“I’ll see you at school tomorrow.” His voice has lost its edge, but it does nothing to make me feel better. He’s leaving me alone on my birthday. I realize dinner was a mess, but my entire life is a mess. What’s new?
I turn around and walk away from his truck.
“Clara.”
He’s confusing as shit with all this back-and-forth.
I spin around and march back to his window. “You know what? I don’t need this. I don’t want a boyfriend who makes me feel worse when I’m already down. I don’t want to date you anymore. I’m breaking up with you.” I back away but realize I’m not finished with my point, so I step back toward his truck. “They disrespected the two most important people in my life. They disrespected me. Am I just supposed to pretend I’m fine with it? Is that the kind of girlfriend you want? Someone who just gives up and lets other people win every time?”
Miller’s arm is hanging casually over his steering wheel. His voice is calm when he says, “Sometimes you have to walk away from the fight in order to win it.”
Hearing him repeat those words infuriates me. I stomp my foot. “You don’t get to break up with me and then quote my dead aunt!”
“I didn’t break up with you. And I’m quoting you.”
“Well, you should stop. Don’t quote anyone! It’s . . . it’s unattractive!”
If it’s possible, Miller somehow looks amused. “I’m going home now.”
“Good!”
He looks behind him and begins to back out of the driveway. I’m standing in the same spot, confused by our argument. I don’t even know what just happened. “Did we just break up? I can’t even tell!”
Miller presses on the brake and leans out his window. “No. We’re just having an argument.”
“Fine!”
Again, he looks amused as he backs onto the street. I want to wipe the smirk off his face, but he’s already leaving. When he rounds the corner, I walk back inside the house. My mother is standing in the living room, staring down at her phone. It’s on speaker. She’s listening to a voice mail. I walk in on the tail end of it.
“. . . she didn’t sign out at the office, so we’re just calling to let you know she’ll need to bring a note to excuse her from her afternoon classes today . . .”
My mother ends the call before the voice mail is over. “You skipped school today?”
I roll my eyes as I brush past her. “It was only three classes. I had to get out of there. I couldn’t breathe. I still can’t breathe.” I slam my door, and tears are streaming down my cheeks before I even fall against my mattress. I grab my new phone and call Lexie. She answers on the first ring because she’s dependable like that. She’s the only dependable thing in my life right now.
“This . . .” I suck in a series of quick breaths, attempting to choke back tears. “This is the worst birthday. The worst. Can you . . .” I suck in more breaths. “Come over?”
“On my way.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MORGAN
I pull a few of Chris’s shirts out of the closet and remove the hangers from them. I drop them into a trash bag I’ll be donating to a church.
Lexie showed up half an hour ago. I debated on not letting Clara have her over, but I’d almost rather Lexie be here than for Clara to be alone right now. I was relieved to see her when I opened the front door earlier because I could hear Clara crying from my bedroom, and she refuses to speak to me. Or maybe I don’t want to speak to her.
I think it’s best if we just don’t speak until tomorrow.
Now that Lexie is here, Clara is no longer crying, which is good. And even though I can’t make out what they’re saying, I can hear them talking. At least I know she’s home and safe, even if she does hate me right now.
I pull two more of Chris’s shirts out of my closet.
Since the week after Chris died, I’ve slowly been getting rid of his stuff. I’ve been doing it a little at a time, hoping Clara doesn’t notice. I don’t want her to think I’m trying to rid this house of the memory of him. He’s her father, and erasing him isn’t my goal. But I am trying to rid my personal space of him. I threw his pillow away last week. I threw his toothbrush away this morning. And I just finished packing up the last of his dresser.
I expected, in all my digging around, that I would find something he was sloppy about. A hotel receipt, lipstick on a collar. Something that would show he was a little careless in his affair. Aside from the letters he kept locked away in his toolbox, I find nothing else. He hid it well. They both did.
I should probably take the letters out of my dresser and put them away before Clara accidentally runs across them.
I pull a box of his things down from the top closet shelf. After I got pregnant with Clara, Chris and I moved in together. We didn’t have much because we were just teenagers, but this box is one of the few things he brought with him. At the time, it held little mementos like photographs and awards he’d won. But over the years, I’ve been adding other stuff to it. I consider it our box now.
I sit on the bed and look through loose pictures of Clara from when she was a baby. Pictures of me and Chris. Pictures of the three of us and Jenny. I inspect every picture, assuming I’ll find some kind of hint of when it started. But every picture just paints a portrait of a happy couple.
I guess we really were for a while. I’m not sure where it went wrong for him, but I do wish he’d have chosen any girl in the world other than Jenny. That was the least he could have done.
Or maybe it was Jenny who chose him.
I pull an envelope out of the box. It’s full of pictures developed from a roll off one of our old cameras. Jenny isn’t in many of the pictures because she was the one who took most of them, but there’s a lot of me and Chris. Some include Jonah. I stare hard at the pictures of Jonah, trying to find one where he looks genuinely happy, but there isn’t one. He hardly ever smiled. Even now, it’s a rare thing. Not that he wasn’t happy. He seemed happy back then, but not like the rest of us. Jenny would light up around him, Chris would light up around me, but no one made Jonah light up. It’s as if he was stuck in a perpetual shadow, cast by something none of us were aware of.
I flip through the final three pictures, but something about what I see causes me to pause. I pull the three pictures out, taken in sequence, and study them. In the first picture, I’m in the middle, smiling at the camera. Chris is smiling down at me. Jonah is on the other side of me, looking at Chris with a desolate expression.
In the next picture, Chris is smiling at the camera. I’m looking up at Jonah, and Jonah is looking down at me, and I remember that moment. I remember that look.
In the third picture, Jonah is out of the frame. He had broken our stare and walked off.
I’ve tried not to think about that day or the ten minutes before that picture was taken, and I haven’t. Not in a long time. But the pictures force me to recall it in vivid detail.
We had been at Jonah’s house because he was the only one who had a pool. Jenny was on a towel laid out on the concrete, trying to get a tan near the shallow end of the pool. Chris had just gotten out of the water to go inside the house because he was hungry.
Jonah was holding on to a raft a few feet away from me, his body submerged in the water, his arms stretched out over the raft.
I couldn’t touch, and my legs were tired, so I swam over to him and grabbed onto the float. The raft was poorly inflated and probably a few summers old, so it wasn’t very reliable. Especially with both of us hanging on to it. I started slipping, so Jonah grabbed my arms, then slid his leg around the back of my knee to anchor me in place.
I don’t think either of us expected to be jolted by the contact, but I could tell he felt it too. I could tell because his eyes changed shape and darkened at the same moment I shuddered.
I’d been dating Chris for a while at that point, and in all the times he’d touched me while we dated, I had never felt that kind of current pass through me. The kind that not only
left you breathless but left you fearing you’d die from lack of oxygen if you didn’t back away. I wanted to slip with Jonah under the water and use his mouth for air.
The thought startled me. I tried to pull away, but Jonah held on to my arms. His eyes were pleading, as if he knew the second I pulled away, he’d never get to touch me like that again. So I stayed. And we stared.
That’s all that happened.
Nothing was said. Other than the way he was keeping me afloat with his leg wrapped around mine beneath the water, I wouldn’t even say our touch was inappropriate. Had Chris seen it, he wouldn’t have thought a thing about it. Had Jenny seen it, she wouldn’t have even been mad.
But that’s because they didn’t feel what was happening between us. They couldn’t hear everything that wasn’t being said.
A few seconds later, Chris walked back outside and dove into the pool. Jonah unwrapped his leg from around mine, but he didn’t let go of my arms. The ripples from the waves Chris’s dive had left caused the float to rock, but our eyes never unlocked. Not even when Chris sprang up out of the pool next to me and splashed water on us.
Chris wrapped both arms around my waist, pulling me away from the raft. My arms began to slip out of Jonah’s, and I watched Jonah wince when my fingers slid through his and then left him empty.
We were no longer touching. Chris was holding me up, pressing his mouth to mine, and I knew Jonah was watching us kiss.
In that moment, I felt full of guilt. But not because of the moment I had shared with Jonah. Somehow, it felt like Jonah was the one I had betrayed. Which made absolutely no sense.
I climbed out of the pool right after that. A moment later, Jenny had her camera out, asking us to pose for a picture. I remember after the first picture, I glanced up at Jonah. He was looking down at me with an expression that felt like it put a crack in my chest. I didn’t understand it then. Back then, I thought it was just attraction. A teenage boy, hoping to make out with a teenage girl. But right after Jenny took the second picture, Jonah stormed off, into his house.
His actions confused me, and I wanted to ask him about it, but I never did. A few weeks later, I found out I was pregnant.
Then Jonah Sullivan skipped town.
I stare at the picture. The one of Jonah looking down at me. I finally understand that look in his eyes. It wasn’t attraction or contempt.
It’s heartache.
I put the pictures back in the box and replace the lid. I stare at the box, wondering what would have happened if he had never left.
If he had stayed, would we have ended up like Jenny and Chris? I don’t want to think we would have ended up like that. Sneaking around, betraying the people we love the most.
I’ve been so angry at Jonah for leaving, but I get it now. He had to. He knew if he stayed, someone besides him would have ended up getting hurt.
I’ve been avoiding him since his return because my feelings for him were supposed to be dormant. It was supposed to be a teenage crush that fizzled out after I moved on with Chris.
I’ve been lying to myself, doing everything in my power to convince myself that the feelings Jonah stirs up inside me are nothing more than anger.
I’m a terrible liar, though. I always have been.
I knock lightly when I reach his front door. If Elijah is asleep, I don’t want to wake him.
I take a step back, hugging myself. There’s a heavy breeze that swirls around me, but I don’t know if the chills on my arms are caused by the wind or seeing Jonah standing in the open doorway. He’s in a pair of blue jeans and nothing else. His hair is wet and messy. His eyes are drawing me in like they always have. But this time, I don’t force myself to look away.
“Yes,” I say.
He looks at me, perplexed. “Did I ask you a question?”
I nod. “You asked me if I would have left Chris had I not gotten pregnant with Clara. My answer is yes.”
He stares at me, hard, and then it’s as if this invisible wall that’s always been shielding him from me suddenly disappears. He becomes a different person entirely. His features soften, his shoulders relax, his lips part, his chest rises and falls with a smooth release of air.
“Is that the only reason you’re here?”
I shake my head and take one step closer. My heart is pounding so hard right now that I want to turn around and run, but I know the only thing that can ease this ache I feel is Jonah. I want to know what it feels like to be held by him. To be with him. All this time I’ve never even allowed myself to imagine it. Now I want to experience it.
My hands are at my sides now. Jonah barely lifts his finger, hooking it around one of mine. A jolt of electricity spirals its way through my chest, and then a chill rushes down my arm. Jonah’s arms are covered with chills too. They run over his chest and up his neck. I slip my entire hand into his, and he grips it. Squeezes it.
“I might regret this tomorrow,” I warn.
He steps forward, wrapping his free hand around the back of my neck, pulling me close to his mouth. Before he touches my lips, his gaze flickers over my face. “You won’t.”
He pulls me inside and closes the door behind us. He backs me against the living room door, and it feels like I’m swallowing fire when his lips finally touch mine. It’s everything I’ve denied myself from feeling. Our kiss last night felt incredible, but this kiss makes last night’s kiss feel like it was a mere teaser.
Jonah presses his entire body against mine, and it feels like a lifetime of ache is being soothed with each brush of his fingertips against my skin. With each flick of his tongue, each sound that escapes our throats. We end up on the couch, him on top of me, my hands dragging over his back, feeling his muscles tense and roll beneath my fingertips.
It’s like we’re making up for all the years we missed out on this feeling. We kiss like teenagers for ten minutes. Exploring each other, tasting each other, moving against each other.
I eventually have to turn my face away from his, just so I can catch my breath. I feel light headed. He presses his forehead to my cheek and sucks in all the air I’ve just stolen from him.
“Thank you,” he whispers breathlessly. He closes his eyes and brings his mouth to my ear. His breath is warm as it trickles down my neck. “I needed to know I wasn’t crazy. That this feeling hasn’t all been in my head.”
I pull his mouth back to mine. I kiss him gently, and then he drops his head to my neck and sighs. “That day in your pool,” I whisper. “Do you remember?”
Quiet laughter meets my skin. “I’ve been searching for that feeling since the second Chris pulled you away from me.”
I want to say, “Me too,” but it would be a lie. I haven’t searched for that feeling at all. I’ve spent every year of my marriage trying to forget it—attempting to pretend that kind of connection didn’t really exist. Every time I caught myself thinking back on that day, I found things to blame. The heat. The sun. The chlorine in the pool. The alcohol we’d been sneaking from Jonah’s pantry.
Jonah pulls away from me and grabs my hand, easing me onto my feet. He quietly leads me to the bedroom. We’re kissing as he lowers me to the bed, and I love how he takes his time. He doesn’t remove a single piece of my clothing. He just kisses me in every position. Him on top, me on top, both of us on our sides. We make out, and it’s everything I hoped it would feel like.
He leans over me, dragging his lips down my neck. His breath is warm against the base of my throat when he says, “I’m scared.”
Those words send a chill through me. He stops kissing me and presses his cheek to my chest.
I thread my fingers through his hair.
“Scared of what?”
“Your need to protect Clara.” He lifts his face. “My need to be honest with Elijah. We aren’t on the same page, Morgan. I’ve waited too long for this to be a onetime thing, but I’m not sure you want what I want.”
He scoots up, sliding his hand beneath my shirt, pressing his palm against my stomach. I’m st
aring up at the ceiling, and I could swear the ceiling is pulsating to the rhythm of my heartbeat. “I don’t know what I want.” My eyes find his, and I do know what I want. I’m lying. I know exactly what I want. I just don’t know if it’s possible. “She’ll never understand. And what would we tell Elijah?”
“We would tell him the truth. Do you really think it’s better for Clara to think we’re the bad guys in this scenario?”
“You saw how devastated she was because of a kiss. Imagine if she finds out about Elijah—about what Jenny and Chris did—she’ll never be able to forgive that.”
I can see a flash of understanding on Jonah’s face, but he shakes his head. “So . . .” He falls onto his back. “Chris and Jenny get away with an affair. They get away with lying to me about fathering a child. They get away with being eternal idols in Clara’s eyes. And in the meantime, me and you are forced to keep our mouths shut and live separately in misery because of actions we aren’t even responsible for?”
“I realize it’s not fair.” I lift myself up onto my elbow and look at him. I put my hand on his hardened jaw and force him to meet my focused stare. “Chris was a shitty husband. He was a shitty friend to you. But he was a wonderful father.” I run my thumb over his lips, pleading with him through my teary eyes. “If she ever finds out Elijah isn’t yours, it’ll devastate her. Please don’t tell him. All he knows is you, anyway. It’s not the same as if Clara were to find out about Chris. I’ll take their secret to my grave if it means protecting her from that kind of pain.”
Jonah turns his head, pulling away from my hand. The rejection stings. “I’m not like you. I don’t want to lie to my child.”
I fall onto my back. More tears come. I shouldn’t have come over here. It was a bad idea. I’ve lived this long suffering through this terrible longing I’ve kept buried for Jonah. What’s fifty more years?
“We have to work this out. Come to an agreement,” he says. “I want to be with you.”
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