My heart skips a beat when he says that.
Something happened to him…
You do something to me…
He said that too, and even then, my heart squeezed for him. Squeezed for that look of confusion I saw on his face.
He’s not confused now, just vulnerable and I breathe out, “What happened?”
He brings his hand to his chest, right where his heart is. I imagine him feeling his own heartbeats under his fingers.
I loved doing that. I loved feeling the beats of his heart whenever I slept with my head on his chest. It was soothing to me.
I hope it’s soothing to him too.
He needs that, in this moment.
And since I’m standing all the way over here, I want his heart to give him peace until the time comes for me to close the distance and do it myself.
“When I saw you, Violet, it felt like someone stabbed me in the chest,” he rasps.
My eyes go wide. “What?”
He chuckles; it’s brittle and thin. “Or at least, it felt like it. I saw you up on the roof, with your thick, gorgeous hair and your arms open wide, something got lodged inside my chest, just under my heart and for the longest time, it felt like a knife of some sort. Something that made me… different. It wasn’t that, though.”
“W-what was it?”
“My soul,” he whispers. “It was my soul waking up. The thing that keeps a man alive, came alive in me when I saw you. You woke up my soul, Violet.”
“I did?”
He nods. “Yeah. I’d watch you after that. I couldn’t help myself and I was angry about that, you know. I was angry about watching a girl half my age. I was angry that something was happening to me. I planted a fucking rose garden – something I hadn’t done in years – just to watch that girl. Just to have an excuse to look at her at night. God, I thought I was losing my mind.
“Suddenly, I started to feel things. I started to want things for myself. I started to crave and I was so used to not doing any of those things, I was so used to not wanting anything for myself that I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t know how to handle you. So I kept away from you. I kept away from you for so many reasons until I didn’t. Until the night of your eighteenth birthday.
“And then, everything happened and months later, you found me at my lowest. Jesus Christ, I wanted you to go away. You were so young. My son liked you. You made me feel things.”
He scrubs a hand over his face again. “And I wanted you to leave me alone so badly. So fucking badly but you never listened. You never left. You never went anywhere. Not only that, you saved me. You went and goddamn saved me and finally, I realized something.”
At this, he gives me a look that I’ve never seen from him. He gives me a look of pure and utter vulnerability. A look that tells me that he’s undone.
And it becomes so hard to stand here.
So I give in and take a step toward him. “What did you realize?”
“You told me that your sunglasses and your cap are crutches, yeah? You use them to hide from the world. I use crutches too, Violet.”
My heart is slamming in my chest now. Slamming and slamming. This was so not what I expected him to say. Not at all.
“You do?”
“Yeah. I hide behind taking care of my son and a boring, dead-end job because it’s easier. It’s easier to provide for him because I should be doing that anyway, and to work a job that I hate than to face the truth.”
“What’s the truth?”
“The truth is that I’ve never really lived. I’ve gone through the motions. I’ve survived, yes. But I’ve never really been alive. I’ve never really had a dream of my own. I never had the luxury to dream a dream. Maybe if my life was different and I lived in a world that was less lonely and selfish, I would’ve learned. I would’ve learned to live, to dream, to want. But I never lived in that world, Violet and I don’t know how to do any of those things. I don’t know if I can. So I used crutches. I hid behind things just because it was easier than to face reality. To face the fact that I’m halfway done with my life and I know nothing about dreams and wants and wishes. But I’m going to try.”
So far, his expression has been lost. Both like a little boy who forgot the dream he had last night and an old man at the end of his life who never got to fulfill any of the dreams he saw.
Because he was living for everyone else and neglected to live for himself.
But his expression has changed now. Somewhere at the end of it, it became fierce and determined.
His nostrils flare and he fists his hands at his sides, as if strength has finally returned in his body.
“I’m going to try. I’m going to learn, Violet.”
“Learn what?”
“Poetry.”
“Poetry?”
He nods; it’s a jerk of a movement. “I can learn to write poetry. How hard can it be? It’s a drunk man writing about his feelings, right? I read a poem once, Anesthesia by this guy. Abrams or something?”
“Thomas Abrams?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
As choked up as I am right now, I get an urge to smile but I suppress it; Thomas Abrams is super famous for his poetry and stuff. “He’s a pretty big deal actually.”
“Who cares? If he can do it, I can do it too.” Before I can say anything else, he goes on. “I can paint your nails too. I’ve done it once, I can do it again. I can hold your hand and walk down the beach with you. Even though my hands are rough and scratched up and I fucking hate the beach – too many people. But I can do all of that. I can learn to do all of that and more, Violet.”
“You wanna learn all of that?”
At last, he takes those final steps and stands right where he can touch me. He reaches out and cups my cheek and I don’t have the strength to push him away or be this mad but calm girl.
I don’t have the strength not to fist his shirt and look up at him as he wipes my tears, which I didn’t know that I was shedding.
“Yes. For you. I’ll learn all of that. I’ll learn to be soft. I’ll learn to be gentle and tender. I’ll learn to dream when I’ve got my eyes closed. Because I don’t think I can live in my world anymore. I don’t like my world, Violet. I want to live in a different world.”
“A different world?”
I realize that I’m parroting his words but I don’t know what else to do when he’s looking at me with such emotions and intensity.
He’s stealing all my thoughts and words looking like he just stepped out of a dream.
My dream.
“Yeah. A world where colors are bright and gorgeous. Where you dance in the moonlight. Where you have a vegetable garden right next to a rose garden. A world where the air smells like strawberries and candies. A world where an eighteen-year-old girl sneaks into the backyard of a man she wants, a man she’s been watching, a man who’s been watching her as well, and steals his roses. A world where she steps on his shoes because she’s so tiny that she can’t get to his mouth and kisses him. A world where she follows him just because she thinks she’s wronged him. A world where she saves him from himself. I want to live in your world, Violet. A world of moon and magic, if you’ll let me.”
God, he wants to live in my world.
The world I created because I didn’t want to live in the world I was given. And he wants to live there, in my imaginary world.
He wants to live there with me.
Oh God, my heart is so full and I need him to stop talking so I can kiss him right now.
“Graham, I –"
“I fucked up, okay?” He cuts me off, instead. “I know that. And I probably succeeded too. You probably hate me.” His fingers flex and jerk on my cheek at the thought. “But you don’t have to love me, all right. It’s okay if you don’t.”
“But I –"
He cuts me off again, flicking his eyes back and forth between mine. “If you cou
ld put all your dreams in the palm of my hand like you did with your journals, if you could be that brave, then I could be too. I could be brave for you. Because you inspire me to be brave, baby.”
More tears fall down my cheeks and saturate the pad of his thumbs. “I inspire you to be brave?”
He nods. “Yeah. You do. You inspire me to live, Violet. You inspire me to live in a world where a brave girl saves a dangerous, old beast and shows him to be brave like her.”
A broken laugh escapes me.
But he doesn’t smile, no. He doesn’t break his focus or his intensity. He keeps looking at me, wanting me to understand.
“So you don’t have to love me, Violet,” he continues with a low tone. “Because I love you enough for the both of us. And I’m gonna learn to show that, all right? I promise you that. I’m going to learn to show my love to you. It might not happen overnight, but I’ll keep at it. All I want is for you to trust me. Just trust me.”
I dig my knuckles into his hard stomach and I can hear his heartbeats there, deep in his gut, banging against my fists.
Feeling those beats on my hands, I whisper, “I didn’t before. I didn’t trust you.”
Pain slashes through his features. “I know. But I’d never… I’d never think that –”
“I know.” I nod. “I know. I guess I always knew. I always knew that I could trust you. I think it was… my doomsday brain. It wouldn’t let me tell you. It kept saying that I’m not good enough and… yeah.”
He presses his hands on my cheeks. “You’re magnificent, Violet, you got that? You’re fucking perfect.”
More tears well up and river down. “I’m not fine, Graham. Everything is not fine. I have this thing inside of me and I’m so scared. I know I’m brave; I know that. But it scares me that I have to live with it for the rest of my life and –”
He puts his forehead over mine. “Hey, hey, look at me. Look at me. We’ll do this. We’ll do this together, okay? We’ll take it one day at a time. One step at a time. I’ve got you. I asked around, all right? There’s a bunch of doctors in Denver we can go to. I bought books and stuff. I’m –”
“Is that why you were in Denver?”
He studies me a beat and then nods.
“Is that why it took you so long to come? And you sent Brian, instead.”
“I wanted to make sure I knew everything. I wanted you to trust me.”
I laugh, then.
It’s not a loud laugh or anything. In fact, it’s laced with tears. But somehow, it’s the purest, most joyful laughter I’ve ever produced.
It’s acceptance.
It’s what I felt the day I accepted that I loved him since the beginning.
This is what I’m feeling right now. Accepted and loved.
I laugh and I cry and my head drops down to his chest.
God, I love him. He’s an idiot but I love him.
He buries his hand in my hair and presses my forehead into his chest even more. I take a second to rub my nose in his shirt, smell his thick, outdoorsy smell. It reminds me of the cabin so much – our rose garden, the bed, the woods surrounding our home.
I have to pull myself away and tell him. I’m getting so impatient now. I need him to take me away.
“I’ve been so mad at you, you know. You hurt me in the worst possible way. You made me cry and everyone kept saying that you wouldn’t come. That you didn’t care.”
“Baby, I –"
I put a finger on his mouth. “But I knew. I knew you’d come. Do you know how I knew?”
He swallows another lump of emotion and breathes against that finger of mine, shaking his head once.
“You kissed me,” I whisper. “That day. When you sent me away. You stepped up to me and you wiped my tears off and you kissed me on the forehead, and you said what you did on my eighteenth birthday. You said, go home. Even though you wanted to kiss me that night, you kept pushing me away. You kept denying yourself. You kept doing the right thing. And I knew. I knew you were doing the right thing on my nineteenth birthday too. You just needed to realize that what you thought was the right thing wasn’t really the right thing. And I knew you’d realize it. I knew that because I trusted you. I did and I do. I trust you, Graham.”
A breath rushes out of his mouth and my finger absorbs it. It travels down my veins and spreads across my body. That breath of relief.
I take off my hand and shake my head at him. “And you’re so stupid if you think that you can make me hate you.”
I see the full impact of my words register on his body bit by bit.
At first, he frowns but when he realizes what I’ve said, his eyes sweep across my face to confirm it. His lips part and the biggest impact is how he tightens his hold on me. How his fingers in my hair spasm and jerk before he digs the pads into my scalp.
Finally, he says in a rough but relieved voice, “Thank fuck you’re smarter than me.”
“Duh.”
His lips stretch into a lopsided smile that I absolutely adore, and I step up on his feet. “I wanna go home. I don’t like it here.”
He shifts a hand down my spine and splays it on my lower back, pressing our bodies together. “Home. Yeah. It didn’t feel like home before.”
I grab the collar of his shirt and tell him sternly, “It’s our home now.”
His eyes flare with emotions. “It is.”
“Good.” Then, “And I think we need new floors.”
His chest reverberates with a chuckle. “We do?”
“Yes. We also need a bigger rose garden because I have ideas.”
“You have ideas.”
I nod slowly, biting my lip and peeking at him through my eyelashes. “Yes.”
A current passes between us, or rather we absorb each other’s desire since there’s hardly any space left between us for anything to pass.
I wind my arms around his neck and he puts his hands under my ass to lift me up. I hang onto him like a spider monkey.
When I’m all adjusted, he grabs the back of my neck and demands, “Tell me about them.”
I rub my fingers in his thick beard and kiss his cheek softly. “Only if you kiss me right now.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh. And I don’t want it here.”
“Where do you want it?”
God, his sexy voice always gets me. Always.
It makes me wild. The thing I become when I’m with him.
“In your old backyard where everything started.”
He tightens his hold on my neck as his eyes narrow. “You know there are other people living there now, right?”
“Yup. There’s this lady with a bunch of cats. And I think her husband keeps staring at me.”
I don’t know, actually. I caught him staring once but I don’t know if he keeps doing that. I just said it because I want my beast now.
I want him to come out in all his possessive glory.
“Does he now?”
His dangerous voice sends a dark thrill down my spine. “Yeah. So you should just claim me, you know. Show him that you’re my boyfriend.”
“I’m your boyfriend.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Yes. You are. That’s what the kids my age are calling it these days.”
Amusement flickers over his features as he begins to move. “Yeah, I wouldn’t know now, would I?”
Laughing, I kiss him while he walks us to the very spot where everything started. There’s no rose garden there; it’s covered up by a patch of grass and the loungers and things are different.
Everything is different, yet it’s still the same.
I still feel the same way about him. I still have the same urgency in me to kiss him. But before he can close his mouth on me, I whisper against his lips, “Graham?”
“Yeah?”
“I hate the beach too.”
“You do?”
“Uh-huh. Too many people.”
“Yeah, too many
people.”
“And I don’t think I like poetry all that much.”
“You don’t, huh?”
“Nope. I think I like it better when you talk dirty to me.”
A muscle jumps in his cheek and I know it’s lust. “I’ll keep that in mind, Jailbait.”
“You do that, Strawberry Man.”
He comes closer to me but I stop him once again. “Oh, one more thing.”
“What?”
“I love you.”
He puffs out a breath over my lips, his eyes widening a fraction as if he still can’t believe it. Still can’t believe I love a man like him.
“I love you too, baby,” he whispers.
And then, he’s kissing me.
On the same spot.
In the same backyard with probably the same people who’re sleeping right now around the neighborhood.
Or maybe not.
Maybe they’re not sleeping.
Because I think the new owners just turned on their lights. And another one came on in my own house.
Whoops.
I think I woke up everyone with my kiss again.
It’s okay.
Because in his arms, I’m wildness and beauty. And in mine, he’s my beast.
It’s okay because I’m kissing the man of my dreams and he’s kissing me back.
Someone is watching me.
It’s a girl.
I didn’t notice her before. I was staring at my phone, trying to look at the list of things I need from the grocery store before I can go home.
Man, I so want to go home but there’s still a ton of stuff left to buy. And I don’t plan on getting out in the world for the next couple of weeks, so it has to be now.
Plus, it’s a big day tomorrow.
Like, really big. Phone will be ringing off the hook.
First, I’ll get calls from all my girls – The Heartstone Sisters – Renn, Penny and Willow, who just had the cutest baby girl ever, Fallon. Ah, I can’t wait to babble with that little cutie on FaceTime.
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