Forever & Always: The Ever Trilogy (Book 1)

by Jasinda Wilder

  “Didn’t have much choice, Gramps. I was losin’ my fucking mind in Michigan.”

  “Watch your fuckin’ mouth, boy,” Gramps growled, but chuckled as he said it. “When’d you start talkin’ that way?”

  “No one to make me stop cursing anymore, I guess,” I said, and heard my voice catch. There was a sudden lump in my throat, hot and hard and rising.

  “You’re here now, and you know Grams’ll wash your mouth out if she hears you talk like that.”

  I nodded, but the gravel at my feet was blurry. I’d driven one thousand four hundred and fifty-eight miles in twenty-six hours. I was just tired from the drive, that’s all.

  Except the burning in my eyes was getting worse, and then something dripped onto the top of my shoe.

  I was gathered into a rough embrace. Gramps smelled like cigarettes and cologne and wood smoke and something else indefinable, something uniquely Gramps. My shoulders heaved, and I tried to push away, tried to push it down. Gramps held me in place.

  “No shame in it, boy. Let it out.” He held me tight against his thin cotton T-shirt. Even at seventy-eight years old, Gramps was still hard as iron. “You’re allowed to feel it, son. Ain’t no one gonna think less of you. Least of all me.”

  I shuddered, shivered, and then felt it overwhelm me in a hot flood. It all came out, sobs wracking me, shaking me. Gramps just held me and kept silent, comforting simply with his presence and his thick hard arms holding me upright.

  “I miss her, Gramps. I miss her so damn bad it doesn’t seem possible. And I miss Dad.” My fingers clawed at his shirt as I forced myself upright. “He’s gone, even though he’s still alive, still living in that house. He’s there, but he’s not. And I needed him, but he…he just quit. I’m lonely. I’m so alone. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of myself. And I’m so tired. Tired of hurting. Tired of missing her.”

  “I know, Cade. I know. I got nothin’ to say will make it better. Just keep on through, ’s all you can do. Saw men die, you know that. I never talked about it much, but…. Good men, friends, guys I trained, fought beside, and loved like brothers. Never hurts less. You just get up every day and do what you gotta do and eventually…well…the hurt is replaced by other things. Other hurt. Good things, too. Met your Gram when I finally left the Army, after my third tour in Vietnam. Served for ten years, most of that in combat zones. Saw some shit you can’t never imagine, and I hope to God you don’t see it yourself. I was fucked up, is what I’m tryin’ to say. Met your Gram, and that was the good what replaced all the bad I seen.” He paused to suck on his cigarette and exhale the smoke away. “If I was to lose my Beth, well…I can’t honestly say I’d be in any better shape than it seems Aiden is in. Until you know that kind of love, Caden, you can’t imagine how it gets—I don’t even know how to put it. I ain’t no good with words. It gets all hooked up inside’a who you are. Like vines wrapped around a sapling, growing together until you cain’t tell the tree from the vine. If you lose that, it’d tear you up but good. Tear you up forever. Wouldn’t be nothin’ left’a me, were I to lose Beth. That’s what I’m tryin’ to say. So don’t be too hard on your ol’ Pops.”

  “I’m trying, Gramps. I get all that, at least as good as I can. But I’m…I’m just a kid. I’m trying not to be. I know I’ve gotta grow up. But…I don’t want to, sometimes.”

  “No harm in that, son. I was barely a kid myself when I joined up for Korea. Barely a week over eighteen. I had to go, I knew I did. All the guys I grew up with, we was all acting gung-ho and eager and excited, but inside, deep down where you keep all those secret feelings you don’t know how to deal with, we was scared. Plumb terrified. Most of us had never left Wyoming. I hadn’t. My best buddy Hank hadn’t neither. We joined up together, got our draft notices the same day. Went through basic and got assigned to the same unit. Some luck, we thought.”

  Gramps lifted his boot to rest on his knee, brushed the cherry off his cigarette and stuck the butt in the breast pocket of his T-shirt. “Hank…. Goddamn. That boy was a fuckin’ lunatic. Absolutely fearless. Heroic. Problem was…heroic and fearless is what gets a man killed, and that’s what happened to Hank. Our whole unit was pinned down on this hillside. A machine gun emplacement had us dialed in to the inch. If any of us moved a single inch, we got popped. Dozens of guys bought it that way. Fuck, that was nasty. Well, Hank, he gets it into his head that he can get us out of it. Says, ‘Cover me,’ like we could do jack-diddly shit to cover him. We tried, though. Tossed some grenades, laid down some lead as cover. Crazy-ass Hank jumps up and starts running hell for leather, dodging like nuts. Bullets was whizzing past ’im, missing by a gnat’s whisker. He gets up to within a fuckin’ inch of that emplacement, tosses some ’nades, one in each hand, slings his rifle down and starts blasting. And goddamn if he didn’t take the entire emplacement out his own self.

  “But…he caught one in the gut. Didn’t stop him none, not till every last fucker in that emplacement was dead. Then Hank just falls over. I watched ’im fall. Bullet to the belly is an ugly thing, Cade. Ugly fuckin’ way to die. Took him days. We was out in the field, days out from HQ. No one but Kyle the medic for miles. And Kyle couldn’t do shit to save him. He died screaming. Took…days. Fuck—fuckin’ days for him to finally go.

  “And me? I cried like a baby, Cade. That’s the whole point of this story I shouldn’t be tellin’ you. I fuckin’ bawled my eyes out when he finally gave up his ghost. I didn’t want to grow up. I was nineteen when I lost Hank. I was growin’ up quick, sure enough, but that? Losin’ my best buddy? Grew me up all the way. Sometimes life just makes you grow up. You can’t fight it, son. You just have to wipe your eyes and keep puttin’ one foot in front of the other and do what you gotta do.”

  I nodded, and stared up at the numberless stars, and Gramps stood beside me, smoking in silence and each of us lost in our own thoughts.

  billy harper, warm rain for a funeral

  Ever

  It was the summer between my sophomore and junior years that I met someone who was able to pull my attention away from my paints and my photographs.

  His name was Billy. I knew of him, of course. He was the guy at school who was just effortlessly cool. Didn’t have to try, didn’t seem snotty about being the cool kid. He just…made you like him without having to try. He was the type to have tons of acquaintances, “hangers-on,” the old books would call them.

  I met him by accident, in the parking lot of the high school. I’d been using the school art room to frame a piece I’d done, since they had the space and tools to do it properly, especially since the piece I was framing was eight feet by six. It was an abstract piece, my most abstract yet, I think, but my best as well. All swirls of color streaking across from top left to bottom right, curving and arcing in almost arabesques, Arabic spires of blue and minarets of yellow. It seemed almost like a Middle Eastern landscape, but it wasn’t, quite.

  I’d borrowed Dad’s SUV for the day so I could cart the piece there and home. Only, I hadn’t anticipated how much heavier the painting would be after I’d framed it, and I was having trouble getting it into the car. I’d nearly dropped it several times, and was struggling to hold it up, to keep it from sliding out of my grip and to the ground. I had the front end in, but not enough of it. I was stuck, perfectly trapped, unable to lift it any higher, unable to lower it without dropping it and ruining the frame I’d just spent four hours making in the woodshop.

  I was near to tears, sweating, struggling, whimpering. Then I felt the weight miraculously lessen, and a pair of tanned arms slid around me, hands on the frame to either side of my hands, lifting, pushing, hefting the front end over the tire well that had been stopping it.

  I turned around, and there he was. Tall, with blond hair perfectly spiked above ice-blue eyes and carved cheekbones. Billy Harper. He had his trumpet case dangling at his side from a strap, and his body was inches from mine as he pushed the painting into Dad’s Mercedes.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, feeling start
led at his sudden presence, as well as the surprising reaction I was having to his proximity.

  My heartbeat was ramping up, and my breath was fluttering in my chest. I felt like the description of a southern belle in the old romances, all atwitter, flustered.

  “No problem.” His voice was low and calm, like the surface of a mirror-still lake. He lifted up on his toes and glanced at the painting. “It’s an awesome picture.”

  “Painting.” I couldn’t help the correction from popping out of my mouth.

  “What?” He seemed genuinely puzzled.

  “It’s not a picture, it’s a painting.”

  “Oh. Right. Yeah.” He shrugged a sculpted shoulder. “Anyway, it’s great. Looks kinda like…the desert. You know? Or a city in the desert. But it’s not, though. It’s just…lines. It’s cool.”

  “Thanks. That’s kind of what it’s supposed to be. Not quite one thing, not quite another, but nearly both.”

  He grinned, and my stomach flopped. “That’s cool.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m B—Will. Call me Will.”

  “Will? I thought—”

  “Yeah, everyone calls me Billy, I know. But it’s a nickname I’ve had since I was a kid, and I hate it. I always introduce myself as William, or Will, but everyone always hears others call me Billy, and it just sticks.”

  I shook his hand, and my palm tingled at the heat of his palm. “Ever.”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen you around. You have a sister, a twin sister, right?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. Eden.”

  He just nodded, and an awkward silence descended. He gave a funny, nervous little laugh, and then waved at my car. “So. Taking that painting home, huh?”

  I wanted to roll my eyes at the completely pointless statement. “Yeah. I wanna hang it in my room.”

  “Need help?”

  I did, actually, so I shrugged and nodded at the same time. “Sure, yeah.”

  Will followed me home, and carted the ladder in from the garage. He also knew how to use Dad’s stud finder and hung the painting over the couch along the far wall of my room, opposite my bed. “So. That’s hung. Um…you want to grab some dinner, maybe?”

  And that’s how it started. Innocent enough, at first. Dinner at Eddie Merlot’s, an exceptionally expensive restaurant. His sleek black BMW valeted, the keys left casually in the ignition. A table in a quiet corner, despite the crowd of people waiting and the fact that he’d clearly not planned the date. He was a wonderful conversationalist. He could talk about anything, from music and movies to politics and philosophy. But…there was something niggling at the back of my head. He could talk without end, and did, saying lots of great-sounding things, well-structured sentences and funny stories of skiing in Switzerland and getting into trouble with aristocratic Europeans. But something was missing, and I couldn’t identify what it was.

  Yet my hormones, my body, something inside me that I didn’t quite have complete control over, reacted to him. On a visceral level. He leaned forward while he spoke, the sleeves of his thin, cloud-soft cashmere sweater pushed up to his elbows, his eyes intent on mine, and he told me his funny stories and his nearness seemed to set some secret inner part of me on fire, and I couldn’t quite help it and didn’t know if I wanted to, even though I felt the tiny worm of something not quite right wriggling in the back of my head.

  After sharing a thick, decadent slice of cheesecake drizzled with raspberry sauce, he helped me into his car, holding my palm in his while the valet waited behind the door. I slid into the seat, the leather cool against my legs through the fabric of my skirt. He drove me around slowly, Sigúr Rose playing “Hoppipolla” in the background, soft rolling strains of exotic music rising to a symphonic and almost alien rolling blend of triumphant sound and song and falsetto voice and horns. Fat droplets of rain pattered against the windshield as we cruised the winding Bloomfield roads, and I felt like I was lost in some fairy tale, some movie where I was the starlet and Will was the star, falling in love in perfectly choreographed splendor.

  I felt the pounding of my heart and the sizzle of my skin as he casually rested his right hand on the armrest between us and slid his fingers through mine. I felt the ache of trembling fear and the pulsing of anticipation as we sat in the parking lot of a closed park, in the shadows a few spaces down from the streetlamp, faint slow romantic jazz, a trumpet playing delicate notes in the silence between us as our faces neared and….

  He tasted like cinnamon gum, his lips soft and warm and wet. His hand traced up my arm, across my shoulder, curled around the back of my neck and pulled me into the kiss, and my entire being shuddered, and I lost myself in it, in the purely perfect teenaged wonder of the moment.

  A strange awareness kept ahold of me, however, as Will kissed me with practiced passion. A kind of poised, tensed knowledge that this was a moment that I was indulging in, allowing to happen, and that despite the fervor of my body’s reaction and the heat of my skin in my clothes, a part of me was kept back. Held in check, for some reason I couldn’t fathom.

  I wanted to let go of that part. I didn’t like it being held back. It meant…it meant that there was something empty and false in this moment, this perfect first kiss with Will Harper.

  He didn’t push the moment. He didn’t grope me or take the kiss too far. He pulled back, assessed that I needed a moment, and let it fade.

  I touched my lips and stared at Will, at his carved cheekbones and smooth hands on the steering wheel and his calm, glacier-blue eyes. “Who…who is this, playing?” I asked, to cover the confusion I felt.

  Will seemed puzzled, then blinked several times. “This…um. It’s Miles. Miles Davis. ‘Sketches of Spain.’” He twisted the knob to turn the volume up slightly so I could hear the Latin-infused trumpet. “Miles…man, he was a god on the trumpet. Just amazing. Listen to the way he plays it. You can’t ever mistake Miles for anyone else. There’s some amazing trumpet players out there, but Miles? He’s the best there ever will be.” Passion infused Will’s voice and his eyes.

  That settled my confusion a bit. If he was passionate about music, what could be wrong? He was gloriously handsome. Not just hot, that was too commonplace a word for William Harper. He was truly handsome. And so, so polished. He took my hand and chattered about jazz as he drove me home, talking about “Birdland,” whatever that was. How jazz was real, true, proper music, the kind you jam to and improvise, or craft this architectural masterpiece all from merely a piece of metal and your breath. He was eloquent about jazz, and that was hard to resist, that passion, that knowledge of something he loved, the ability to woo me with words and make me want to love music I’d always thought was boring. Listening to Miles Davis in Will’s car was magical somehow, a continuation of the strangely perfect date we’d had.

  Except for the moment of doubt after he’d kissed me, but I’d all but forgotten that by the time he’d pulled up to my house and dropped me off.

  As I slid out of the warm cocoon of his BMW, he turned the music down and called my name. “You want to have dinner again? Friday?”

  I smiled, feeling excited. “Yeah!” I smiled at him. “Sounds great.”

  “Cool. I’ll pick you up at seven.” He waved, and I closed the door.

  Eden gave me a strange look as I passed her studio. She was lying on the floor, sheet music held above her head and a pencil in her mouth. Her windows were all wide open, letting in cool evening air and the scent of rain and the sound of raindrops against the roof. Her studio and bedroom were at the front of the house, giving her a view of the driveway.

  “Who was that?” she asked, taking the pencil from her lips. “And why were you out so late with him?”

  I glanced at my phone, saw that it was nearly two in the morning. “That was Will Harper. And…we were on a date.”

  Eden sat up, shock causing her to let the pencil drop onto her thigh. “A date? With Billy Harper?”

  “Will.” I didn’t know why I corrected her.

  “Will.” She tucked her fe
et under her and stood up. “Why were you on a date with…Will Harper?”

  I shrugged. “Because…he asked me. He helped me get my painting into the car, and then helped me hang it, and we went on a date. He’s…nice.”

  Eden took a hesitant step toward me. “Ever…he’s Billy Harper. He’s the hottest and most unavailable guy at school. I know girls from other schools that know who Billy Harper is, and wish they could get a date with him. His dad is famous or something, and he grew up all over the world. He goes to parties with movie stars, Ever. And you just…went on a date with him? Just like that?”

  I’d heard all those stories about Billy Harper, of course. The rumor mill at school was insane, full of half truths and lies and jealousy. I’d assumed most of the stories about him were just that, stories. But now, having spent time with him…I could almost believe it. He had the kind of poise and confidence about him that made me think he’d be as comfortable at an A-list party as he was playing his trumpet in the courtyard.

  I wasn’t sure what to say to Eden. “I don’t know, Edie. He was…really nice. I had a really good time.”

  She stared at me for several moments, and then her expression cleared and turned excited. “Did…did he kiss you?”

  I felt myself blush. “Yeah, a little.”

  “A little? A little?” She closed in, grabbed my arm, and shook me. “Was it amazing? What was it like?”

  “It was a kiss.” I shrugged, and then giggled with her. “Yeah, it was amazing. He had this jazz playing in the background, and it was raining outside, and I don’t really like jazz, but he makes it seem cool, you know? And he kissed me, but he wasn’t crazy about it, you know? He kissed me, but didn’t, like, try to make it anything else.”

  “God, like that would have been a bad thing.”

  “Well, on the first date?”

  Eden made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “It’s Billy Harper. I should be so lucky. If he tried to feel me up on the first date, I’d let him.”