My tears dried up long ago. Now I busy my days by staying occupied at Freeway. I try not to let my mind wander to the what-ifs and could-have-beens. I try to rejoice in my new-found health and embrace it as the miracle that it is. I pray that Jace will be able to embrace his own renewed health in a couple of months when he gets his new scans. I’m so sad that I won’t be there to support him, but I know that Morgan will be and I simply have to accept that everything has worked out as it should.
At Freeway we are preparing the house for the construction that will begin soon, thanks to Jace’s generous donation. As Chaz and I remove some of the wall hangings I ask him, “Do you think he will pull the funding that we are getting from The Third Watch now?”
“No, I don’t think so. When I talked to him the other day, he seemed to indicate it was business as usual.” Oh, he talked to him? This is news to me.
“You talked to him, Chaz? Why didn’t you tell me? Did he ask about me?”
Chaz looks at me with sorry eyes. “I’m sorry, Keri, but no, he didn’t ask about you. We simply talked about the expansion and the plans to fund another position or two.”
I know this is what I asked for. I know I hurt him. I guess I just never fully expected it to work. Maybe in the back of my mind, I thought he would see through all the crap I was feeding him in my message and ride in on his white horse and whisk me away to live happily ever after.
But there will be no happily ever after for me. I know I will never find another man like Jace. I was happy once, before him, wasn’t I? If I can just get back to the way things were before Jace. Before cancer. I was fine living a life filled with Tanner, my other friends and of course, the kids at Freeway. That will be enough. I will make it be enough. But then I think of my mother and her words about finding my more-than-enough love. I’ve let her down. I know I’ve let her down and maybe that makes me saddest of all.
~ ~ ~
Jules finally did contact me after a few weeks and we are going to lunch today. I prepare myself for her reprimands. I will sit and take whatever she dishes me. I deserve it. The main reason I’m going, other than the fact that I really like Jules and I miss our friendship, is that I’m hoping she will give me some sliver of information about him. Is he okay? Is he back with Morgan? Part of me hopes that he is leading a miserable existence of a life just as I am, but the other part, the part that loves him to the depths of my soul, hopes that he is happy and will eventually live the life he was meant to live, with the person he was meant to live it with.
“Keri, I’ve missed you so much.” Jules pulls me in for a hug and I hold onto her for dear life as a tear rolls down my cheek.
“I’ve missed you too. Thanks for contacting me. I wasn’t sure that you would.” I look at her and wonder if she can see the abundance of guilt I carry on my shoulders.
“The truth is, he asked me not to, but I couldn’t stay away,” she says. And if it’s possible, my heart breaks even more, becoming a hollow, lifeless organ that resembles my robotic existence. “I like you, Keri, and we can be friends, but you hurt my brother so I should tell you that I’m not here to talk about him if that’s why you came.”
How can I fault her for that? I dug my own grave. I’m getting exactly what I asked for. “Maybe I did come to find out if he is okay, but that’s not the only reason. I miss you. I value our friendship and if talking about him is off the table, I can be okay with that. But I have to ask one thing. If I keep in contact with Lilly and the kids from The Angel House, do you think that would seem too much like me stalking him?”
My question extracts a laugh from her. “Keri, if you cut off contact with those precious kids, then you aren’t the kind of friend I thought you were. Whatever your issues are with my brother, nobody can fault you for being a good humanitarian.”
I smile knowing I’ve gotten her blessing to continue to see those great kids, and especially Lilly who is having her surgery in a few days. We spend the next hour figuring out that we have more in common than her brother, which is good because I wasn’t sure that we would be able to find anything else to talk about. We make plans to get together for lunch next week. She even said she might come to the club Tuesday night, my slow night, just to keep me company—after assuring me that I still have a job there.
~ ~ ~
A few more weeks have crawled by at a snail’s pace. Lilly had her surgery and I went to the hospital to visit her on two occasions, after checking with Gracy to make sure Jace wasn’t there. Tyler and his mother are happily co-existing at home and his ex-stepdad is resting not-so-comfortably in jail, awaiting trial for a myriad of charges. Scrabble Nights are back to normal sans Jace. Tanner still brings Greg and they graciously allow me to be a third wheel on some of their dates. I think I’m wearing grooves in all of my Star Wars DVDs that have always been my go-to movies in a depression.
I’m so grateful that I took pictures of all Jace’s paintings along with the ones that he sent me. And I have some candid shots from the times he took the Freeway kids and our chemo friends on the yacht. I scroll through them every day.
It’s pitiful, I know, but I almost wish we were back in chemo, tumors still invading our healthy bodies, poison still dripping into our veins. At least then we would be together.
I still love him.
I’m not sure I will ever stop loving him.
My heart hurts from not being able to see him, touch him, feel his whispers. I keep expecting the pain to die down, to go away. But every day when I wake up and realize he is gone from my life, I have to force myself to get out of bed and go through the motions of living.
I finally break down and pull out my laptop to Google him, just to see him again. What I see astounds me. His life did not stop when mine did. He didn’t seem to miss a beat. I see an article about him and how he took a child with cancer to meet the boy’s football hero. I recognize Dylan from the picture, and I laugh because his hero is the quarterback for Tampa Bay and there is Jace, wearing a Buc’s cap right along with him. Then I see pictures of him with some of the familiar faces from The Angel House right alongside Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Apparently he took them all to Disney World.
There is another place his foundation supports that he never spoke of much called The Stopover in Ft. Lauderdale. It’s a shelter for women and children that puts women through training for jobs like nursing assistants or massage therapists—jobs that only require a month or so of training. There is a picture of Jace and a barrage of women and children at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new facility built by The Third Watch.
But it’s the final picture I find that has my heart battling with my head. There is a picture of Jace, all dressed up in a tux and looking like I’ve never seen him before. His hair has grown out more and is starting to flop over to the side in that fresh-out-of-bed look that probably has women falling at his feet. And standing right next to him, with her hand on his chest is Morgan, dressed to the nines in a magnificent evening gown. Next to them are Jace’s parents. They look like the perfect family. I read the caption that says the picture was taken at a charity ball. Three days ago.
So that’s it. The question has been answered. He’s back together with her. He looked happy even. I close the lid to my laptop and go lie on my bed. I tell myself this is exactly what I wanted; exactly what I wished would happen. So why then, does it feel like my heart has been through a meat grinder? Why do I lie here trying to feel nothing, because feeling nothing would surely be better than the pain. The pain that is different from anything I’ve ever experienced. Different even from when I lost my parents, different from when I found out I had cancer, different from those horrible Monday nights I spent in my bathroom. Different from when I had a gun pointed at me. No, this pain . . . it’s like part of my body has been removed. It’s like I’ve been stabbed in the chest with a knife and each painful memory cuts deeper than the last. It’s like my soul was ripped in half and shredded to pieces. It is the pain of knowing I will never have that more-th
an-enough love.
Chapter Thirty-two
Tanner has been my rock. He makes me laugh when I think laughing is no longer possible. He gets my ass out of bed when all I want to do is wallow in self-pity. And bless him, he watches Star Wars with me whenever I ask him to. He took away my laptop last week after he found me Googling Jace. He told me it was unhealthy and that I just needed to give it time and that everything would work out in the end. For whom, I wonder?
He is taking me somewhere nice tonight. He said that almost six weeks of commiseration is all he could bear so he made me put on makeup, dress up and paint a fake smile on my face in the name of fun. He won’t tell me where we are going. He says it’s a surprise. But he must really think it’s great because he has had a shit-eating grin on his face the entire drive.
We pull up to the curb alongside the road in a trendy district of downtown Tampa. Tanner, being all gentlemanly, comes around to open my door and leads me up to the glass front door of some kind of art gallery. “What are we doing here, Tan?” I ask, with a suspicious stare, knowing he has about as much appreciation of art as a blind baboon.
“Just come in, Keri.” He holds the door open for me and we walk through into an empty gallery. It’s so deserted that the clicks of my heels echo off the gleaming white tile floors and concrete walls.
A woman comes over to me holding a silver tray with a single glass of champagne on it. She hands me the champagne and says, “Right this way, Miss.”
I start to walk with her when Tanner says, “I’ll be right over here on this couch if you need me.” He winks at me then he gives me a push toward the opening of another room.
I’m utterly confused. Why am I being lured into an art gallery and handed champagne if I’m the only one getting to enjoy it? The woman turns around and disappears somewhere and then it hits me as I look up and see the painting on the wall in front of me.
It’s the painting that used to hang over Jace’s fireplace. The one he did of me being pulled from my burning house the night my parents died. The one that was his inspiration. What? Why is it here? Has he decided to sell his art since he got back together with Morgan? But, why would Tanner bring me here, unless maybe he thinks I want to buy it. All sorts of things are racing through my mind.
The art gallery is apparently laid out to keep people moving from one exhibit to the next by using partitions and strategically placed walls. A light clicks on, illuminating another painting in the next area. I move over to see it and it is the painting that was at The Angel House with my guardian angels on it. Then I see another light and walk around the partition to see the painting he did of us on the bathroom floor. This was the first one he did after we met at chemo. I’m beginning to see a pattern here as the paintings are being displayed in the order in which he made them. If that’s the case, the one that comes next will be the one of me cupping my breasts. I quickly walk over to where the next light shines to see that, yes, it is in fact the one.
My steps quicken over to the next painting and I’m faster than the light. I hear someone snicker when I stand in front of it and wait for it to be illuminated. I look around, wondering if Tanner is somehow watching me. Yes, it is the first one from the yacht, the one in the cabin of me with the thirteen ‘balloons.’ I move on to the next one, the lights coming quicker now to keep up with me. But I’m stunned to see it is not the painting I suspected it would be, this one I haven’t seen before. It’s a painting of me under that old bridge at the train yard, the place Tanner used to take me in order to clear my head. I know Jace must have visited the place because he painted it dead-on. I take extra time to look at it, even though the light has already clicked on the next painting. This one I do know, it’s the rainbow painting from the salon on his yacht. I smile remembering the graduation party he threw for me that day.
A few steps over, I see another unfamiliar one. This one causes the tears that have welled up in my eyes to spill over. It is a picture of Lilly and me, hugging on her bed at the Angel House. I look around but don’t see any more lights. I don’t know what to do. I’m still not sure why I’m here. My heart tells me it’s because of Jace, but my head won’t let me believe it yet. The place is eerily dark, only illuminated by the glow of the lights that still shine on each painting.
I take a shaky sip of my previously untouched champagne. Then someone comes out of the shadows and my heart skips a beat. It skips ten-thousand beats. He is gorgeous. I’ve never seen a more handsome man. He has a light-grey suit on. He’s not wearing a tie and the collar of his white linen shirt has the top button undone. His hair is much longer and is perfectly messy. There is a smile on his face that shows his wonderful dimple. The smile touches his eyes and I know that he’s here for me.
Jace points in the direction of a still-darkened painting and then he says, “There’s one more, Keri.” And my heart comes out of my chest. He spoke! He spoke to me. Oh, my God. His voice is deep and gravelly and sexy and wonderful and perfect, so I wonder if he really did speak or if I just dreamed it. Maybe I’m dreaming all of it. He walks over to me and takes my hand that is not holding the glass of champagne. He pulls me over to the dark painting and says, “Here, let me show you.” And then the light shines on another new painting. It’s me, of course, sitting at a table with Scrabble pieces strewn about. There is a man’s hand in the painting and it is touching the words that are sitting on the tile holder. I look at the words and see that he’s spelled out I’M SURE.
I set my glass down on a nearby shelf and turn to him. “But I hurt you. I said those awful things. Why would you still want me?”
“You don’t really think I believed a word of that voicemail message, do you, Keri?” He smirks at me as I swoon over his rough, delicious voice. “I know why you did it. I saw the letter and I know my mom called you. But I didn’t think you would understand at the time that I wanted you and only you. Things were too fresh, we had just seen Morgan and you had read her pleas to me. I knew if I tried to get you then that you would run away. I had to give you time and space.”
“But the picture of you and Morgan at the charity event—”
“Was planned months before that,” he interrupts me. “Even before Morgan and I split, I had committed to it. It was platonic, I assure you and very unfortunate that they snapped the picture while her hand was on my chest. She probably planned it that way. You should know she says that she still wants to get back with me.”
I shake my head at him. “You never went back to her?”
He smiles at me. “I never went back to her. I told you that night, Keri. I told you I was sure. I’m still sure. It’s you, you are the one I want. You may not have been my first love, but you are the love of my life.”
I briefly close my eyes and rejoice in his words before I say, “And you are the love of mine.” I lift my hand to his jaw and rub it across the rough bit of stubble. “Your voice . . . you got your voice back!”
He grabs my hand and pulls it to his mouth to kiss the palm of it. “It was you. You were my inspiration, Keri. You have been since I was nineteen. I’ve never met a stronger, more beautiful woman—inside and out. And I just had to get my voice back. I’ve worked so hard these past weeks with a speech therapist because I had to be able to tell you how I feel.” He takes my hands in his and looks me in the eyes, his own tears welling up, when he says, “I love you, Keri.”
“Thank you.” It’s all I can manage to say through my tears as he pulls me to him and crashes his lips against mine.
Minutes later when we reluctantly part our swollen lips, he impatiently pulls me towards the front door of the gallery and I look at our surroundings. “Where is Tanner?” I ask.
“He left a while ago.” He smirks at me.
“Kind of a foregone conclusion, was I?” I roll my eyes.
He laughs and my insides melt at the sound of the low sexy grumble. “No, Keri, you are anything but predictable. But I didn’t want you to have an out, a way to leave before I had the chance to tell you
how I felt.”
“And he was okay with that—with leaving me here with you?” I question, knowing how Tanner has always been so protective of me.
“We’ve been communicating for weeks. Everyone was in on it, even Jules and Chaz.” He looks at me guiltily as I raise my eyebrows to scold him. “Keri, I needed to know if you were going to do something drastic like date another man. I wouldn’t have been able to stand it if you did. I was fully prepared to scrap the entire plan and whisk you away the moment you turned your head for anyone else.”
I can’t help but smile at his jealously and possessiveness.
He continues, “I’m sorry I put you through that. I know the past weeks have been hell on you. They’ve been hell on me, too. Not seeing you, not touching you—I’m starving for you, Keri. And I fully plan to make it up to you if you’ll let me.”
“Oh really?” I smile at him suggestively. “And just how do you plan to do that?”
“If you’ll come back to the loft with me, I’ll show you.” Thoughts of what almost happened the last time we were at his loft flood my head. And desire floods my body at the anticipation of getting to touch him again. Then suddenly, I’m the one pulling him through the front door of the gallery.
We talk the whole way back to his loft, my ears dancing with pleasure at the sound of his gravelly voice. By the time we reach our destination, my skin is humming with passion as he has seduced me with only his voice—his enticingly spoken words.
We both giggle as we quickly bypass the living room, almost running to reach the bedroom at the far end of the loft. We need to finish what we started six weeks ago. We need it like we need air. He pulls me into a heated kiss and I thread my fingers through his hair and tug him closer, pressing him almost painfully close to my body.
Abstract Love Page 23