Page 42 of When We Had Forever
His phone number lurks optimistically beneath his signature. I barely look at it before pitching the phone down and pulling back out onto Highway 12.
For the next twenty minutes, my mind grinds in useless circles. Grayson’s polite, apologetic tone baffles me, a glaring mismatch to the habitual drinker who flips off photographers and snubs lingerie models in nightclubs.
Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter whether I’m passing right through Seattle in a matter of hours. If Grayson thinks I’m going to call him, much less sit down for coffee, he has another thing coming.
I recite that like a mantra for the next three hours. By the time Seattle’s outskirts jockey for space beyond the windshield, my resolve has hardened. In the stop-and-go traffic on the 405, I open my phone and swipe left to delete Grayson’s message. Then I empty the trash folder, ensuring I can’t change my mind.
Only later, as I nose the Porsche into the cabin’s gravel driveway, does a heaviness descend between my shoulder blades like an ache.
I ignore it. In the fading light, I focus on the cabin’s familiar brown siding and pine-green trim. In the background, the jagged, toothy mountains of the Wild Sky Wilderness rear up like the serrated fangs of some sleeping beast, their tips frosted with snow. The waning day catches on the glistening spires, splashing them with dusky, bloody crimson.
I pop open the car door. Outside, the crisp scent of pine mingles with the spice of the burbling creek, but even the evening’s briskness can’t clear my mind.
Grayson Drake. I can’t believe he emailed me.
I grab my phone and slam the car door harder than necessary, then wander into the cabin’s overgrown backyard. Beyond the swaying grass, the forest awaits, a tangle of gleaming blue shadows that seems to beckon.
A sense of familiarity enfolds me, as if this place has been waiting. As if it always knew I would someday need it again.
I shake myself. Time enough for that later. On the porch, I find the key beneath a carved wooden grizzly bear, and let myself in without unloading the car.
Inside, I zigzag through the shadowy living room to my old bedroom, where I curl up with the knitted afghan from the foot of the bed.
Within moments, my eyes drift shut. Hours later, I awaken to total darkness. The rush of the creek and the mournful sigh of wind-bent pines fill the night.
I feel for my phone and tap the screen, then jerk back: 11:11 p.m.
Ugh. Of all the minutes between dusk and dawn, it had to be that one.
Swallowing hard, I wait until 11:12 arrives, then open my email inbox. I don’t scroll up or down, but stare at the place where Grayson’s message was. For the first time, I admit that, of everyone I know—or don’t know, as the case may be—he’s the only person who might actually understand what this feels like. Who’s loved someone so deeply that their death broke him to pieces.
But his message is gone. No matter how long my eyes scorch a hole in the screen, the email doesn’t exist anymore.
And now it’s too late to get it back.
BEFORE
During my last four days with Michael, we don’t mention the possibility of me staying again. Yet he often gets a faraway look, as if arguing with himself, and sometimes, I catch such conflict in his eyes that my pulse skitters erratically in response.
Our kisses get deeper. Longer. Laced with desperation. Michael does everything short of tearing my underwear off, and I do everything short of tearing off his. We writhe and sweat and moan together until I nearly climax from the rock of his hips alone, but I stop myself. I want him inside me, that first time. I want everything he has to give, all at once.
It’s torture.
At Michael’s insistence, I put a price hold on a ticket to Athens, which reserves me the option to purchase at any point until departure. My assignment at the mortgage company has left me with enough to cover the cost, but I don’t click Buy. Or Cancel. Because how do you decide which half of your heart to rip out?
On our last morning together, or maybe the first of many, I awaken to find a breakfast tray resting on the crisp white sheets.
Michael stands beside the bed in boxer briefs, a single red rose in hand. Backlit by the foggy morning, he looks like an angel who’s accidentally tumbled to earth.
I sit up, my heart straining against my ribs. Maybe his name suits him, after all. At the very least, he’s come swooping into my life like a miracle, and today, he’ll finally, finally belong to me in all the ways I desire.
Except the longer I look, the more his smile looks wrong. An edge of despair sharpens that normally easy grin, as if he expects to have earth-shattering sex with me and watch me fly away afterward.
Which, of course, he does.
“I made your favorite,” he says. “Eggs Benedict with bacon.”
“Wow,” I croak, my voice gritty. My eyes drop to his perfectly packaged...package. This moment has been a month in the making. “It’s like you’re trying to get laid, or something.”
