. Use your device’s highlighting function to record your response whenever you are asked to checkmark, circle, underline, or otherwise indicate your answer(s).

  Contents

  1. Surprise at The Grove

  2. “But He’s So Young!”

  3. A Girl with a Past

  4. A Sign from Heaven

  5. Huntington Beach

  6. VidCon

  7. Last First Kiss

  8. Back in ’Bama

  9. San Francisco

  10. Motion

  11. Social Media

  12. Everleigh

  13. Long-Distance Love

  14. One Last Secret

  15. Pondering the Big Move

  16. Making a Decision

  17. Preparing for the Move

  18. Transitions

  19. Together at Last

  20. The Proposal

  21. Wedding Planning

  22. Purity

  23. Loving Ev

  24. Countdown to the Wedding

  25. The Wedding Weekend

  26. Our Wedding Day

  Reflection Guide Day 1: Praying and Trusting

  Day 2: How Good He Is

  Day 3: God’s Way of Showing

  Day 4: Good for the Soul

  Day 5: Truly Worshipping

  Day 6: Take Off

  Day 7: The Sweetest Thing

  Day 8: I Asked Him

  Day 9: Passion for God

  Day 10: Show Me the Way

  Day 11: Praying Together

  Day 12: Every Part of Our Lives

  Day 13: The Most Amazing Feeling

  Day 14: The Best Is Yet to Come

  About the Authors

  1

  Surprise at The Grove

  Cole

  “I feel like I just said goodbye to my own daughter,” I told my friend John Stephen the first time I met Savannah and Everleigh. It was the strangest feeling. I had no idea where it came from.

  This certainly wasn’t what I expected to find when John Stephen and I headed out that morning in search of the perfect motor scooter to ride around the campus of Troy University back home in Alabama. I hadn’t really thought about how I was going to get a scooter home when we flew back to Alabama in five days but, hey, I was nineteen, and questions like how to get a motor scooter from Los Angeles to Troy, Alabama, by way of the Atlanta airport didn’t really concern me. I just knew I wanted one and I’d found the perfect one online at a warehouse about half an hour away from where we were staying. I convinced John Stephen to get up early and go with me. We found the warehouse, but it turned out it didn’t have the exact one I wanted, so I decided to pass. Now we found ourselves thirty minutes out of our way. I say minutes and not miles because in our few weeks out in Los Angeles, we’d learned that everything is measured in time. Miles don’t matter because traffic is so bad everywhere you go that it takes forever to get anywhere, especially at the wrong time of day. That’s why we decided to try to find something fun to do where we were rather than drive all the way back over to where we were staying.

  We had less than a week left in California after our month-long bros trip, and we wanted to make the most of it. My oldest brother, Luke, had flown out with us right after all of us finished up our classes at our respective colleges that spring to spend a month bumming around Southern California. We didn’t have any kind of plan except to go exploring, hang out at the beach, and maybe meet girls. The last part was mainly Luke and me since John Stephen already had a serious girlfriend he ended up marrying. I also tried acting while we were there. I had some television experience from being on The Amazing Race, and I wanted to see if acting might be something I’d like. It wasn’t. In fact, I hated it. All it did was waste some of our already too little time in California, so I didn’t want to waste any more. Then Luke had to fly home a week early, which made the end of our adventure feel that much closer.

  When the motor scooter place turned out to be a bust, I started Googling fun things to do close to where we were. The number one thing to pop up on my phone was an outdoor mall called The Grove. I’d heard some people talk about how cool it was, and now we were only a mile and a half away. I told John Stephen we should go check it out, and he agreed. We drove over there and started walking around the shops.

  The Grove was huge. All these great stores wound around parks and fountains, plus the mall had a theater and all kinds of places to eat. We could spend a week there and not get bored. I could see why it was number one on the Google list.

  John Stephen and I started wandering around, taking everything in, when I happened to see this super-beautiful blonde girl across the mall from us. Now, I am no ladies’ man. I’d never had a girlfriend, and I was the last guy on earth any of my friends thought of as smooth with the ladies. But I was also a nineteen-year-old single guy, and anytime I saw a beautiful, blonde California girl, that was a pretty good day. I looked a little closer at the girl, and she looked familiar. Living in a small town in south Alabama, I never ran into famous people, either from movies or television or social media, but this was Southern California, not south Alabama. I started trying to figure out where I knew this girl from. Then it hit me. I said, “Hey, John Stephen. I think that’s the girl from musical.ly.” Musical.ly is a social media platform where I’d recently started posting videos. “If you see a little girl with her, then it’s definitely her,” I said.

  “Is that the girl?” John Stephen asked as a little girl who looked to be around three ran past.

  “Totally,” I said. “That’s Everleigh, which means that has to be Savannah Soutas. I sent her a direct message a couple of weeks before we came out here. I thought maybe we could tag each other in our videos to help each other get more followers, but I never heard back from her.”

  “So what do you want to do?” John Stephen asked.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Should we go up and say hi?”

  “I don’t know. Should we?”

  “I think so.”

  “Nah, feels kind of weird since she never messaged me back. Besides, she has a kid. She has to be married. If that wa
s my wife, I wouldn’t want a couple of goofs like us to go up and start bugging her,” I said.

  “You’re probably right,” John Stephen agreed.

  “You know, let’s leave her alone,” I said. We then took off to another part of The Grove. John Stephen wanted to buy something for his girlfriend. Eventually we ended up at a Barnes & Noble.

  Maybe forty-five minutes later, the two of us walked out of the Barnes & Noble and literally ran into a woman walking by. As we were apologizing, her eyes widened as she said, “Hey! My name is Chantelle. My sister, Savannah, saw you guys a little bit ago, and she told me that if I happened to see you to tell you to come over and meet her. She’s over that way with a friend and their daughters,” Chantelle said. “I’d take you over to her, but I’m on my way out of here.”

  “Okay, thanks. We will definitely head over that way,” I replied. As soon as she walked away, I looked over at John Stephen, shook my head, and said, “This is going to be awkward.”

  “Ya think?” he said.

  “Oh man, how can it not be? I kind of wish we hadn’t run into her sister,” I said.

  “But we have to go over and meet her now. Her sister will tell her she ran into us. If we don’t go meet her, it will be rude.”

  I shrugged. “I guess you’re right,” I said, and the two of us headed over toward where we first spotted Savannah.

  We found her pretty easily. She hadn’t moved since we first saw her. I walked over and said something like, “Hi. I’m Cole. I hope this isn’t weird, but we ran into your sister, and she said we should come over here and meet you. I wanted to tell you that you have a really cute daughter, and I love the videos the two of you make together.”

  Savannah smiled and said, “Awww, thank you!” Before she could introduce herself, her daughter came bouncing up and said, “Hi. I’m Everleigh.”

  I have to be honest. I was much more comfortable meeting Everleigh than I was meeting Savannah. I am the second oldest of six children. I have a little sister, Lily, who was six years old at the time. Since Everleigh looked to be a little younger than my sister, I immediately went into big brother mode. “Hey, Everleigh. You’re so cute,” I said, or something like that. Savannah also introduced me to her friend Michelle and Ava, Michelle’s daughter. Everleigh and Ava were your typical super-energetic preschoolers. The two of them started jumping on John Stephen and me, wanting to play, so, like the big brothers we were, we chased them around this grassy area. Eventually the girls stopped jumping on us and started playing together. When they did, John Stephen and I went over to talk to Savannah and Michelle a little more. All we really had to talk about was the fact that we both made videos on social media. Then I remembered VidCon was coming up that weekend. VidCon is like Comic-Con but for vloggers and other social media people. “So are you going to VidCon this weekend?” I asked.

  “I thought about it, but I don’t really know anyone who is going to be there, so I’ll probably pass,” Savannah said.

  “Me too,” Michelle said.

  “We’re from Alabama, so we don’t know anyone else either, but if you want to go, maybe we could meet up there and hang out. I mean, you don’t really know us, but at least you won’t be completely by yourself,” I said. I was not asking Savannah on a date. I assumed she was married.

  Savannah surprised me and said, “Yeah, that would be cool.”

  “Great,” I said. “Here’s our numbers. Text us in a few days if you decide you really want to go.” I gave my number to Michelle not knowing if we’d hear anything from them.

  Once we finished talking about VidCon, we pretty much ran out of things to talk about. John Stephen and I needed to get going anyway, so I told them, “Well, we gotta take off. It was great meeting you.”

  “Yeah, you too,” Savannah said. John Stephen and I turned and started walking away when Savannah called over to her daughter. “Everleigh, go give Cole a hug goodbye.” Everleigh dropped whatever she was doing and took off after us. I turned around and saw this cute little three-year-old with boundless energy running toward me with her arms wide open, like a scene in a movie. When she got to me, she jumped in my arms, smiling wide. I picked her up and spun her around in the air, which made her laugh even more. I gave her a hug goodbye, then sat her back on the ground. “Goodbye, Cole!” she called to me as she ran back to her mother.

  “Bye, Everleigh!” I said.

  John Stephen and I turned and walked away, and that should have been the end of the story. But then the strangest feeling I’d ever had in my life came over me. That’s when I turned to John Stephen and said, “I feel like I just said goodbye to my own daughter.” Why I’d feel that or say that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. I was nineteen years old and about to start my sophomore year of college. I’d just met Savannah, and I had no reason to feel anything toward her or Everleigh, and yet I couldn’t shake that feeling.

  Little did I know that the feeling that came over me was a seed God planted to prepare me for the biggest surprise of my life.

  2

  “But He’s So Young!”

  Savannah

  I don’t know what made me send my sister, Chantelle, off to find Cole. It wasn’t like me to chase down guys. I was surprised even to see Cole when I spotted him at The Grove. My sister just happened to be in town visiting. On a whim she and my best friend, Michelle, and I decided to go hang out at The Grove for the afternoon with our girls. Michelle’s little girl, Ava, and Everleigh were both three at the time and baby besties. We’d been at The Grove for a while when we decided to stop for ice cream. That’s when I glanced over to my right and saw these two guys staring over at us like maybe we looked familiar. I recognized Cole right off. I turned to Michelle and my sister and said, “That’s him! That’s the guy from the video we were watching the other day.”

  “What?” Chantelle said. “I thought he lived back east somewhere. What’s he doing here?”

  I told her I didn’t know, and then Everleigh did something, and I had to go into mom-mode to take care of her. By the time I turned back around toward where I’d seen Cole, he and his friend were gone. I was pretty sure they didn’t know I had seen them. “Oh man, I thought they were going to come over and say hi,” I said. “He DMed me, and after I replied, I never heard back from him. I wanted to meet him.”

  That might have been the end of it, except about a half hour later Chantelle said she needed to leave. I hugged her goodbye; then I just sort of blurted out, “Hey, if you see Cole and his friend on the way out, let them know they should come over and say hi.” I really don’t know why I said that to her, except I thought Cole’s videos were hilarious, and I wanted to meet someone else on musical.ly. I really didn’t know many other people who did what I was doing, so when I had a chance to meet one, I wanted to do it.

  “Okay, I will,” Chantelle said as she left. I hoped she’d run into Cole and his friend, but I didn’t really expect her to. The Grove is huge, and thousands of people go there every day. The odds of her running into Cole and his friend, if they were even still there, were almost impossible. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised a little while later when the two of them came walking over toward me.

  Cole seemed nervous when he introduced himself. He also seemed really, really young. At the time, I was a grown-up woman of twenty-three. He looked like he was still a teenager, which later I learned he was.

  I introduced myself and told him I was glad to meet him. Everleigh didn’t wait to be asked to introduce herself. She came right up and said, “Hi, I’m Everleigh,” and gave Cole a big hug. She was always super-friendly with my guy friends. I think maybe it was because her father wasn’t around that much.

  Before Cole and I could have a real conversation, Everleigh pulled him away and made Cole start playing with her. Cole looked over at me, smiled, shrugged, and said something like, “Well, looks like someone needs me.” Watching the two of them play together was so cute. Cole seemed completely at ease with her, like he had a daughter
of his own or maybe a little sister. Given how young he was, I figured it had to be the latter. Ava also grabbed Cole’s friend, who had introduced himself as John Stephen, and had him play with her. The four of them ran around acting all crazy in the grassy area where we were hanging out.

  Everleigh finally stopped playing with Cole long enough for him to come over and talk to me. I asked him how long they were going to be in town, and Cole told me they were leaving on Monday, right after VidCon that weekend. When he mentioned VidCon, I said something about maybe going, except I didn’t know anyone who was going to be there. Cole said he didn’t either, so we talked about going together. If you had asked me right then if I was for sure going to go to VidCon with him, I’d have told you, uh, maybe. He seemed really nice, but we had just met. I didn’t know if I wanted to spend a day or two or three at VidCon with someone I’d just met. But he seemed like a lot of fun, and Ev had hit it off with him right away, so I thought maybe I’d go. Cole gave his number to Michelle so we could contact them later if we decided to go with them. Cole then said something like, “Well, hey, we gotta go.” I said goodbye and it was nice to meet you, or something like that, and Cole and John Stephen started walking away. He’d been so sweet to Ev, and I didn’t want her to miss saying goodbye, so I called her over from playing with Ava and said, “Ev, go tell Cole goodbye.” She took off running after him and gave him a huge hug. Cole picked her up and swung her around in the air, which made her laugh and made me happy. I love to see my daughter smiling and laughing. He then set her on the ground, and she came running back to me.

  When I think back to that first meeting, I am blown away by how random it was, and yet it wasn’t random at all. Cole told me later that he recognized me because of Everleigh. He thought I looked like the girl from the musical.ly videos, but he wasn’t sure until he saw Ev. If he hadn’t stopped and looked closer to see if Ev was with me, then I might never have seen him at all. And if I hadn’t seen him, then I wouldn’t have talked about his videos that I’d watched with my sister, and I wouldn’t have told Chantelle to tell him to come over and say hi if she saw him. And none of this would have happened if I hadn’t started doing social media. It only seems right that seeing Everleigh was what let Cole know I was the musical.ly girl because if it wasn’t for Ev, I never would have started posting fifteen-second videos there.