Austen Box Set

by Hart, Staci

  Every movement was long and slow, deliberate. Her head turned to the side, lips parted, body rocking against mine. My arms, my back, my legs trembled as I moved slowly, deliberately, my pulse racing faster with every flex, and a soft sound passed her lips. I pressed harder, and she gasped. Harder still and my name, a whisper, slipped into the air. And then, just before I lost my composure, her back arched, her breath gone, lost from between her parted lips, the squeeze and pulse of her body around me taking me with her. And I let go too, the past, my pain, my heart and soul. I let it go and gave it to her.

  Our bodies slowed to a gentle wave, my heart thundering as I buried my face in the curve of her neck, her heartbeat fluttering under her skin against my lips as her arms wrapped around me, cradling me.

  I thought I'd never find freedom again. I thought I'd never know home, never know love. But in that moment, in her arms, against all odds, I found it all.

  Only

  For time cannot stop,

  But moments,

  Seconds,

  A fleeting smile,

  A kiss in the sunlight,

  Can live forever.

  - M. White

  Elliot

  The sun shone crisp in a cloudless sky, warming us in the cool in-between that spring so often brought. Wade stepped forward onto the mounded grass and placed a bouquet of flowers on Rick's grave, then another on his mother's. When he came back to me, he reached for my hand, and we stood silently, his final goodbye, for a while at least.

  Almost two months had passed, bittersweet with grief over our losses and joy that Wade and I had found our way back to each other. Grueling and time consuming was the process of finalizing the details of the estate, paying off lingering debts and medical bills, setting up Sophie and Sadie to be able to manage the house with him so far away. But I'd been there through it all, and over the weeks, the hard shell of a man who'd come back after so long had cracked and fallen away, and I found Wade, my Wade, underneath it all.

  I'd also submitted my work to a string of agents, a nerve-wracking and slow process. But I felt good and right, as if I were stretching my dusty wings for the first time in years and years. I found my light, my spark, and Wade had found his. We'd held each other's all that time.

  I'd moved into the house with Wade and Sophie once Charlie's parents came to town and the new nanny was hired and settled in, and though I still went by every day to see them, they seemed to be just fine without me after all. Mary's absence was the likely culprit of their adaptability — she would have only made it harder on everyone, children included, strictly for the sake of doing it.

  I hadn't seen or spoken to her since that night. I didn't know that I ever would again.

  She'd disappeared, abandoning Charlie and the kids, and my father and Beth had disappeared right along with her. It should have made me sad, made me regret my part in the falling out, but I didn't. That they blamed me for their circumstances only made it easier to walk away.

  I'd been freed from chains I hadn't known I'd been wearing.

  The grass was still damp under our feet from the morning dew — Wade's flight would be leaving soon. My heart skipped a painful beat at the thought of being separated from him, but I reminded myself it was only temporary. I'd follow him in a few weeks, and then forever after. Warmth blossomed in my chest at the thought.

  When he left all those years ago, I'd been afraid to leave home, leave everything I knew. But what I'd learned since was that he was everything that home meant to me. Without him, I'd been lost, wandering through my life without moving an inch, searching for something to make me whole.

  Now that I had him, I could do anything. I was unstoppable.

  He squeezed my hand and began to walk away, and I followed, neither of us speaking until we'd left the cemetery.

  "I don't want to leave you," he said once we were in the cab headed for the airport and I was tucked into his side, my head on his shoulder.

  "I don't want you to go, but I'll be right behind you."

  He sighed. "Two weeks is too long."

  I chuckled. "Seven years is too long. Two weeks is a heartbeat."

  "I've spent every day for the last two months trying to memorize your face, trying to get my fill, but I can't. No amount of time will ever be enough with you to satisfy my heart."

  I lifted my hand, touching his face as I kissed him. "Well, do you think forever would be long enough?"

  He smiled down at me. "Guess we'll see."

  My heart fluttered, and I rested my head on his shoulder again. "Do you think Lou is getting settled in?"

  "Ben says everything's great. I just can't believe they ran off like that and got married without telling anyone."

  "Oh, I dunno. It doesn't sound so crazy to me. And anyway, I'll be glad to have someone familiar in Germany."

  "So I'm already not enough for you? I see how it is," he joked.

  "You're a given. You're more familiar to me than my own reflection."

  He kissed the top of my head. "I love you, you know."

  "Almost as much as I love you."

  He sighed again. "Two weeks is too long."

  I laughed and wrapped my arms around his chest as we rode the final minutes in the cab in silence, the ticking of the infernal clock never stopping. And too soon, we were standing at the passenger drop at LaGuardia, his duffle bag at his combat boots, cap on his head, shielding his eyes from me.

  "For so long I didn't want to come back, and now I don't want to leave."

  "Yet let me not be too hasty,

  Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter'd, become really blended

  into one;

  Then if we die we die together, (yes, we'll remain one,)

  If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens."

  He smiled, a crooked thing, surprised and teasing and full of love. "Quoting a Whitman poem about death is supposed to make me feel better?"

  "It's easier than saying goodbye, isn't it?"

  He pulled me close, still smiling. "It's only two weeks."

  "Two weeks is too long," I echoed, and he kissed me sweetly before whispering in my ear.

  "Two weeks, and then forever."

  And at that, I cupped his cheeks, kissing him once more as the sunlight danced across his grandmother's engagement ring resting on my finger, the same finger that was closest to my heart.

  Epilogue

  Elliot

  He laid his hands gently on my jaw, my heart singing his name and tears stinging my eyes, and he kissed me, sealing the vow of our forever.

  The people who loved us cheered and clapped from behind us, but I barely heard a thing. There was nothing outside of his hands, his lips, in that moment when our lives began. And when he pulled away, his hands still warm on my face and the ghost of his kiss still on my lips, he smiled at me with more joy than I knew one man could possess.

  He took my hand, and we walked up the aisle, past Sadie and Sophie, crying and smiling from the front row, past Ben and Lou with her hand on her round belly, Charlie and the kids, as confetti rained down, spinning to the ground like dervishes. Hanging candles in jars and paper flowers spun above us in the light breeze, whirling the tiny scraps of paper around us.

  The Black Forest was magical, a fairy tale forest of trees stretching up to the heavens, lush and green and older than time. The big trees were so tall, so dense we could barely see the sky, the leaves and moss so green they almost glowed. When Wade and I had come here to view the venue, we'd both known it was the perfect place to start our fairy tale.

  A year of planning after years of loneliness had brought us to that moment. We'd flown back for Sadie's graduation and brought her and Sophie back with us, and every day since then had been busy with the whirl of preparations, time mostly spent constructing decorations for today, this day.

  All the paper cuts were worth it.

  I'd typed up all of our letters on an old typewriter, and though it wasn't the first time I'd read them all, eve
ry one hurt in its own way, sated only by the peace of forgiveness. But I remembered writing every line, and I felt every line of his.

  We'd photocopied the originals and used them to make a myriad of decorations, mostly paper flowers, some big, some small, some in bouquets, some to make garlands of, which hung all over. Some were made into strips and used as streamers. A thousand more copies were shredded into confetti, confetti that floated around us like snow.

  A thousand letters that brought us to that moment.

  My heart skipped in my ribs as we walked together to the back of the venue with my hand in the crook of his elbow, the long chiffon spilling down from the empire waist of my dress, floating around me like mist. And as we reached a curtain made of tulle strips strung with flowers, he pulled me through it and stopped.

  He was so beautiful, his uniform crisp and medals shining as he smiled down at me.

  "Mrs. Winters," he started as he brushed a scrap of confetti from my nose.

  "Yes, Mr. Winters?" I asked with a smile.

  "I have dreamed of this day for eight years." His fingers trailed across the lace capping my shoulder in a triangle.

  "And was it all you imagined?"

  At that, he smiled and tipped my chin with a single finger. "More. And now there is nothing left in the world I could possibly want."

  His kiss spoke the truth of his words, stealing my breath, stopping my heart, starting my life.

  Because now, we would live.

  Part III

  Living Out Loud

  Copyright © 2018 Staci Hart

  All rights reserved.

  stacihartnovels.com

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover by Quirky Bird

  Photography by Perrywinkle Photography

  Editor: Jovana Shirley, Unforeseen Editing

  Proofreading: Love N Books

  Playlist: http://spoti.fi/2EZNZU4

  To those who have survived the storm:

  Here’s to finding sunshine

  after the rain

  Happiness, not in another place but this place…

  not for another hour, but this hour.

  -Walt Whitman

  Arrival

  Annie

  The first thing I recognized was the Chrysler Building.

  I think I noticed it because of how it shone, the sunlight setting it ablaze like a silver beacon in the midst of a maze of steel and glass. There was nothing else I could compare it to, certainly not anything I’d seen in Texas, and the truth was that I hadn’t been anywhere else.

  I reached for my little instant camera, adjusting the settings before aiming it at the city and clicking the button. It spat out the familiar white-framed photo, black in the center where the memory would appear.

  Meg’s mouth hung open, her eager ten-year-old eyes as big and wide as ping-pong balls as they bounced across the horizon.

  “Whoa,” she breathed. “It’s so…big. It takes up the whole sky.”

  My face was close enough to the window to feel my breath against my cheek when it rebounded off the glass, my own eyes as big as Meg’s as they did their best to drink in everything I saw like I’d been thirsty my whole life.

  “How many square miles is it?” Meg asked.

  “Let me look.”

  I reached for my phone, glancing at Mama. She was less impressed than Meg and me, the normally invisible lines between her brows and the corners of her mouth pronounced. For her, it was a homecoming, one that was as unwanted and unwelcome as it was absolutely necessary.

  My older sister, Elle’s, expression was unreadable, her hands on the steering wheel and gaze in front of her as she drove us toward the Lincoln Tunnel. The only betrayal of her sadness was reflected in the rearview mirror, buried in the depths of her eyes.

  I pulled up Wikipedia and read through the city’s statistics. “Manhattan itself is twenty-two square miles, and one-point-six million people live there.”

  “Whoa,” she said again, her breath fogging up the window. “How big is San Antonio?”

  A quick search and a brain-crushing second later, I said, “Four hundred sixty square miles and one-point-four million people.”

  “No way.” Her eyes were still on the horizon. “There aren’t any trees.”

  “Probably only in Central Park.”

  She frowned. “Can I climb them?”

  I offered a smile, but it was sad. “I don’t know, kiddo. We’ll find out.”

  Meg sat back in her seat and unfurled her map of Manhattan, marked with a red marker at places of her interest and blocking of sections of the city for a purpose unknown to me. She dug her old calculator out of her backpack and, lost in thought, began punching out numbers and jotting down notes in the corner of her map over the Bronx.

  There wasn’t much to see in Boerne, my little hometown just outside of San Antonio in the hot Texas Hill Country. It was beautiful in the way wild country was—with scrubby mesquite trees, rolling grasses the color of a sun-faded paper bag, and forests of oak with pine-lined spring rivers. The area boasted the only hills to speak of in the entire state. Those hills were rocky and craggy, the definition of untamed land, making it easy to think back a hundred years, two hundred years, and imagine what it was like to live on the frontier.

  But when you lived your whole life in a place like that—one untouched by time, one that never changed, even when you did, even when you lost the things you held most dear—it sometimes didn’t feel like enough. You could feel your insignificance in that sort of place.

  I was reminded of the time my family drove down to Galveston to go to the beach. I’d stood at the shore and dipped my hands in the gritty, silty sand, letting it slip through my fingers as I considered how small I was. I realized my life was just a single heartbeat in the life of the universe.

  The world was infinite, and I was not.

  You see, my heart was full of holes.

  The one I’d been born with destined me to a life indoors with my family, my books, and my music to keep me happy. It stopped me from running barefoot through the fields behind our house, like Meg. It prevented me from tubing down the river with the kids my age. It restricted me to a life of physical inactivity, so I put everything I could into occupying my heart and soul and mind instead.

  The hole in my heart where my father used to be wasn’t so easy to accept. People kept telling me I would survive his death just as I survived my physical condition—with patience and acceptance and that ever-marching time. Part of me believed them.

  The rest of me knew better.

  My only comfort was a vow I’d made from a pew in the tiny church somewhere far behind me; I would honor my father’s life by living mine.

  I thought I’d been doing just that. I’d read thousands of books. I’d spent even more time with my fingers on ivory piano keys. I’d visited every spot on the globe through Meg's voracious explorations with thanks to National Geographic and the internet. But as we drove into New York City, I realized I hadn’t seen or done anything at all.

  That would all change soon enough. I was eager and ardent, armed with a list of firsts to check off, diligently jotted in the notebook in my back pocket where it had been since Daddy died.

  Through the tunnel we went, under the Hudson, into the city. Meg and I were the only ones who spoke; the car had otherwise gone silent since the city came into view. She busied me with questions I could only answer with the help of the internet.

  Whe
n was the Lincoln Tunnel built? 1934. How did they build it? With enough difficulty that the lead engineer died of a heart attack at forty-one. What kind of metal is on top of the Chrysler Building? Non-rusting stainless steel.

  And on and on.

  Unlike the silent front seats, I was happy to fill the air with something, anything to separate us from the truth of our feelings, which followed us like a balloon nearly out of helium, hovering too close to the ground to be joyful.

  It took us an hour to get to the Upper East Side where my uncle lived, passing so many people, so many streets, so many buildings that the magnitude of the city set my mind spinning. Through Central Park we went, looping around Madison to Fifth Avenue, the park on one side and beautiful old buildings on the other.

  My heart skipped and skittered as Elle pulled to a stop in front of the building where we’d live now that we had no home.

  A doorman in a forest-green suit that matched the building’s awning smiled amiably, moving to open Elle’s door and mine at the same time.

  “Hello, ladies. Might you be the Daschles?”

  “Yes,” I said with a smile as I took his offered hand and stepped onto the curb.

  “Oh, good. Mrs. Jennings has been anxiously awaiting you. I think she’s called down a dozen times.”

  I laughed.

  “This hour.” He winked and snapped to attention, following Elle around the car to the trunk. “Name’s George,” he said, touching the bill of his hat with two fingers. “Oh, let me get that, Miss Daschle.”

  “Thank you.” Elle stepped back as he unfurled Mama’s wheelchair.

  Meg slid out of the seat and into my side, her lips together and hands twined, her eagerness gone so completely, it was as if it had never existed.