Page 82 of The Do-Over
“I’m saying I want us to work this out. I don’t want to go back to Chicago and you stay here. I’d be an idiot to let you go now that we’re finally back in each other’s lives, and if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I’m not an idiot. I may have acted like one once, years ago, but I won’t make that mistake again.”
“But what are we going to do?” Thea asked. “You live in Chicago. I live here.”
“We’ll just have to figure it out,” Rob said. “We were prepared to change our lives for each other before.”
“But we couldn’t,” Thea reminded him. “Neither one of us was willing to give anything up. You couldn’t stay in Deer Ridge—or even in Iowa—to be with me, and I wasn’t willing to give up my chance to go to college and go live in Chicago with you.”
“That’s true, but things will be different this time,” Rob said. “Listen, Thea, I don’t know what it’s going to look like. I don’t have the answers yet. But I know that you and I can figure this out. We’ve both been through worse. We’ll just take it one day at a time, just like we did when we were grappling with my memory loss. This won’t be as difficult as that.”
She grinned. “I guess that’s true,” she admitted. “It could be a lot more difficult than a few hundred miles of distance.”
“I’ve spent all this time trying not to touch you,” he said. “I knew I shouldn’t, because I couldn’t remember everything that had happened between us, and I didn’t know if you’d welcome it.”
“I wanted it,” she murmured. “Every time you reached out for me, I wanted to go to you.”
He held out his hand.
She took it.
“I couldn’t,” she told him. “I was so sure you only wanted me because you didn’t remember all the reasons you’d decided to leave. If anything happened between us, you’d eventually get your memory back and you would regret it.”
“But I don’t,” he said. “I don’t regret anything that happened, Thea. I’m glad it did.”
Rob stood up and pulled her to her feet too.
“We were so lucky,” he said softly. “I met the love of my life when I was only seventeen years old. How many people can say that?”
“But we were so unlucky,” Thea countered. “We had our future right there in our grasp, and we messed it up. Now we’ve spent half our lives apart. Twenty years wasted.”
“Maybe,” Rob said. “But we found each other again, didn’t we? That was definitely good luck. Think about how easily that could have gone the other way. If it hadn’t snowed—”
“If you hadn’t come home for the first time in twenty years to accept this award—”
“If you’d ever moved out of Deer Ridge—”
She nodded. “Then we wouldn’t be here together right now.”
“Something brought us back together, after all this time, and I’m not going to leave it to luck or fate to make that happen again. I’ll follow you anywhere, Thea. I’ll give up my practice for you, if that’s what it takes. Whatever has to be done, that’s what I’ll do.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying these things,” Thea said. “I always dreamed of this.”
“You dreamed I’d come back to you?”
“Crawling back.” She smiled. “In my fantasies, I usually told you to go to hell.”
“Is that what you’re going to tell me now?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
She leaned in and kissed him.
The memories broke over Rob like a wave.
Their first kiss, when they’d been young and kissing itself had been new. All those nights they had spent on her parents’ couch or tucked away in her bedroom or out in his car, kissing and kissing. All the kisses he had experienced as an adult that hadn’t been with her. They’d never lived up, and until now he had believed that that was just a function of adulthood. That kissing got less exciting as you got older.
He saw now that he had been wrong.
It was her. It had always been her.
And now they were reunited, and he was determined that nothing would tear them apart.
He broke the kiss. “What do you say we blow off this thing and go back to your place?”
She feigned astonishment. “The great Rob Honeycutt wants to skip out on his own award ceremony?”
“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “The great Rob Honeycutt has a lot of lost time to make up for.”
She wrapped her arms around him and smiled.
