His Everlasting Love: 50 Loving States, Virginia

by Theodora Taylor

  Another inner-battle broke out across her face. And this time, Sawyer helped his side along by pointing out, “If you don’t do it, I’m just going to outsource the job to my old friend, Jack Daniels.”

  That worked.

  “Fine,” she said, putting the check back in her purse with a very irritated look. “A session a week for the next six. But you have to promise not to drink. At least not until your therapy’s done.”

  “Promise,” he answered, gracing her with a lazy smile. “See you tomorrow? Same time?”

  “Like I said, I have a job over in Richmond. In fact, I’m probably going to be late for it now. But I only work half-days on Tuesdays, so I could do tomorrow afternoon after I’m done with work. Around three.”

  “Three’s good for me,” he said. “See you then.

  “Yeah, see you then,” she answered.

  She didn’t sound very enthusiastic. And she began walking away before he could so much as thank her for agreeing to take the job.

  But he didn’t care. He watched her walked away, his entire body thrumming with desire. And anticipation. She was leaving, but she’d be back tomorrow. That was all that mattered. At least for now.

  5

  Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  Willa could not stop chastising herself as she walked around the side of Greenlee Place and down the hill toward the now rarely-used footbridge that connected their two properties. There was a woman standing on the little red fishing pier on the Greenlee side. Dressed in a rather vintage, peach-colored peignoir and nightgown set. It could only be Sawyer’s mother, Kate. The one folks say drowned in a bathtub like Jim Morrison when Sawyer was only fourteen.

  “Well, hello there,” the woman called out to her. “You must be Marian’s daughter. Whatever are you doing over here? Can you see me, too?”

  Of course her mother was friendly with the lady of the house. For all she knew, Kate had helped her mother out with the lawsuit. Her mother loved ghosts and they loved her.

  But Willa—Willa had a policy about not talking to ghosts outside her family’s property lines. She kept walking toward the footbridge, ignoring Kate and not even stopping at her father’s willow tree, which was swaying in the Virginia breeze, awash in morning light.

  This was the kind of morning her mother and Trevor loved. And if he wasn’t due at his care center in less than an hour, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see them heading toward the woods for one of their “reunion walks,” as her mother like to call it.

  But she couldn’t even admire the scenery because her mind was so caught up with Sawyer Grant.

  Why was he here? She’d heard some town gossip about him running for his dad’s old Congress seat, but the district was huge. You’d think he’d have gotten a ground floor apartment in Bon Air, or some place like that. Not come back to a small town with only one bus stop. Hell, even she wouldn’t be living here if not for Trevor and Thel and the zero dollar cost of rent.

  She stormed into the house, slamming the door so hard behind her, a few of the books on the many makeshift shelves beside the door came tumbling down.

  “You okay?” her sister asked. She was sitting at the round table in their front room-slash-kitchen with Trevor and her mother. Both her mother and Trevor were reading. Her mother from a big leather-bound tome, and Trevor from The Walking Dead Compendium. Highly inappropriate for someone of his limited reading skills, but it was one of the few comics her mother had approved for him to read.

  “She’s fine, dear,” her mother answered Thel in Willa’s stead, peering up at them both over her reading glasses. “Just upset about the many ways the past can haunt you. It is the strange fate of man that even in the greatest of evils, the fear of the worst continues to haunt him. That’s Goethe, dear,” she said, nodding at Trevor.

  Willa glared at her mother. She so did not need to hear one of her mother’s seemingly bottomless cache of quotes. Not today.

  Not after what she’d just agreed to do.

  “You almost ready to go?” she asked Trevor.

  “Two more pages,” he answered, not even bothering to peer up over his glasses.

  “We’re already running late,” Willa told him, grabbing his backpack off the couch in the front room.

  “Two more pages,” he said again, without looking up.

  She obviously needed to have another discussion with her mother about proper reading materials for Trevor, but she headed out to wait for him in the car anyway. Trevor was as stubborn as her mother when it came to books and she could use the time to get her head together before she drove him anywhere.

  However, waiting in her car didn’t help her mental state at all. Because it wasn’t her car, it was his car. The one he’d bought for her. The one he used as leverage to railroad her into doing the stupidest thing she’d ever agreed to do in her life.

  No, not the most stupid thing, she thought, remembering that night in Germany, six summers ago.

  Later she would blame the rain. Germany wasn’t respectful about letting folks enjoy their summer like Virginia was. Summer be damned, it was coming down hard the night she made the stupidest decision of her life. And she’d been lingering behind the hospital’s glass doors, trying to wait it out.

  She’d been so busy assessing the downpour beyond the carport, trying to figure out if it was really letting up or if that was just wishful thinking on her part, that she’d let down her guard.

  She’d mistaken the chill for the opening and closing of the outer doors in the corridor she was standing in. She didn’t realize why she was suddenly so cold until it was too late. And she was looking up for the source of the cold wind.

  But instead of finding an open door, she found Sawyer Grant’s ghost. His eyes intense as he stared at her.

  This wasn’t their first run-in. He’d been following her around for nearly a month now, trying to catch her eye. Occasionally asking if she could see him. She’d never answered. Had, in fact, studiously ignored him as she went about her duties. And she’d been pretty sure he’d fallen for it. She hadn’t seen him for days now. Had even been meaning to discreetly check over in ICU to see if maybe he’d come out of his coma—one way or the other.

  But apparently he hadn’t come out of the coma. He’d just been laying low for a while. And now he was standing there right beside her, the fluorescent lights casting harsh shadows across his sharply planed face. He was staring straight at her.

  And she found herself staring back before she had a chance to remember he was a spirit. One she definitely couldn’t see because here in Germany, she was a normal girl. Not a freak like her mother, but a normal woman who could definitely not see Sawyer’s very handsome spirit roaming the medical center’s halls.

  Thunder boomed in the distance and she jumped, her eyes finally unlocking from Sawyer’s. To her relief, the rain started to slow down outside. The thunder seemed to have signaled an end to the storm, with its steady patter ebbing into a few drips.

  “Oh, the rain’s almost stopped,” she said, pretending to look straight through Sawyer as she “talked to herself.” A belated attempt to play off the eye lock they’d just shared. One she prayed would work.

  It didn’t.

  “You can see me,” he said, his voice hard and angry. It wasn’t a question this time but a statement.

  “I wonder if the U-Bahn’s even running this late,” she said to herself again, looking at the Timex her mother gave her when she graduated from UVA.

  “Stop pretending you can’t see me.”

  She kept her eyes somewhere right above his head, steadfastly pretending to scan the horizon for signs the rain really had come to a stop. Which was exactly what a very normal girl who couldn’t see him would be doing in that moment.

  “I know you can see me,” he said, snarling out each word.

  She mentally whistled, refusing to acknowledge him in any sort of way. Go away, go away, I need you to go away.

  She heaved her backpack onto her shoulder, fully
prepared to go around him if that’s what it took.

  But before she could take the next step, Sawyer blocked her path, suddenly falling to his knees in front of her.

  “Please, Stork,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “I need you to see me. I need you to tell me I’m real. I feel like I’m going crazy, and I need somebody to talk to me. I understand if you don’t want to help me, because of all that shit I did to you in high school. I don’t care if you don’t want to help me get out of this mess. But please, talk to me. Please.”

  Oh, how hard Willa had to work to keep her eyes from going wide as saucers. He was begging. Sawyer Grant was begging her, Willa Harper, to talk to him. She’d never in her life thought she’d see or hear such a thing. And keeping her eyes exactly where they were became a real struggle. The sight of him on his knees, just below her line of sight, pulled on her eyeballs like magnets.

  But then a gang of nurses burst into the outer corridor, just getting off their shift.

  “Want a ride back to Sembach?” one of them, who occasionally assisted Delores, asked her. “I’ve got my car here.”

  Yes, thank you! she wanted to say as she used the excuse of their presence to finally drop her gaze. Her apartment in Sembach was cheap, but it was also a two-train, hour-and-a-half ride from Landstuhl. She should have jumped at the chance to get a ride with one of the civilian nurses…

  But then she saw Sawyer on the ground. Still on his knees, his face haggard with desperation.

  Dammit! Dammit all to hell. Her mother had always said she had her father’s heart. Too soft when it came to people in need. In fact, getting out of his car in a small town to help a white woman whose car had broken down at the side of the road had brought on his untimely death.

  And having his heart secretly beating inside her otherwise hard exterior, was what caused Willa to stop pretending. To finally look directly at the spirit in front of her on his knees.

  “Thanks, but I’m good,” she said to the nurse who’d offered her the ride. “Now that the rain’s stopped, I was actually going up to the roof to call my mom in the states.”

  Easy excuse to believe. It was mid-morning in Virginia. And the roof was the quietest place in the complex to have a conversation without fear of running into a co-worker or patient.

  In fact, that was exactly where she went without so much as a “follow me,” to Sawyer. But she didn’t need one. He trailed behind her, his cold wind following her down the hall like a shadow.

  When she got to the roof, she gave the damp space a hasty scan. No one out here, thanks to the recent rain.

  She walked as far away from the door as she could get and carefully pulled out her phone so she’d have an excuse if anyone came out there.

  Then for the first time in her entire life, she looked directly at Sawyer Grant on purpose.

  “My name isn’t Stork,” she said to him, her voice tight. “It’s Willa.”

  If she expected him to look chastened, she was mistaken. Instead his whole body sagged with relief as he said, “Oh God, thank you, Willa. Thank you. I thought I was going crazy.”

  “You’re not going crazy,” she said, her soft heart constricting because no one, not even Sawyer Grant, deserved the confusion that came with suddenly waking up in spirit form. “But you’re not exactly here either. You’ve been hurt, Sawyer. Bad. And you’re in a coma, somewhere between life and death…”

  HUGE, HUGE, STUPID MISTAKE, Willa thought to herself as she waited for Trevor in the car. Six years ago she’d felt compelled to help Sawyer with his undecided spirit problem. Just like she’d felt compelled to help him with his ghost leg now. Especially after she seen its specter, still attached below the cut off point. Strong and mutinous, refusing to believe it was long gone now, incinerated at some medical waste facility.

  Appearing to Willa just as real as its fully corporeal right counterpart, the ghost leg clung to the place where it had died. She could only imagine how much pain it must have been causing Sawyer all these years. That was why she hadn’t been able to keep herself from accepting his offer.

  It was one thing to give up her dream of becoming a physiatrist six years ago. It was another to completely ignore the skillset that had led her to apply for the Landstuhl fellowship in the first place. She knew she could help Sawyer with his leg. And in this, she and only she could help him. Again.

  But helping him six years ago had blown up in her face and the stakes were even higher this time around—

  The sound of the car’s back door opening cut off her panicked thoughts.

  She watched Trevor crawl into the seat and buckle himself in, flashing her a triumphant smile when he was done.

  “Now you say ‘Good Job, Trev,’” he instructed her.

  “Good job, Trev,” she said, indulging him. “You got a book for the center?”

  Of course he did. He waved her high school edition of Old Yeller at her from the back seat, “Pappy says this became his favorite book after you taught him to read.”

  Okay, still wildly inappropriate for someone at Trevor’s reading level. But at least they didn’t have a dog. So maybe this one wouldn’t give him nightmares, like when her mother decided it would be a good idea to introduce him to Animal Farm, even though one of Trevor’s chores used to be the daily feeding of Mr. Chekov, The recently deceased pack horse her grandfather had bought to pull his cart shortly before he died.

  But hopefully Old Yeller wouldn’t haunt Trevor like Animal Farm had. Like Sawyer continued to haunt her. Even more so, now that he was no longer a spirit.

  He’d looked so different standing in his doorway. Hair now shaved close to his head with a beard that didn’t look like it had been tended to in weeks. Same swamp mud eyes, but this Sawyer only bore a passing resemblance to the clean-cut SEAL who’d begged her to talk to him. And he’d been drinking too much, she could tell. From the bleary eyes and the lingering smell of alcohol mingling in with the scent of fresh soap.

  He was a hot mess and going through all the motions his father had set forth for him to cover it up.

  Yet, she could still feel it between them. The thing she’d tried so hard to ignore during their time together in Germany. Like a dangerous promise humming in the air.

  God, she couldn’t wait for the six weeks to be over. She reached over and started up the car.

  6

  Apparently Willa couldn’t wait for their appointment.

  Sawyer grinned when the doorbell sounded a full fifteen minutes before she was due.

  He’d been anticipating it, too. Not only had he’d informed Josh that he’d only be doing half days for the next few Tuesdays, he’d rushed home from work in order to clean up for her. By the time the doorbell rang, he’d been ready and dressed for physical therapy for an hour, and he actually had to hold himself back from running to the door.

  Somehow he managed to open the door with some measure of cool. Smooth, like he’d been doing something other than waiting for her to show up. However, the composed look fell right off his face when he saw the person on the other side of the door.

  “Dad, what happened to calling first?” he asked, not bothering to mask his annoyance.

  “I called over to the office and the girl behind the desk said you’d already left for the day,” his father answered. “I’m sorry, Son, is this a bad time for you?”

  Quentin Grant showed just how much he cared about the answer to that question by pushing into the house past him. Bold as the four-star admiral he used to be, before switching to a career in politics.

  Sawyer watched his father survey the front room. The Admiral still had officer posture. Straight spine, chin forward as he scanned the living space he’d ceded to his youngest son. Sawyer could just about hear Terminator-style beeps as he searched for something to disapprove of.

  Earlier in the day, he would have found plenty. Bottles, one of his old prosthetics, a crapload of unopened mail. But he’d cleaned up for Willa.

  “I see you took my a
dvice and called in Grace to keep house for you.”

  “Yeah, I did,” Sawyer said, crutching over to stand beside him. “She’s officially retired now, but she agreed to start coming over on Tuesdays and Thursdays starting next week.” He let a significant pause go by before he added, “…on the condition you wouldn’t be here. That’s not going to be a problem, will it, Dad?”

  He watched for his father’s reaction, wondering not for the first time what he’d done to make Grace, their longtime housekeeper, quit. Knowing Quentin, he’d gotten upset over some immigration bill or something and said something so elitist and racist, even the super agreeable Grace couldn’t put up with him anymore.

  But whatever it had been, it was huge. His father had moved out of the house to his apartment in Bon Air soon after, and as far as Sawyer knew, neither of them had been back to the house since.

  Sawyer watched his father’s salt-and-pepper head—more salt than pepper now that Quentin was no longer keeping it “just the right amount of brown” for the cameras—move back and forth as he scanned the great room.

  Again, Sawyer had to wonder what had compelled him to come back here. He could have run his campaign somewhere else. Some trendy apartment with a doorman, so his father couldn’t just show up without warning.

  But he’d been drawn back to the house where he’d grown up. Like a magnet he couldn’t figure out how to fight. And now, he was standing here on his crutches, waiting for his father to finish his inspection. Feeling like a plebe, forced to stand there while his superior decided if his rack passed inspection.

  “Can I get you anything, Dad?” Sawyer asked. “Beer, whiskey, water. That’s all I’ve got.”

  His father answered with a censorious frown. “As soon as Grace gets back, tell her to start keeping a pitcher of tea at the ready for unexpected guests.”

  “So I guess that’s a no.”

  His father held up a manila folder. “I’ve got some copy for a few more campaign ads we’d like to record next month with you. It needs your approval.”