“Well, that was an eventful start to the evening,” I said.
She rested her head on my shoulder and gave me a warm squeeze. “I ruined your burgers.”
“The floor does seem to catch a lot of food when you’re around.”
She pinched my side. “No teasing me right now. I feel awful.”
I pinched her right back. “Nah. We still have brats. My sister thought I’d scare you away with my burgers anyway. She claims that I can be—and I quote—‘a little heavy-handed with the seasoning.’”
Her head popped up, her gaze finding mine. Color had returned to her face, but surprise was still very much present. “You told your sister about me?”
Technically yes and no.
I smoothed down the unruly blond hairs attempting to free themselves from the confines of her braids. “Is there something wrong with that?”
“Not at all.” She grinned, biting her lip in a failed attempt to hide it.
“What about you? Have you told anyone about me yet?”
She crinkled her nose and grimaced. “Mark’s been working a lot, so I haven’t seen him much since you stopped glowering at me all the time.”
I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t glower at you.”
“Fine. Smolder. Is that better?”
“Marginally.”
“Aaron’s usually my go-to guy for all things dating when I meet someone new. But he’s been going through a lot with the settlement and all. It hasn’t been the right time.” Something facetious spread across her features. “Besides, despite your mouth being magnetized by mine, I’m not sure what there is to tell him yet. It’s not like I know anything about his accounting professionals or anything. But that’s neither here nor there. What’d you say to your sister?”
I relaxed deeper into the mattress. “Just that I met a woman with a foliage fetish who flashed me at the courthouse and then tried to kill me with peanut butter cookies.”
“Mmm,” she hummed. “So only the good stuff?”
Laughing, I tickled her side. “It’s all been good stuff.”
She dissolved into giggles while batting my hands away. “Bowen, stop.”
Sugar let out a loud yip and we both turned to look. At the attention, he started playing pattycake with the door again.
“How long have you had them?” she asked.
“Clyde, the big one, I’ve had since shortly after I graduated college. I’ve only had Sugar for about a year though. There’s still a lot of puppy in him.”
“Him?” She sat all the way up and crisscrossed her legs between us, both of her knees touching my side. “You named a boy dog Sugar?”
I shifted uncomfortably. Fuck. I hated the constant tiptoeing around my life. She was going to get quiet and apologize, which would make me feel like a grade-A asshole again. And hell, maybe I was. But if I wanted to keep her—and I did, desperately so—I needed to start opening up.
“He was Sally’s dog.”
Her eyes flared, but I had to give her credit. She was quick to cover it. “Was that your fiancée?”
Bringing us back to eye level, I sat up and used the pillows to prop myself up. With one swift push off the ground, I sent the swing gliding. “Yeah.”
“That makes more sense.”
I wasn’t sure if she realized she did it, but her gaze flashed around the porch, a silent inspection of sorts. She didn’t need to ask the question for me to know what she was thinking.
“She never lived here,” I stated. “In case that’s what you’re wondering.”
Remorse filled her eyes as they once again landed on me. “I wasn’t going to pry.”
“I know. But I wanted to tell you. Maybe crack the door for a minute.” I willed myself to let the moment happen, to open up just enough. “Before the crash, she lived through the unimaginable, Remi. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fix the world for her. I’d love to tell you more about her, but in order to do that, I’d have to tell you all the ways I’d failed her. So let’s make a deal. You can ask me anything you want about Sally or the plane crash. But if I can’t answer you right away, we put it on pause and come back to it when I can.”
I expected her brilliant smile.
I expected her to look me in the eye and tell me none of it mattered—even though we both knew it did.
I even expected a barrage of questions she’d been mulling over all week.
But I never thought the first thing to come out of her mouth would be, “I’m not sure not being able to fix the world for someone counts as a failure. That’s a tall order even for a man like you, Bowen.”
My heart stopped as she inched closer, the crickets serenading us as the sun lazily slipped away.
“It may not have turned out the way you hoped, but—in my opinion—loving someone through, despite, and after the impossible is quite literally the definition of success in a relationship.”
