by Jamie Pope
She couldn’t ask him to stay with her. It would be selfish and needy and throughout this entire relationship he had been the one to give to her. She wanted to give something back to him, but she didn’t know how. How to show him that she loved him. Words just weren’t enough anymore.
* * *
“I’m glad you conducted the interview. I wouldn’t have thought to ask half of those questions. Thank you for doing that,” she said awkwardly, when she knew there were a thousand other words that she should be saying.
“Stop thanking me.” He dropped the shoes, grabbed her shoulders and pushed her down on the bed, his heavy body covering hers. It felt so good, having his hard, warm weight on top of her. She closed her eyes as he kissed down the side of her neck. She was going to miss this, too. The security of his arms. The instant arousal she felt whenever he touched her. “I didn’t do anything special...”
“You did. I’m going to miss you.”
“It’s just three days. You’ll be on a flight back to New York and I’ll come get you from the airport.” He kissed her cheek. “I’ll take you out for a nice dinner and then back to the apartment and I’ll strip every inch of clothing you have off of you. You won’t be able to go to work the next day because I won’t let you out of that bed.”
“Asa.” Her voice came out choked as tears escaped her eyes. “Because I can’t go back to New York.”
He was quiet for an incredibly long time.
“I knew you were going to tell me that.” He rolled off her and lay beside her on the bed, his arm over his eyes.
“What do you mean you knew?”
“I knew. I was just hoping you weren’t going to say that.”
“I know we hired a nurse and that there’s help here for them, but I just can’t leave my mother and grandmother right now. Maybe in a few weeks or a month. I don’t want to lose you.”
“I don’t think you’ll ever be able to leave them. I don’t want this to end, either. I want to be selfish. I want to just let you come back and pretend I don’t know that your heart isn’t completely here. But I can’t do that. Because in my heart, I’ll know you’re there for the wrong reason and it will make me feel like hell.”
“Damn it, Asa. Don’t do this. Don’t end this. I would be happy with you anywhere on the planet. I will be happy for you. But I just can’t go now.”
“You can’t start a new life unless you really know what kind of life you want. Maybe you’re not ready to be in a relationship yet. This was too soon for you. You told me you had all these plans. You were going to finish your doctorate and become a professor. You said you gave that up for Brent. He’s out of the picture. What’s stopping you now?”
She froze. That was a damn good question. She could blame the move, and the new job, and life getting in the way, but those were all just excuses. She’d run away from heartbreak, but she hadn’t run toward her goals in the process. “I don’t know.”
“I need you to be sure.”
She did know what she wanted out of life. She wanted him and marriage and babies. She wanted to live her life right here on this island and be surrounded by her family. But could she ask that of him? After six weeks? Especially since she knew how much he loved New York, how good he was at his job. She saw him with her grandmother and mother and speaking to the doctors in the hospital, and she knew that the FDNY would lose one of the best rescue paramedics they had ever had. Asa meant healer and being a healer was his calling. She couldn’t ask him to give that up for her, because just like she didn’t want her to resent him, she couldn’t bear the thought of Asa resenting her.
“Asa...” She reached for his hand, her heart breaking. She knew this was ending for the right reasons but it felt so wrong, so incredibly wrong. Her days had been a little brighter these past few weeks knowing that he was in them.
“Hallie,” he whispered. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what? Like the love of my life isn’t walking away from me?” She felt the first tear slip from her eye and she realized she was crying over him. She hadn’t cried for Brent. She had been angry and hurt and shocked, but this was a different kind of devastation. She had been so close to touching the kind of happiness that she only thought was possible in fiction.
Asa took in a deep sharp breath and pressed his head to hers. “You’ve got to come back to New York. All of your things are there. You’ll see me again. You have to see me again.”
She nodded, but she knew she really didn’t have to go back if she didn’t want to. She wasn’t taking her furniture. She had all her important things with her. It would just be some clothes and things she could replace. The only reason she would go back was to see him. Saying goodbye to him twice would be impossible. She couldn’t do it again. She wasn’t ready to do it now.
She sat up and slipped her dress off over her head. “Make love to me. Please. One more time before you go.”
He reached for her and nodded just before he removed the rest of her clothing. “One time will never be enough with you.”
Chapter 20
Asa had said his goodbyes to most of his family that morning when he went to visit them at Carlos and Virginia’s house. He had said goodbye to Hallie at his rental house even though he thought he would have more time with her. He had anticipated that she would go with him to the ferry and kiss him goodbye, but she didn’t want to. She just gave him a brief, tight hug before she turned away. She wouldn’t look him in the eye one last time before she walked out the door for good. She was hurting. Tremendously so, and he felt like scum because of it.
“Looks like it’s really going to come down,” Virginia said, looking out the window as they drove toward the ferry. “It’s supposed to storm tonight. It’s going to ruin a lot of New Year’s plans. Hopefully your flight will get out on time.”
“Yeah,” he said only half listening to her.
Just Virginia had come to take him to the ferry. They hadn’t had any time alone during his two weeks there and this seemed like it would be their only opportunity. He knew he should be focusing on her, but he couldn’t get the look on Hallie’s face out of his mind and as he drove further and further away from her, he felt more and more like he was leaving half his heart behind.
Virginia pulled to a stop in front of the ferry terminal and rested her hand on her growing belly. Something inside of him pulled agonizingly as he watched her do that simple action. She was going to have a baby, be a mother, start a new big chapter in her life and he wouldn’t be there. He would be in New York, alone. Completely alone, doing a job he no longer loved. His parents wouldn’t even be nearby.
Why was he going back? He had been so focused on what Hallie wanted and how she could be happy that he’d barely thought about what he really wanted out of life.
Hallie loved him. She said so. She had called him the love of her life. A person didn’t just say that. Hallie wouldn’t just say that. She must have meant it.
“Asa, I don’t want to pry into your private life, but what happened between you and Hallie?”
“What? Why are you asking?”
“She’s not here and you look like you want to die.”
“We broke up.”
“What do you mean you broke up?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t want her to sacrifice her happiness by staying in New York just for me. I didn’t want her to end up resenting me.”
“You broke up with her now, so she wouldn’t break up with you later? How does that make sense at all?”
“I don’t know.”
“A person can find happiness anywhere if they choose to. Something brought you two together. Something powerful keeps throwing you together. Out of all the paramedics in the world, you were the one to respond to that call. Out of all the places in the world for you two to spend the holidays, you both
ended up here where your families are. She doesn’t have to go back to New York to be with you, because she already went there to find you.”
Asa took in a deep, sharp breath, his head spinning from his sister’s impassioned speech.
“You can’t let her go. You love her.”
Virginia stroked her belly and looked down at her feet. “I’ve never seen you this happy before. If you let her go, I’m afraid you won’t be this happy again.”
She was right. He knew deep in his soul that he wouldn’t find someone like her again. He could come here. His family was here now. He could work here. Carlos had given him a huge opportunity and if he didn’t like it, he could always find something else to do. But he wouldn’t find another Hallie. “I think I just made the biggest mistake of my life.”
A brilliant flash of purplish lightning followed by an enormous crack of thunder surrounded him—it felt like the entire island shook. And then Asa’s phone went off. An alert from the airlines telling him that his flight had been canceled due to weather.
Fate.
Destiny.
Forever.
Virginia and Asa stared at each other, their eyes wide, their minds thinking the same exact thing. “Turn this car around and take me back to your house,” he said to his sister. “If I’m going to make a gesture, it needs to be a big one.”
It was late by the time he had put together everything for Hallie and so when he showed up at her parents’ home that night he was nervous and excited. He was also soaking wet because the skies had decided to open up and give him a real taste of how powerful an island storm could be. It took a few minutes of knocking before someone answered the door. He knew that it must have been hard to hear over the howling wind and the thunder roaring around him. But Derek answered the door, clearly surprised to see him standing there.
“What are you doing out in this storm?” He pulled Asa inside. “Are you insane? The wind is supposed to get stronger.”
“I came to see Hallie. I need to ask her something. I need to ask you all something.”
“You want to marry her, I suppose?” Clara asked from the overstuffed easy chair in the living room.
“Yes. I’ve come to ask for your permission.”
“Some might say that’s terribly old-fashioned and it’s not up to the parents to have a say in who their daughter wants to spend the rest of her life with.”
“Maybe. I’m going to ask her anyway, with or without your permission. But I was hoping you would give it.”
“She gives her permission.” Nanny appeared from the back of the house, all bundled up in a bathrobe.
“Mother!”
“You like the boy. Stop giving him a hard time.”
“I like him, too,” Derek said. “Especially after how he stepped up and helped this week.”
“You all never let me have any fun,” Clara sighed. “You have my blessing. I’ve already told you as much. I just wanted to give you a hard time like my husband would have. She’s our only child. I also wanted to make you sweat it out because she came back here very upset and refused to talk to any of us about it.”
“Where is she?” he asked, his heart beating faster. “I think I can fix that.”
“That’s the thing,” Derek said with a slight worried look on his face. “She’s not here. She called me to come over and then she took off. We don’t know where she is.”
* * *
The teakettle on the small ancient stove in the boathouse sounded and Hallie tore her eyes away from the storm that was lighting up the ocean to attend to it. She had come here to think. It was the only place on the island where she could be alone with her thoughts and yet she didn’t have very many thoughts tonight. Just one. And it was how to make Asa believe that her life wouldn’t be complete without him.
Asa was gone and she was faced with the prospect of spending every day without him, sleeping without his strong arms around her, with not having him there to lean on. She was no longer sure she could be happy here. And he would be without her. He would come home to a cold, dark apartment. There would be no one there to speak to about his day. No one to share his meals with. No one to love him. He loved so hard, and so deeply that he deserved to get the same in return. No one would love him like she would. It would be impossible.
She retrieved the sugar from the cabinet and stirred the tea in her mug for far too long. She heard pounding, figured it was the wind beating against the little boathouse and ignored it. But when she turned around she saw a man standing at the door. She screamed, but then she recognized who it was.
Through the wind and the hammering rain she recognized the missing piece of her heart. She rushed to open the door and the force of the wind blew it back, causing it to slam against the wall. Asa stepped inside, soaked to the bone, grim determination on his face.
“What are you doing here?” she yelled out to him but she couldn’t even hear her own words over the force of the storm. She just pulled him further into the house and together they pushed the door shut.
“Why the hell are you in the most dangerous place on the island during one of the worst storms of the year? You could have been killed. This little house could have blown away!”
“I’m fine. You could have been killed! You drove in this. And then you walked up to the house. You could have been blown into the ocean.”
“I came to find you. Not even twenty-mile-per-hour winds are going to stop me.”
“What are you doing here?” She turned away, rushing to the closet to get out a towel and a blanket for him. “You were supposed to be on a plane.”
“No, I’m not.”
He was dripping wet, water running off his face, his clothes plastered to his body. Her heart was in her throat. Anything could have happened to him. And if something did... She wasn’t sure she would be able to recover. She grabbed his shoulders and began peeling off his wet clothing, the rain slicker he was wearing that didn’t seem to help one bit and the navy blue shirt that was plastered to his chest.
When she unbuttoned his pants, he grabbed her arms and kissed her till she was breathless and she couldn’t make her mind work. She was so focused on the fact that he was there that she forgot to think about the reason he was there.
She grabbed the towel and dragged it across his chest when he released her. “Get out of those pants. I know you can’t catch a cold from being cold, but it can’t be good for you to be in sopping wet clothing.”
“You’ve been crying.” He touched her face.
“Of course I’ve been crying. You left.”
“I couldn’t go.”
“Because of this storm?”
“I couldn’t go home because you weren’t going to be there. My home is not in New York. My home is wherever you are.”
“My home is where you are,” she told him. “I was coming back to New York. I was going to pound down your door and make you listen to me tell you why I loved you until you believed it. I—”
“Hush.” He stepped away from her and reached into his jacket, pulling out a soggy packet of papers. “I need to tell you something. I bought a house.”
“What?”
“I bought the rental house we stayed in. You said you liked it so I bought it. Virginia’s going to decorate it. She said she could get started right away.”
She shook her head. “That house must have cost a fortune. I was just talking when I said I could live there. I didn’t mean for you to buy it.”
“It’s perfect for us. I was thinking we could turn the third bedroom into an office for you.”
She was having a hard time processing what he was saying, his presence there after she was sure he had gone. “What exactly are you trying to tell me?”
“That I’m an idiot. A huge one. I just wanted you to be sure of what you wanted, sur
e of us, that it almost caused me to lose you. I never thought about the life I wanted.”
“What kind of life do you want?”
“The kind where I spend the rest of it with you. Here on this island.”
“But what about your job? Your apartment? You love New York. I would never dream of asking you to give it up for me.”
“Why not? You were willing to give up this place for me. Your soul is here. The memories of your father, the people you love the most. I can give New York up for you. But I can’t give you up.”
“I want you to be happy.”
“I won’t be without you.”
Her heart was beating so hard that she was having a hard time breathing. “What does this mean for you?”
“I quit my job.”
“But you’re so good at it.”
“I’m not going back. I’m done with seeing people in pain and at their worst. I want to see people at their best. That job brought me to you and I think it was fate that brought us together. I don’t need to do it anymore, because I already got the best thing that ever came from that job.”
“Where will you work? I know you. I know you like to stay active.”
He nodded. “Carlos is starting a foundation for student athletes who come from areas with limited access to resources. He wants me to run the day-to-day operations here on the island.”
Hallie eased herself into the nearest chair. “That’s a big deal, Asa. Are you sure it’s what you want? You’ve never had a desk job before.”
“It won’t be just a desk job. I’ll get to work with kids and one of my best friends to do something good.”
“It sounds like a good opportunity. I know you’ll do a lot of good.”
“He’s opening up a camp here in the summer for them and they are going to focus on the arts and academics as well as sports. He said he could use someone to oversee the education side. I recommended you.”
“What?”
“It doesn’t have to be forever, just until you get a job as a professor. Most of the work will be in the summer when you’re not in class or working on your dissertation.”