Page 120 of Love What's Left
Memory floods through me. “You took me to a concert. You sang with me in the audience and got us backstage passes. I was so happy that night.”
He’d wrapped his arms around me from behind and belted out every lyric along with me.
“You remember,” he says.
“Yes.” I indicate the volume control. “Can we turn it up?”
He does, and I know the words to song after song. When an upbeat tune comes on next, I know that one too, though I’m not sure if it came after the concert or before. I was washing an apple in the kitchen sink and wiggling my butt as the music played over the speaker. Gabriel came up behind me and put his hands on my hips, swaying us both to the beat. I dropped the apple, turned, and he pulled me into his arms with a teasing growl. We danced.
It was over-the-top and silly, with wild spins, sloppy lifts, overt butt squeezing, and a dip that took me nearly to the floor. I never worried for a single heartbeat that he’d drop me. We danced, and I laughed and he sang, and when the song ended, we kissed each other breathless at seven a.m. in front of the kitchen sink with golden sunlight pouring through the windows.
Gabriel keeps his eyes on the road, but he’s no longer smiling or singing along. Instead, he looks tortured by memories. When I lost me, he lost me too.
As he turns off the main road, I wipe my face surreptitiously with my T-shirt. Then he guides the car down a winding gravel drive flanked by tall pines and past a series of cabins until we reach our destination. The log home is lit up with a warm glow, no doubt Zack and Zoe’s doing. In the near distance, a gleaming full moon turns the lake to glittering silver and the gritty sand beach to ripples of black and gray.
“We’re probably going to hear from the cops tomorrow. They’ll be mad that we didn’t stick around to answer more of their questions,” I say.
“They owe you a little leeway. They shouldn’t need us right now, but if they do, they know how phones work. One of the guys will take our luggage into the cabin. Do you feel up to a little walk?”
“I’d love it.”
He exits the vehicle and walks around the hood. When he opens my car door, the summer breeze wafts over me, bringing the scent of pine.
“We only flew a couple hours, but it feels like we’re in a whole new world. I love the city, but this is a little piece of heaven.” I walk beside him down the familiar moonlit gravel path toward the private beach.
“My mother is from Blackwater, like you. Do you remember that?” he asks.
“I knew Bronwyn had family there.” Somehow, I doubt she grew up “like me.”
“In a roundabout way, it’s how you and I found each other. If Dad hadn’t met Mom, and she hadn’t adopted Henry and me, we wouldn’t have spent time there. You and I wouldn’t have met through my sister,” he says.
Wind blows my hair across my face and into my mouth. I drag the strands away. “I never liked the idea of ‘If you step on a butterfly, you could accidentally change your whole future’ thing. Maybe I just hate the idea of life being so random and easily derailed. If something is meant to be, one small thing shouldn’t bump a big one off-track forever.”
He stops me with a tug on my hand, then, with deft fingers, he gathers the unruly mass of my hair and begins weaving it into a quick loose braid. “You’re saying if we hadn’t met through my sister, it would have been another way?”
“I havezero scientific basis for my theory. But, I like to think, when you need to learn something, life’s going to put you on that path as many times as it takes.”
Gabriel laughs as he ties off my finished braid with a hair tie he retrieved from his pocket. “Did you just call me a ‘life lesson’?”
“I think you’re teaching me things I wouldn’t learn any other way, and you’re the only one who could do it. Sometimes learning something is the same as healing, especially when the lesson is here”—I point to my chest—“instead of there.” I indicate my head, reminding us both of our conversation at the hotel in Hawai’i.
Turning, he crouches with his back to me and his hands on his knees. “Get on.”
“On?” I squawk.
Craning to look my way, he quirks a grin. “You’re getting tired. I could do a fireman’s carry.” He makes a deliberate leering grab for my ass.
I dance back two steps. “You just want an excuse to touch my butt.”
“That’s a lesson for you. There’s not a single moment in your presence when I don’t wish my hands were on your ass. That’s never going to change.” He turns. “Your chariot awaits.”
Laughing, I press close to him, but my climbing muscles aren’t what they once were. He reaches both hands behind him, cups my butt, and boosts me onto his back.
“Smooth,” I say.
He squeezes. “I thought so.”
I breathe in and shiver, my eyelashes fluttering at the hint of expensive body wash and shampoo but, mostly, justhimthat fills my senses. I should be used to the way he makes me feel, but I’m not, and I don’t know if I ever will be.
