His Everlasting Love: 50 Loving States, Virginia

by Theodora Taylor

  From the confused look on his face, she could tell she wasn’t making much sense. “Anyway,” she rushed on. “In your case—in the case of all ghosts—folks walk through you because they can’t see you. Therefore you don’t exist in their observed universes.”

  But this explanation only made Sawyer look even more confused, and now a bit angry.

  “I just told you I want to kiss you. So bad, I’m starting to seriously want to come out of this coma, and your answer to that is a physics lesson?”

  “No, please don’t call what I just said physics. Because it totally isn’t. I’m simply trying to explain that you exist in my universe. I can see you.”

  He inclined his head like maybe now he was wondering how far Willa’s apple had fallen from her mother’s crazy tree.

  “I can see you,” she repeated, her voice husky with emotion. “And that means something. That means, I can…”

  She took a deep breath and did something she’d never ever in her life done with a spirit who wasn’t some kind of relation to her. She reached out and touched him. Before she could stop herself, she laid her hand on Sawyer’s cheek.

  Sawyer didn’t have lungs. Not really, but the sound that came out of him could only be described as a sharp inhale, followed by his hand wrapping around her forearm as his whole face filled with something akin to reverence.

  “Willa…” he whispered her name like a prayer.

  And then slowly, oh so slowly as if he were scared she would disappear if he went too fast, he drew her to him, cold arms wrapping around her body.

  “Willa,” he whispered again, a cool breeze against her lips.

  Then his lips were on hers. Delving, exploring her mouth with the same reverence she’d seen on his face when he touched her for the first time.

  She kissed him back, surprised at how good it felt, how right she felt in his arms. The Stuttering Stork no longer, but a swan made beautiful by this man’s kiss.

  It was a pretty kiss. A romantic kiss. The kind of kiss featured at the ends of movies in which the hero and heroine have traveled a great distance to finally reunite.

  And then it wasn’t.

  The kiss took a turn somewhere, with Sawyer’s lips no longer sipping but gulping. She gasped when he abruptly lifted her off her feet, carrying her to the nearest surface—the royal blue physical therapy bed. Small weights and resistance bands went flying with one slash of his arm as he set her down. He quickly stripped her out of her pants before unzipping his jumpsuit, and positioning his cold waist between her warm legs.

  “So much wasted time,” he growled as he pushed into her. “Why didn’t you tell me, Willa? Why?”

  He sounded on edge. Like a man betrayed.

  But he didn’t give her any chance to answer. As soon as he was inside of her, his hips began rocking into her with urgent thrusts. He kissed her everywhere as he claimed her, on her lips, her face, her neck, the little bit of chest inside the V of her scrubs. Any bit of skin he could find.

  She could only imagine what this would look like to anyone who might walk in at that moment. Her half naked on the counter. Hips jutted forth on the table, eyes closed, head thrown back in ecstasy. Her body jolting upwards every time her unseen lover shoved himself between her legs.

  But all she could do was moan, spreading her legs wider to receive him even deeper. Something was happening inside her now. A quickening she’d never known with the few guys she’d dated seriously during her undergrad years. And she didn’t want it to stop. Didn’t want him to stop.

  “Fuck, Willa,” he said, voice tight with raw desire. “This right here is everything I ever dreamed about.”

  His words sent her over the edge, and the climax caved her shoulders, pressing her even further into him.

  “Ahh,” he yelled out, as her sex squeezed his tight. “Fuck, yes! This is so perfect. You’re so perfect, baby. Even better than I thought you’d be.”

  His body tensed between her legs, his hip thrusting forward one last time as he yelled out.

  His icy release sent a chill through her entire body. But she’d never felt so warm in her life. Or so alive.

  As if reading her thoughts, he looked at her in wonder. “I’ve been faking it all my life, but I never felt as real as I do now. With anybody ever, Willa. Baby, you make me real.”

  She could still remember smiling back at him with the same wonder. Only to have that wonder shatter inside her heart when the portal suddenly blinked into existence behind him.

  “What?” he asked, following her gaze over his shoulder.

  Then he saw it, too.

  The portal…and inside its oval, a hospital room.

  She easily recognized the unconscious man in the hospital bed. Someone had been taking pains to keep him well-groomed. His hair was clean and lay upon his head in combed waves. His handsome face remained beard-free. He still looked exactly like the man standing in front of her, except there was now a small smile on his face and….he only had two-thirds of a left leg.

  Sawyer pulled out of her and zipped up his jumpsuit as he turned to look at the man in the portal. “I don’t understand. How are we seeing this? What happened to my leg?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, behind him. Now thinking of all the things she hadn’t told him. “I should have told you, but I wasn’t sure…what you’d decide.”

  “What’s going on?” he demanded again, his eyes now wide with fear as he stared at the man in the hospital bed.

  The time for keeping secrets was over and she told him it straight. “That’s you Sawyer. Your leg was too far gone. They had to perform a below the knee amputation.”

  The portal kicked up a wind. One she could only vaguely feel. But she knew from her experience with Trevor’s ghost that Sawyer would more than feel it. The wind would be stronger for him. Sucking him in.

  “No,” he said when it started pulling him back, grabbing on to her hands. “Not yet. We just started…!”

  “It’s okay,” she said to him, her heart squeezing with sadness around his words. But she reassured him as best she could. “Your body is calling you back. And for what it’s worth, I think you made the right decision.”

  He continued to hold on to her hands, even though the wind was pulling on him hard now. “This means we’ll be together for real when I wake up, right?” he asked.

  “Sawyer…” she squeezed his hands. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “But that’s not how it works. When you wake up, you won’t remember anything that happened to you while you were in spirit form. We’re not designed to remember what happened to us in spirit form. It’s better that way.”

  But Sawyer obviously didn’t agree with her assessment of the universe’s design. “No… no…” he growled. “Find me when I wake up. Or I’ll find you. It can’t end like this. We’ll be together. I promise you.”

  She just shook her head, hot tears springing to her eyes. Because obviously that really, really wasn’t a promise he could keep.

  But he insisted. “No, Willa, don’t give up on this. I’ll find you.”

  The wind grew louder, pulled harder, but still Sawyer resisted. He was fighting so hard. But eventually the universe with its infinite power over life and death and Sawyer’s coma won out. And his hands slipped out of hers.

  “This isn’t how we end, Willa Harper!” he yelled to her as the portal sucked him in. “I’ll find you!”

  And then the portal closed around him and he was gone.

  Leaving Willa alone in the room with a promise he couldn’t possibly keep.

  For him that wouldn’t be a problem. He’d forget her and live his life exactly as planned by his father. Only with a one year delay for intense physical therapy. He’d even make the news for returning to the SEALs and serving out the rest of his deployment as an amputee.

  But as for her…she would never forget him. She already knew then and there that Sawyer Grant would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  “SO YOU UNDERSTAND why I can’t
do this,” Willa said to her sister six years later. “Why I can’t stay here.”

  Thel nodded, let out a long breath after hearing Willa’s epic story. “Yeah I get it. I definitely get it.”

  Then she went over to their bedroom window and drew the curtain back for the first time since the day Sawyer returned. At first Willa thought she was looking at Greenlee Place in a new light. But Thel’s eyes had gone glassy as if there were another distance inside her head that she was staring off into.

  “Believe me,” her sister said eventually. “I get having to get away.”

  She let the curtain drop, covering the view of Greenlee Place in a way that felt final.

  “Give me a few days. I’ve got something I can sell that’ll get us enough money to leave here, but it will take a few days to arrange. Meanwhile, we’ll all start packing, okay?”

  Willa’s shoulders slumped with relief, and she crossed the distance between them to give her sister a fierce hug. “Thank you. Thank you!”

  Her sister hugged back just as fiercely, arms squeezing her tight as a warm blanket on a snowy day. “You came through for me six years ago. Now I’m going to come through for you.”

  “Thank you,” Willa said again, accepting her sister’s generosity if not her undue gratitude.

  She was happy to have been able to help Thel through her ordeal with cancer, but at this point she couldn’t wait to get out of here. And her heart filled with relief knowing that, thanks to her sister, she’d soon be leaving Sawyer Grant and the rest of Greenlee County far behind.

  13

  When Sawyer woke up face down in his bed, he was a little boy again.

  The smell of alcohol permeated the air, and he could hear voices arguing downstairs. Just like when his father used to rail against his alcoholic mother for getting too sloppy at one of his Navy functions. He could still easily remember his father yelling at his mother before he sent her away to the first rehab center. Saying that he loved Kate, he really did, but he’d just been appointed to a four-star post by the President at the relatively young age of thirty-nine. He already had high hopes for his political future after serving out his four-year term and he couldn’t let her go on like this.

  There was no drunken weeping this time, but the yelling still sounded very familiar.

  Except Sawyer wasn’t a boy anymore. For one thing, his cock was still pulsing from the dream he’d just had. One featuring Willa Harper, a girl he wouldn’t have looked at twice when he was still living under the same roof as both of his parents. For another, he was the one now living in what used to be his parent’s master bedroom. And the smell of leftover alcohol was coming from the empty bottle of Jack still clutched tightly in one hand.

  But there were definitely voices yelling downstairs…

  He got up and went through the process of “talking to his leg” and putting on his prosthetic limb, followed by a t-shirt and a pair of jeans. Then he went downstairs to find Grace and his father in the great room. Yelling at each other. His dad waving around that old leather bound book Grace had been carrying around lately, trying to read it during her breaks because, “I don’t know, why not? That Miss Marian is a very nice lady, I think, and maybe she knows something I don’t,” she’d answered when Sawyer asked her about it last Thursday.

  But his fathered looked furious, towering over the little maid as he yelled, “You mean to tell me you had no idea this book, this signed first volume of Winston Churchill’s World in Crisis, was stolen from my collection years ago during a party? Shortly before you came to work here, in fact?”

  Grace bent her arms upwards, her hands going wide as she said, “No, I didn’t steal your book, Admiral Grant. I will tell you this again: Miss Marian gave this book to me. I have no idea where she got it from, and I have only been reading it a little bit, keeping it in my purse. In fact, I have no idea how it came to be out here, since I just cleaned this room. And by the way, I don’t think you should go around accusing people of lying. Especially one who loves your boy like he is her own family, even when you do not.”

  His father’s face went red with anger, and it looked like a vein was about to burst in his forehead as he yelled, “You’d have me believe she stole a volume worth ten-thousand dollars and then instead of selling it, she decided to sit on it for nearly twenty years and then simply give it to my housekeeper?”

  Grace’s eyes fluttered with shock. “Is that how much this book costs? Dios mios!” Then as if remembering herself, she drew up herself up, placing her hands on her wide hips as she informed his father, “I am not your housekeeper anymore, Admiral Grant, and I never will be again. I do not know how Miss Marian got this book, but she said she bought it specifically for me when she gave it to me.”

  Now his father squinted at her. “Why would she do that?”

  Grace’s prideful stance deflated a little. “Because she said a spirit told her to,” she mumbled. “But that is beside the point, because I really do not think she can afford a ten thousand dollar book. Maybe this is not your volume, as you called it.”

  “It is most certainly is my volume,” Sawyer’s father roared. “See this autograph? It’s addressed specifically to my grandfather, John.”

  “There are many Johns in this country...” Grace shot back. “Even more Johns here than Juans in Puerto Rico…”

  The memory of Willa talking to her sister on the phone invaded Sawyer’s mind then.

  What did she need with a $10,000 dollar book? Oh my God, that was all of our savings…

  Could this have been the reason she—

  He cut that thought off with a brutal shake of his head. No, no…he wasn’t going to let himself think about Willa anymore. She was with somebody else. Probably some black guy with both legs intact.

  For all he knew, the only reason she’d slept with him last week was because she felt sorry for him. A pity fuck disguised as passion.

  But the way she’d responded to him, her body melting into his like she’d just been waiting for him to take her—that didn’t feel like pity…

  And the memory of that telephone call continued to nag at him, making the headache he’d woken up with blare louder than a Navy ship horn inside his head.

  Booze, he thought to himself. That’s what he needed. More booze.

  He headed the rest of the way down the stairs. Past the arguing adults who weren’t his mom and dad. Except technically his dad was actually still his dad. And Grace had been more of a mother to him than his drunken one ever had.

  They both abruptly went silent as soon as he walked past them, like a ghost had just entered the room.

  But whatever, Sawyer thought, the crystal decanter that Grace kept filled with what his father used to called “talk fuel” was the only alcohol left in the house. So he kept on walking until he got to the Bohemian crystal whisky service sitting on the sideboard on the other side of the great room.

  However, when he turned around from filling his crystal tumbler nearly to the top, his father and Grace were standing there, all of their attention now completely focused on him.

  “Tell me you’re not drinking at eight in the morning,” his father said, voice laced clear through with disapproval.

  “Would’ve probably been ten or eleven if you two hadn’t woke me up,” Sawyer answered, taking a huge sip of the hair his dog of a hangover needed.

  “Is this why you canceled our lunch on Saturday? Why you haven’t been answering any of my calls or emails? Because you were too busy getting drunk?”

  Sawyer leaned back against the sideboard. “Yeah, sure, Dad. Let’s just say that’s it, if that’s the excuse you want to use for coming over here.”

  His father’s eyes narrowed. Then just like the old days, he looked to Grace for an explanation of his son’s behavior. Like she was one of his political staff, responsible for briefing him before he went into a room with a belligerent Democrat.

  Throwing Sawyer a worried look, Grace actually fell back into her old role. “I do not k
now why he is behaving this way. He was passed out in his room when I got here. And I think the Harper girl will maybe not be coming over today...”

  The sudden downcast of her eyes told Sawyer Grace must have come upon Willa’s leftover panties in the kitchen.

  “No,” he assured Grace, the old meanness coming back in full force. “That Harper girl probably won’t be coming back anytime soon.”

  His father gave Grace a short nod. Then turned back to Sawyer. “First of all, I will not stand for this kind of attitude from you, young man. Second of all—”

  “Why are you here, Dad?” Sawyer asked looking between him and Grace.

  “I told you.”

  “No, you didn’t, actually. So please explain it to me now. Why have you once again shown up at my house? Unannounced.”

  His father frowned, seemingly taken aback by Sawyer’s question. “I would have given you some notice if you had answered my email.”

  Sawyer whipped his phone out of his back pocket and went straight to the special Dad folder in his mail program. “Let’s see…we’ve got more ad copy to approve…something about new headshots…a possible meeting with Representative Dorner…something about rescheduling that Saturday lunch. But nothing about coming over here.”

  He raised his eyes back to his father. “And why do I get the feeling if I check all these voicemails you left me, there wouldn’t be any advance notice there either?”

  His father remained the admiral through and through, undaunted by Sawyer’s questions. “I don’t need an excuse to come here, Son. I was worried about you, so I—”

  “See that’s just it. You don’t really worry about me, Dad. I was in a coma in that German hospital, and you were too busy campaigning to come visit.”

  At least his dad didn’t try to deny that, but he did parry back with, “I was trying to control the story for your political sake, and my flying over there would have tipped off the press. But I called when you woke up. As soon as you woke up.”