Page 36 of P.S. It’s Always Been You
A voice in my head is praying fervently. Please say no, please say no.
He shakes his head. “Neither. I haven’t met anyone I wanted to commit to.”
“But you’ve dated lots of models and actresses.”
Tilting his head, he drums his fingers against the table. “Ah, the plot thickens. You won’t watch my show, but you’ve tracked my romantic entanglements.”
“That’s the part you glom onto? That I haven’t watched your show?”
“And you glom onto the fact that I’ve dated some actresses?”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s true.” He shrugs, leans back, smiles. “But it was never serious. So who cares? In the last ten years, there’s been no one who’s registered as more than a blip.” He spreads his arms across the back of the booth effortlessly, a man in repose. His eyes roam my face shamelessly before he finishes in a low, deliberate tone, “And before you ask, you were so much more than a blip.”
I shouldn’t care that I was more than a blip to him. But I do care. I care too much. “I wasn’t going to ask that.” The words spill out in a mad dash, as if the speed of my delivery can cover up the lie. Because I love what he just said.
He frowns. “You weren’t going to ask, and you don’t even watch my show. That breaks my heart.”
“You’re one to talk about heartbreak,” I fire back. “We had that magical Valentine’s Day trip and then you took off a few days later.”
He stretches a hand across the table and grabs mine, holding it tightly. “It broke my heart too.”
His voice. Those words. They weave through me, slinking past reason, sliding around logic.
So I do the illogical thing. I open up. “Watching you in any form hurt far too much,” I say, and the confession rubs my throat raw, but it also loosens something inside me. Some of the hurt I’ve harbored.
“You didn’t want to be reminded of us?” He’s so gentle, his voice so tender, and it surprises me. He wasn’t callous before per se. He was simply . . . younger. Perhaps less sensitive. This older, more mature Hunter seems to possess a sensitivity, a thoughtfulness that the younger one didn’t have. “That’s how I felt for a long time too,” he continues. “I didn’t want to be reminded of you. I didn’t have many reminders when I was far away, but the thing is . . . I couldn’t escape you, Presley. You were here,” he says, tapping his temple. “Do you remember the note I wrote you? The one about how I’d think of you when I woke up?”
If he only knew how much I remember it. I know every word by heart. “Maybe. It sounds vaguely familiar,” I fib.
“I thought of you constantly. Leaving you was hard. Forgetting you was harder.”
I bite the inside of my lip so I don’t speak, so I don’t say, What’s hardest is sitting still when I want to throw myself into your arms.
“But look at all the benefits,” I say with as much cheer as I can muster. “Your dreams came true.”
His expression saddens. “Not all of them.” He squeezes my hand, and I’m not going to be able to maintain an ounce of resolve if he keeps touching me.
Deliberately, I draw back my hand, reaching for my phone and clicking on the picture I took earlier. “Should we tell Corinne and Joseph about what we found? This letter isn’t for us, and that keeps gnawing at me.”
“Right, but they hired you to catalog the house, and this was in the house. They didn’t ask you to give them a play-by-play on every item, did they?”
“No, just a report at the end. But Edward and Greta wrote the letter for their children, and Corinne and Joseph are their grandchildren. It’s probably been there for ages. You saw how much dust covered the box. How would you feel if someone else found a note for you from your father?”
His jaw ticks with seeming irritation. “I wouldn’t like that. But then again, my dad gave a letter directly to me. He didn’t hide it away in some sort of scavenger hunt.”
I notice the shift in Hunter, but press on, brandishing the image of the letter on the phone screen. “But what if the Valentina family has been looking for this? Is it right for us to keep it from them?”
“If they were looking, they didn’t look that hard. It took us less than one day to find it.”
“Does that mean we should play the scavenger hunt game?”
“Consider this. What if the letter leads to nothing? Wouldn’t it be better if we found that out before they do? What if ‘research before the search’ leads us to zip?”
He has a point, and I nod. “So we don’t get their hopes up, you’re saying?”
