Page 7 of Timeless
Music filled the night air for a beat before footsteps on the gravel registered behind me. I didn’t need to look over my shoulder to know who was there.
“Jaxon, please. Just hold on a sec.” Arizona’s tone was pleading.
“Not now, Ari,” I said, doing the mental math on getting to Lily.
She had to be on Highway Eleven somewhere since it was the only main stretch both entering and exiting our small town; the question, though, was which direction she had been traveling from, north or south?
I turned and faced a somber-looking Arizona and my piece of shit brother with his crestfallen expression standing behind her.
“Do you know where Lily was coming from?”
Ari nodded with her lips parted before she cast her eyes downward with what I assumed was guilt. “Rockwood.”
“Rockwood?” I shouted, causing her to startle. “For how long?”
“A year.”
“Motherfucker,” I said through clenched teeth.
Apparently, the blows just kept coming.
I tilted my chin to the sky. Lily had been living only forty-five minutes away for the past year.
Arizona reached out and touched my arm, pulling my focusback to her. “Please go easy on her, she’s . . . she’s been through a lot.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t really know, but I have my suspicions. She has good days and bad days. That’s all I can say.”
“What does that mean?”
“Jaxon, even if I knew what she’s been through, it’s her story to tell. Please let go of this anger before you see her. If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at us; we can take it, but Lily, she’s . . . ” Where her explanation was headed hung heavy and unspoken as her words died on her lips.
“Did you know she was coming here tonight?”
“No, I only saw the text just a minute ago. I will say, though, if she’s coming back here, and risking running into you, something is very wrong.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” I said before I took off.
Running had always been a part of my fitness routine, something I did almost daily. It was familiar and comforting, and in moments like this, it felt like the only option. Driving was out of the question; I’d been drinking too much for that even to cross my mind. Sure, I could have asked Arizona to give me a lift, but deep down, I knew I didn’t want that. I needed the time it would take me to get to Lily, to breathe, to sort through the chaos in my head, and try to process the fact that those I trusted had openly omitted the truth from me.
With each step, the rhythm of my feet hitting the pavement felt almost mechanical, easy, unlike outrunning Arizona’s words that kept circling back on a vicious loop. The problem wasn’t just her words; it was what shedidn’tsay that spoke volumes and had me alert and on edge. And the more I tried to make sense of it, the harder it was to fathom.
If Lily had been in Rockwood for a year, why come back here now?
As the weight of that question and the reasoning behind it pressed down on me, headlights from her vehicle pulled off on the side of the four-lane highway up ahead came into view. The faint glow cut through the dark, and for a moment, I could hardly believe I was about to come face-to-face with the only girl who owned my heart and took it with her when she disappeared.
I slowed my pace and took tentative breaths, trying to steady my heart rate, but the closer I got to her older model Honda Civic, the more my heart raced erratically against my ribs. That feeling continued until the interior dome light came on when she opened the driver’s door, causing my heart to stutter, then nearly stop altogether as she angled her head to shield her face.
A face that had long haunted my dreams.
Watching her hesitate before stepping out of the vehicle was sobering. With her back to me and her shoulders rounded inward, her gaze lingered on the interior of her Honda before she straightened her spine, pushed her shoulders back, and turned toward me.
A decade had passed, and yet all it took was a single second to erase the weight of it all as I laid eyes on the love of my life. The worry, the questions, and all the what-ifs that plagued me for years, none of them mattered at that moment as she stood within reach.
I wanted so badly to pull her into my arms, to make sure she was real and that I wasn’t imagining things, but the longer I held her silent gaze, the more I saw the turmoil she was shouldering, and it punched all the air from my lungs.
Wherever life had taken her, whatever she’d been through, the pain of it all was haunting her from beneath the fragile frontof strength she was trying so hard to present. There were cracks in her armor, glimpses of resilience, and a quiet resolve in her eyes that made my heart swell and break simultaneously and forced me to swallow the lump that had formed in my throat.
