by Susannah Nix
“Hey, Andie?” I called out as I wandered out of the guest room.
“In here,” she said from her bedroom.
When I reached the doorway of her room, the familiar scent hit me square in the gut—a mix of her honeysuckle shampoo and the sweet, clean smell of her skin that took me right back to last night when I’d tasted her on my tongue.
“What is it?” She was sitting on the bed with stacks of folded laundry around her.
I held out the letters as I came toward her. “I found these under the floor in the guest room.”
She took them from me and frowned at the handwriting. “That’s my grandmother’s name.” She flipped through them, then slipped the top envelope out of the bundle. Being careful of the old, fragile paper, she slid the letter out and unfolded it.
I watched, curious, as her eyes skimmed over it and the corners of her lips curved. “It’s a love letter.”
“To your grandmother?”
“Listen to this: My dearest Lillian, What can I say after the precious gift you gave me last night? I am shamelessly in your thrall. From this day forward, I exist only to give you pleasure and draw forth more of those little moans and quivers that gave me so much joy.”
“Whoa.” I grinned as I sank down on the corner of the mattress. “That’s kind of racy.”
“I know, right?” She grinned back at me before looking down at the letter again. “Your body is my home, my harbor, my sanctuary, and I intend to lavish every inch of it with the care and attention it deserves when next we are able to come together.”
I blew out a breath. “Wow.”
Andie’s eyes were bright and amused. “I’m both impressed and grossed out.”
“Respect to your grandad. Dude clearly had some serious game.”
“I guess this helps explain how my grandparents stayed together for sixty years. They were high school sweethearts, only sixteen when they started going steady. My grandfather said it was love at first sight. He always used to tell me that the first time he laid eyes on my grandmother he knew she was the girl he wanted to marry. Can you imagine?”
“Not really.” I swallowed a lump in my throat, thinking of the wish I’d made at almost the same age. The night Andie had fallen asleep next to me under the stars, and I’d wished I could marry her one day. And how I’d never felt that way about anyone else. Not once, in all the years since.
She flipped the letter over and kept reading. “I want to be with you, now and always. My heart burns for you. My body aches for you. My soul belongs to you.” Andie laughed as she looked up from the letter. “I never realized my pawpaw had such a flair for melodrama.”
“I think it’s sweet.” I’d never sent anyone a letter like that in my life. There was only one woman who’d ever inspired anything approaching that sort of devotion in me, and she was sitting right next to me, pissed because I hadn’t been able to tell her honestly how I felt.
The closest I’d ever come was the songs I’d written, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever find the courage to play them for anyone.
Andie arched an eyebrow at me. “I thought you were allergic to romance.”
My throat grew tight, and I dropped my eyes to my lap. “Just because it’s not for me doesn’t mean I can’t be happy for other people.”
“Hmm.”
When I glanced up again, Andie was frowning at the letter. “What?”
“Can you read those initials in the signature?” She thrust the letter at me.
I squinted at the old-fashioned writing. The letter had been signed only with a pair of initials. “HB? Yeah, that’s an H. It’s HB.”
“Well, that’s disconcerting.”
“Why?” I handed the letter back to her.
She stared at it again, frowning. “Because my grandfather’s name was Joe Fishbaugh.” Her eyes lifted to mine. “He didn’t write this letter.”
12
Andie
I couldn’t stop reading those damn letters Wyatt had found. The rain had long since stopped and he’d gone back to work outside, but I was still right where he’d left me.
I’d been sitting on the floor of my bedroom for the last two hours poring over every one of the love letters my grandmother’s secret suitor had written her. Something about them had me captivated. Maybe it was the outpouring of emotion and stark longing scrawled across the pages, or the apparently illicit nature of their relationship. Or maybe it was just the mystery of it all.
Who had written these letters to my grandmother while she was supposedly dating the man she would go on to spend the rest of her life with? What had happened to him? What had happened to them?
It was clear from the multiple references to their trysts that it hadn’t been a one-sided infatuation. My unmarried eighteen-year-old grandmother had met up with this mystery man repeatedly to engage in behavior that would have been seriously scandalous at the time. Based on the dates, their affair took place in the year before she married my grandfather—two years after they allegedly met and fell in love. And yet there was no mention of him at all.
All those stories my grandfather told me about their love at first sight had begun to feel like lies. But had he been lying to me or had my grandmother lied to him?
On some level I knew it didn’t matter. They were all long gone. For better or worse, the story of their lives had reached its conclusion before I’d ever laid eyes on these letters. Whatever choices they’d made or twists of fate had intervened to determine their future were the reason I was alive today. The words on these pages didn’t have the power to change anything about the past.
But I couldn’t put them down. The more I read, the more invested I became in this man who’d obviously loved my grandmother. He wasn’t just some fly-by-night lay. I only had his side of their correspondence, but based on his references to her letters and their conversations when they were together, she’d had some pretty serious feelings for him too.
My fingers shook with eagerness as I opened the very last letter in the bundle. I hoped it would explain what had happened between them and why two people so obviously in love hadn’t ended up together. If the answer wasn’t in this letter, I’d probably never know.
My dearest, sweetest, most precious Lillian,
You’ve made your wishes clear, and I will not stand in opposition to your happiness. My soul is shattered by the prospect of a life without you, the only woman I have ever loved, but I know I must give you up.
How can I say goodbye to a joy such as the one we’ve shared? The answer is that I cannot, and will not. Though I bid farewell to you and vow never to burden you with my company in the future, I will carry my devotion to the very end of my days.
The moments we shared will live forever in my heart. The memory of your soft sighs, tender kisses, and eager caresses will sing me to sleep every night that I draw breath. No other woman will ever be able to match you or replace you in my affections. You will always be the first, the best, the only girl for me. Though you may forget me and offer your heart to another, know that you will remain my dearest, truest love.
My life. My world. My Lillian.
* * *
Wretchedly and forever yours,
HB
My chest hitched as I reached the end of the letter. The writing blurred, and I rubbed away the inexplicable tears that had filled my eyes.
I hadn’t learned anything except that my grandmother had abruptly ended the relationship for reasons I’d never find out. After everything I’d read, all the emotions spilled out across these brittle, yellowing pages, I wanted more closure than this.
I wasn’t usually a crier, but I couldn’t seem to hold myself in check. Whoever the man was who’d written these agonized, impassioned words, he’d reached out of the past and touched some kind of nerve. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and how miserable he’d sounded, and how sad it all was. I couldn’t stop hurting for him and my grandmother and the life they never got to have.
What the hell was the
matter with me?
I never cried like this. And where was my allegiance to my grandfather, who I’d known and loved, and who had loved my grandmother for most of his life? I felt like I was losing my mind, bawling over sixty-year-old letters from a total stranger.
It was more than just the letters though. They’d been the catalyst, but now that the floodgates were open, the emotions I’d been tamping down for the last few weeks were bubbling up and erupting all over me. The stress over the house situation, the injustice of it, and my own impotence and inability to solve the problem on my own. My frustration with Wyatt. My unavoidable dependence on him after his rejection of me. The unrequited feelings I was afraid I’d never be able to shake.
Feelings that weren’t so different than the author of these letters had described at the loss of his first and only love.
It was all just too much. Long-overdue sobs tore their way out of my throat. Apparently I was being punished for trying to hold my shit together, because I couldn’t stop crying now that I’d started. Tears streaked down my face unchecked, and my whole body shook with every painful breath I heaved into my lungs.
“Andie?”
I looked up and saw Wyatt standing in the doorway, his expression bewildered and alarmed.
A fresh sob tore out of me at the sight of him. I didn’t want him to see me like this. I didn’t want my weakness on display in front of the man who’d already left a giant crack in my defenses. I shook my head and buried my head against my knees.
I knew I couldn’t make him go away, but I couldn’t stand to face him.
13
Wyatt
I’d never seen Andie cry before. Not once in all the years I’d known her. Not even when she was a little kid.
She’d always been tough as nails. Seemingly immune to pain. Even that time she’d fallen out of the big tree on the farm and cracked her head open, she hadn’t shed a single tear. I’d been scared shitless because there was so much blood, and she’d just sat there making jokes while Josh tried to hold her scalp together with his bare hands.
I had no clue what had made her cry like this, but it scared me even more than when she fell out of that tree. Instinct took over and I propelled myself at her, kneeling on the floor to pull her against my chest. I didn’t know what else to do, so I held her, rocking her and stroking her hair as her body shook in my arms.
Eventually her heaving breaths eased, and her sobs quieted down to sniffles. She pushed out of my arms and turned her face away. “That was embarrassing,” she muttered as she wiped away her tears.
“What happened?” My throat was so tight I sounded like the one who’d been sobbing instead of Andie.
“Nothing.” She pulled her legs up underneath her. “Nothing at all.”
Worry made me impatient, causing my words to come out sharper than I intended. “Something happened to make you cry.”
She shook her head. “It’s stupid. I was just reading those letters.”
“Was there something upsetting in them?”
I didn’t understand how a bunch of old love letters could have made her this upset. So what if her grandmother had once had a boyfriend on the side? Did it matter anymore?
“No, not really.” She sniffled and rubbed her eyes. “Just more of the same stuff I read out loud to you.”
“Andie.” I reached for her face and turned it toward me.
Her eyelashes lowered as she ducked her head. “Don’t look at me. I’m all gross and snotty.”
“You always look beautiful.” The words slipped out of me before I could think about what I was saying.
Surprise flashed across her expression as she lifted her eyes to mine.
I hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but now that I had, I didn’t want to take it back. How could I? She was the most beautiful person I’d ever known. My thumb stroked over her cheek, wiping away some of the wetness. “It’s gonna take a lot more than bodily fluids to gross me out.”
Her lips curved as she let out a soft huff of amusement.
I was so relieved to see her smiling that I bent my head and kissed away a tear inching its way toward her jaw. She stiffened, sucking in a sharp breath as my lips touched her cheek, but she didn’t pull away.
Neither did I. Instead, I let my lips linger there for a moment before I found another tear to kiss away below her eye. Her eyelashes fluttered against my lips, and I moved higher, kissing her forehead before gazing into her eyes.
“Tell me why you were crying.”
She swallowed and looked away. I let her go, dropping my hand from her face as she swiveled it away from me.
“It was the last letter.” She picked up a page lying on the floor and passed it to me.
I skimmed it, then went back and read it again more carefully. After I’d finished my second read, my gut clenching at all the parts that hit way too close to home for me, I turned to her with a frown.
“Why did this make you cry?”
It was desperately sad, there was no denying that, but it shouldn’t have been enough to get this kind of reaction out of Andie. She hadn’t even cried at Toy Story 3, for Christ’s sake.
“Because they obviously loved each other and they didn’t end up together. It’s such a fucking waste.” She waved her hand at the stack of letters on the floor. “There’s like twenty letters here describing in vivid detail exactly how devoted they were to each other, and it all came to nothing. It’s not fair.”
She blinked like she might start crying again, and I wrapped my arm around her shoulders, pulling her against my chest.
“I have a feeling this is about more than just that letter.”
“I guess.” Her fingers curled into the front of my shirt, which was soaked with her tears. “It’s everything else too. The stuff with the house and…”
“And?” I prompted quietly when she didn’t finish.
“And you, I guess.” Her voice sounded heartbreakingly small for someone I’d always considered impossibly strong.
Hating myself for hurting her, I squeezed her shoulder and pressed my face into her honeysuckle-scented hair. Neither of us moved or spoke. We just sat there like that, leaning against each other. Holding on to each other.
I got the sense she was waiting for me to say something. Or do something.
So I did.
“I lied before,” I admitted.
I felt her go rigid in my arms. “About what?”
“About having a date last night.” I winced as shame twisted inside me. “After I left here I went to Tanner’s and drank most of a bottle of whiskey.”
She lifted her head to look at me. “Why did you lie?”
I swallowed, quailing under the weight of her regard. But now that I’d started this I felt obliged to finish it. Tanner was right. I owed Andie the truth. “Because I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
My tongue shot out to lick my lips, tasting salt from her tears. It gave me the push I needed to force the words out. “Of the way I feel about you, and what’ll happen if I let myself act on it.”
“What will happen?” Her eyes bored into mine, dark and challenging.
“Your brother will never forgive me.”
The way Andie’s lips pressed together, I could tell she was pissed. But even worse than that: she was disappointed in me.
I leaned back against the bed and raked a hand through my hair. “Do you have any idea how fucking hard it’s been? How much willpower it’s taken to keep my hands off you, when all I want to do is touch you?”
“Yes.”
With that one word, spoken on a shaky exhalation, my world tilted off its axis.
It shocked me into seeing the truth I’d blinded myself to, even though it had been right in front of my face all this time. I hadn’t let myself acknowledge it, because if I ever did, there’d be no turning back.
Andie wanted me as much as I wanted her.
In case the point needed further confirmation, she swung her leg over my thigh
s and climbed into my lap.
My vision whited out as her soft curves settled against my growing hard-on. “Andie,” I bit out in a strained voice, screwing my eyes shut.
“What?”
I’d meant to warn her to knock it off, but I couldn’t make myself say the words. I didn’t want her to knock it off. I wanted her to do it some more.
Her fingers ghosted over my face, exploring the stubble on my jaw and sending tingles shooting down my spine. The whisper of her breath warmed my lips, and I knew her mouth was dangerously close to mine.
I was afraid to open my eyes and look at her. Every nerve ending in my body was standing at attention, every muscle tensed in a state of hypervigilance. My hands ached to touch her, to reach up and explore the curves balanced in my lap, but I balled them into fists, refusing to let them have their way.
“Do you want me?” she asked, and a shudder rippled through me.
When I didn’t answer fast enough, she squirmed in my lap, driving me to hiss out a tortured “Yesss.”
“Then say it.” Her voice was pitched so low I felt it all the way down in my balls. “Say you want me.”
I opened my eyes finally and looked into her dark, steady gaze. Her face was flushed and her luscious lips parted. Begging to be kissed.
Who was I to disappoint her?
I reached up and touched her face, smiling at the way it made her lashes flutter. A surge of warmth swept through me, softer and sweeter than the sharp heat rising in my blood.
“I want you,” I told her, letting the words set me free. “I’ve always wanted you.”
14
Andie
A supernova of relief tore through my chest when Wyatt said the words I’d been longing to hear.
I want you. I’ve always wanted you.
The hunger in his eyes should have been enough to tell me the truth, but I’d needed to actually hear him say the words with his whole chest.