by Susan Ward
One Forever Kiss
Affair Without End Series
Book 4
Susan Ward
Copyright © 2016 Susan Ward
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN: 1522946306
ISBN-13: 978-1522946304
All Rights Reserved. In Accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher or author constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Epilogue
Prologue
“Jackson Parker”
There is a quiet you hear only at the beach, a hush that rises up from the ocean, enveloping everything until the only sound is the quiet within yourself.
Most people get it wrong; the reason I’ve spent my most of life living on the edge of the Pacific. They think it’s a simple geography preference or a lifestyle choice. It’s neither. It’s a philosophy, though I’ve never bothered trying to explain that—or me—to anyone. And I probably won’t ever try because the two people on this earth who needed to understand this about me understood without my explaining it.
The ocean shrinks all things—your happiness and your regrets, your strengths and your weaknesses, your love and your loneliness, your misery and joy—to proper perspective. Everything about us is trivial compared to the sea. It is a greater force than any of us can hope to be or ever conquer.
The ocean can provide peace or misery. Sustenance or deprivation. It can sooth your soul or it can mesmerize you into its depths. It can seduce you and then drown you, or in its whim carry you gently back to shore. But in all moments, it is greater than you, do not doubt it, and it will either love or hurt or ignore you at its choosing. And no matter what you do to try to master it, it is only illusion to think you command a single moment you are with it, because the ocean is, in fact, a woman.
That lesson I learned from my wife, Lena.
When I look back on my life it is the same as any man’s. Glorious moments and moments of regret. Sort of a memory scale, a simple equation that determines whether we believe we’ve lived a good life or one of remorse. The challenge is no different for any of us, regardless of our birth or success, our fame or our obscurity, our poverty or our wealth. The game we all play is the same. It’s a simple war we fight every day: what we allow ourselves to see and remember.
How we balance our scale.
More good or more bad.
The things we give importance to and the things we let be.
In truth, all our scales, regardless of what we’ve done with our lives, are equal. They are equal at our birth and equal at our death, and not a single act between the two changes any of it. We live, we die, we love, and we lose. And everything else doesn’t matter. In the giant scheme of things no person is greater than any other, and our only purpose is to love and if we miss that we are nothing.
That lesson I learned from Linda Cray.
The old Jack—or perhaps I should say young Jack—was a stubborn, headstrong, myopic man. I held on to things too tightly, the wrong things in the wrong way. It cost me much. It cost me years of happiness I could have had with Lena. It cost me my son, Samuel. And it nearly cost me my daughter, Chrissie.
There was a time there was nothing but loneliness and regrets walking this beach with me. An empty heart. Pictures in my memory. Voices in my head. My wife. My son. How remarkable they were and how much I’d failed them and wished I could go back in time and undo my every mistake. I could not balance my scale with anything but my mistakes.
I’d forgotten how to love.
How to need.
How to give.
The pain sent me headfirst back into a bottle and I lost myself in a year of being drunk after years of being sober. I was a terrible father to Chrissie. I could not see her or any of the joy of this earth surrounding me.
I walked the shoreline every day, unable to lose myself in the quiet enough to find peace. Grief robbed me of clear perspective, and somehow I’d forgotten that I was trivial.
When standing at the ocean’s edge we all face a single choice: to go into the darkness of the water or turn back to shore. But it was on a night in 1980 when that choice wasn’t turning in my head in a philosophical way but in a consciously made decision way.
I was there at the edge of the sand, ready to die, unable to endure the unrelenting hours of my pain, the suffering of endless expectations, of trying to be who I needed to be and unable to be anything. I wanted to be with my wife again.
I had come to the beach to free Lena’s ashes into the ocean as she’d asked me to before the cancer took her from me. Her ashes had sat for four years on the mantel in my bedroom in a pretty urn I’d had made to resemble a Fabergé egg. Letting her go was not something I was willing to do even though it had been her last wish of me.
Then after a year of grieving our son, I was ready to scatter her remains across the sea because I had every intention of joining her right after.
I wanted to disappear into the darkness of the water with Lena and our son, to find peace again in the only manner there seemed left to me. I needed to be with her, she’d taken more than my heart on the day she died, and whatever held me to earth was less powerful than the want to follow her. But then, I’d pretty much spent our entire marriage following Lena without knowing it.
It was a decided thing, clear in my head, the choice of dying rather than living, then the ocean reminded me, as it often does, that I am trivial. I was lying in the sand, Lena’s ashes scattered around me because I was drunk and had dropped the urn before I reached the water, when I looked up and saw her.
No woman could ever look as much like Lena as Lin
da did that night in the moonlight, and since I was drunk and she was wearing a sheet wrapped around her body like a toga, my mind played tricks on me. I knew it wasn’t Lena’s ghost and that it was another woman helping me from the sand back up the cliffs to my empty house, but my heart refused to let go of the delusion.
Something inside me awakened for the first time in years. Still, I could only hold on to the delusion that she was Lena long enough to carry me through our first night together. And what a night it was. We passed the darkness making love as I had not made love in years—with all my heart, my hurts, my longing, my passion, my joy, my tenderness, the entirety of my body and soul—openly shared with a girl who knew nothing of love or tenderness.
A perfect encounter that should never have been anything more than my goodbye to the pleasures on earth. That’s what I thought I was doing when I started making love to Linda. Having one last drop of being a man before I became nothing.
A single random moment.
A girl from nowhere.
One last night of passion.
An unexpected road on a map going elsewhere.
Nothing more.
But the next morning, clear-eyed and sober, my life changed forever the second I saw Linda standing in the doorway. That second I stopped living in the would have, could have, and should have, and gave myself over to living in the now.
I had what alcoholics call a moment of clarity, all things aligned in proper proportion and suddenly clear. I remembered the things I knew to be true. Nothing in life is ever random. Every moment of life is a gift. Everyone we meet we meet for a reason. And because I was at times a stubborn son of a bitch, this chance moment had to hit me between the eyes like a ton of bricks just to get me to see it for what it was: a second chance to love and a chance to do it well.
Linda was the image of Lena.
She gave me shit—albeit in a sassy, more street-smart way—like Lena.
She wasn’t the least bit intimidated by me—like Lena.
She needed me like Lena—though I did not realize that about Lena until it was too late, the her needing me part of our story. I always thought it was only me needing her.
And Linda got my deadened body awake and on fire—like Lena.
I fell in love with Linda at first sight, only I didn’t know then that she’d become everything I’d live for, this miraculous girl who had stumbled into my life dressed in a toga, wandering the beach. Lena had been a miraculous girl as well, but somehow, even loving her as desperately as I did, I hadn’t learned how to live for her.
Miraculous girls are difficult to love well. And loving them how they need to be loved doesn’t always look the way a man would want it to. That’s a lesson men learn with age: the difference between being who you need to be for a woman and who you think you need to be for a woman.
I’d like to think I’ve loved Linda well, the way she needed me to. I regret not having loved Lena better. But I wouldn’t change any of my mistakes, my failings.
No, not anymore.
Time teaches you things you can’t see when you are young. It’s a widely held misconception that if you remove the bad moments from someone’s life, they will only end with good. But sometimes it’s the roads you don’t want to take that bring you to where you need and want to be.
You see, sometimes it takes being madly in love with a woman and doing it badly to learn how to be madly in love with a woman and do it well. And it took Linda for me to come to terms with my past, to find my way from the darkness back to the good things in my life, and to find peace.
It’s taken loving Linda to forgive myself.
Chapter One
2016
I grab my fishing pole, cast the line deep into the water, and then prop it in the sand to be ignored while I sit on my lounge chair staring at the ocean. A ritual I’ve come to appreciate now that I’m seventy-four. I watch the swells coming in from the south. Not enough to tempt me to grab a board and it probably wouldn’t be a smart move to be far from my phone. Besides, the sun feels good.
It’s unseasonably warm in Santa Barbara for winter, and the scorching rays—as I wait and ignore the unending text notifications from my family—are just the right companion for a day like today.
I’m an expert at waiting. I’ve spent most of my life patiently waiting for things. That’s the first misconception people have about me. They like to call me the voice of a generation and a man who helped change the world.
Bullshit. I’m not a man of action or revolution or change. I know why they say that about me—too many like to romanticize all things the ’60s—and they are just flat-out wrong when it comes to me. I’m the man who waited for things—sometimes too long—to be the way he wanted them to be.
Only, at least today, it’s a joyous event I’m waiting on the call about. Memories of other calls, darker moments in my life, penetrate my consciousness, but I quickly push them away.
Today is a happy day and I want only to pass it quietly here with good memories and the memories of Lena. My own ritual of inner peace: dawn, the beach, and my time with Lena. No matter my romantic status with Linda, there remains a part of me, unbending and unwilling, to let go completely of my emotional commitment to my wife.
As I rub the sweat from the back of my neck with a towel, I reach into my cooler for a chilled container of iced tea. There’s a bottle of champagne as well, though not for me. I haven’t drunk so much as a drop of alcohol since the night thirty-six years ago when Linda found me sprawled and drunk on the beach.
It’s there for her, though it was probably foolishness to have put it into the ice chest this morning before heading from the house, down the steps built into the cliffs and onto the beach.
But I’d woken with that feeling, the one I get when the road in front of me is about to abruptly change, and the only thing in my life I want to have change is where matters have been left with Linda. I haven’t been with Linda in nearly ten years, and to this day I regret the argument we had that turned us into friends instead of lovers—again.
I understand how we got onto the road we’re traveling. And I’m hanging back being the man she needs me to be, like always. But hell, I never expected this break to last so long.
For over three decades I’ve loved that woman and we have never before been in our off status—in each other’s lives, not in each other’s bed, emotionally connected and physically on hiatus—this long.
Together, but distant.
Loving, but silent.
Both of us dug in, believing we’re right, her unwilling to bend and me—this one time—unwilling to bend as well.
Though the unbending part is probably moot. All my stubbornness didn’t stop a thing. It’s happened. A done deal. Unchangeable—and dear God, I wouldn’t change parts of it for the world—and my only wish is that Linda would stop holding her ground.
I should not have expected it to be otherwise. There is no greater force on earth than a woman, and maybe she was right. I should have rolled with things the way she wanted me to. Her reasons and rationale for the conflict that put this latest chasm between us were understandable and right. I couldn’t find a single fault in either her logic or her wants. But that didn’t change a thing about how I felt and I couldn’t roll with her wishes, not this time, not even for Linda.
This unexpected crossroad in our lives knocked us onto the wrong road and we’ve stayed on it too long. I’m ready to turn around if she will just forgive and turn with me.
Lena did when I made mistakes with her, but then, Linda’s been through a hell of a lot more, with me and apart from me. More than any woman I’ve ever loved—more than Lena and more than even my daughter, Chrissie—not the least of which that moment that brought us here, to what I hope won’t be a permanent ending.
Only this hanging back, loving and waiting for her, even though it is the necessary move, I am ready to be done with. But this time I can’t go after Linda; I need to wait until she’s willing to come to me. Ther
e are some mistakes in life you can only fix by hanging on and waiting, and a man has to love a woman how they are, not how he wishes her to be.
I guzzle down two-thirds of my drink then set it in the sand beside my chair. I’m about to grab my rod and recast my line when my phone atop the cooler starts to vibrate with an incoming call.
I didn’t expect to hear from anyone this soon. It’s only been four hours since the text announcing that my granddaughter, Kaley, was in labor and on her way to the hospital.
I slip off my sunglasses so I can see the image on the screen better. Chrissie. FaceTime. God, I hate FaceTime.
I swipe it on. “Well, is it a boy or a girl?” I ask without preamble as I gaze at my daughter.
She laughs in her sweet urchin chime. “Well, nothing yet, Poppy. Why aren’t you down here? The whole family is here except you. It doesn’t feel right without you.”
“Don’t call me Poppy,” I counter, blowing past Chrissie’s question and hoping to change course.
“Why not? You let the grandkids do it. And somehow I’ve always had the feeling you don’t like it when I call you Jack. I sort of like Poppy. Why shouldn’t I call you that?”
“Yes, I don’t like it when you call me Jack, but I like it even less when you call me Poppy. What’s going on, baby girl? Why are you calling if it’s not to announce you’re a grandmother?”
Chrissie crinkles her nose playfully. “Grandmother. It sounds so much more intimidating when you say it. I can’t believe Alan and I are going to be grandparents.”
“It was bound to happen. Especially with having five kids. Ups the odds that one of them would do it to you. It happens to the best of us. Jeez, girl, I’m going to be a great-grandfather by the end of the day. Seems like only yesterday you were born. How’s Linda holding up?”
Even on the tiny five-inch screen I can see her face tighten, like I unexpectedly zapped her with that question. There’s a moment of silence, us staring at each other digitally, and then she recovers enough to make one of her comical faces.
“Why don’t you ask Linda yourself?” she states pointedly. “She’s here at the hospital. She hasn’t left Kaley’s side since they settled her in the birthing room. But if my daughter’s mood is any indication, Bobby’s mother or not, Kaley is going to ask him soon to boot Linda from the room. Give her a half hour. Then call Linda. She’ll need consoling.”