Page 12 of Leah

His eyes on mine. Never blinking, never flickering away.

Secret smiles we exchanged.

Jokes we created and endless laughter to be had.

All the while, those unwavering blue eyes stripped me bare; eyes that spoke of need but not want.

Without even realizing it, I could hear the words flow through me, and they weren’t conjured up in my head. They were coming out of Carter’s mouth as he sang lyrics that broke through my thoughts and left me stunned and rooted to the floor.

“You told me goodbye with tears in your eyes,

And I wish I wasn’t so fucked up to admit

You were right, right all along.

And it’s too late, too late to turn back time.

The world keeps turnin’, and my lust is burnin’

For a heart that won’t beat for me anymore.”

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

That goddamn voice.

It sent shivers down my spine.

It’d been so long since I’d heard it against a live mic.

His eyes scanned the crowd, moving from one side of the arena to the other. Those blues skimmed over me, and I tensed when he stared a beat longer than usual, and then carried on. He shook his head almost to clear it and clutched the mic tighter as he lost himself in lyrics I was positive stemmed from our experiences together.

I relaxed, certain there was no way he’d catch my face in a sea of thousands of others.

Five

Leah

Mel and I were exhausted on our way home. We should’ve spent every minute talking about the concert, but Mel was shrouded in thought, and I was on the verge of tears, discreetly wiping my eyes every time she made a turn that had her head looking the other way.

How come it all felt so fresh?

Wasn’t time meant to heal you?

Weren’t you supposed to look back from such an event and feel like a lifetime had lapsed instead?

Stepping out of the building meant facing life again, and the melancholy that loomed over us in that car reminded me of the moment the boys drove off to follow their dreams. Mel had admired my strength for saying goodbye to Carter, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think I was the only one saying a hard goodbye. She’d suffered the “what ifs” too when Rome turned his back on her. More happened than she’d let on, I quickly came to realize, but getting the truth out of Melanie was like trying to create an echo without sound to start it.

Utterly impossible. She was a stubborn beast.

Reality immediately set in when she parked my Jeep next to her sedan in the underground parking lot of our condominium. It took a lot of effort to remove myself from the seat and focus on the now instead of how brilliant that concert had been.

Eventually, with a lot of laughter to be had, we collapsed out of the car and stood up on wobbly legs. Completely shattered, we hooked our arms around each other and walked very slowly to the elevator.

“I may never move again,” I remarked.

---