Page 122 of The Choices I've Made
The unconditional love I felt in his embrace.
Our eyes met, his baby blues locked on to mine, as we made love. He didn’t beg, but I could see the uncertainty written across his face.
He knew I wouldn’t leave home.
Not now, maybe not ever.
And he couldn’t stay.
Just like before, when a heartbroken eighteen-year-old girl had watched the love of her life board a ferry and leave her behind, this grown woman would be doing the same.
How cruel fate had turned out to be.
But, like Dean had said that day in the hospital when I told him of my never-ending love for Jake, sometimes, you loved someone for as long as you were given.
A day, a month, or a lifetime.
Even if it hurt.
So, I’d love this man for a lifetime even if we were given only a fraction of it.
When it was over, I couldn’t bring myself to move. To do so would mean facing the reality of what was happening between us. So, I just let him hold me there, on the grass, with his heat still wet inside me as we cursed the hours and minutes for stealing our last moments of happiness.
Finally, when a chill began to crawl across the ground, Jake lifted me into his arms and carried us into my room. He gently set me on my bed before disappearing for a moment to grab our clothes. He dropped everything on the wood floor by the door and slipped under the covers beside me. He smelled of earth and heat. I snuggled into his warmth, afraid to close my eyes, for fear sleep would claim me.
“If my mom hadn’t died,” he whispered into the darkness, “if I’d stayed, what do you think our lives would have been like?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess I always thought we’d come back here after graduation and take over the inn and the clinic.”
“Would we be married?”
“Yes,” I answered. “Do you think my mom would let you live here otherwise?”
“My mom would have loved a beach wedding,” he said. “She always told me you’d make the prettiest bride.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “That always followed some sort of safe-sex talk. ‘Don’t get that poor girl pregnant. She’s too pretty to be walking down the aisle in a muumuu.’”
I laughed, remembering how much I loved his mother. It had been a while since I thought of her in that way, as someone I’d lost rather than someone who had taken him away.
“I always pictured us getting married here,” I said. “Just friends and family out on the lawn with the bay in the background. I’d wear my mom’s simple lace gown, and you’d be waiting for me in a crisp linen suit. We’d say,I do, and exchange rings. It would be the perfect end to our fairy-tale story.”
“It would have been. But life didn’t work out that way for us.”
“So, what do we do now?” I asked. “I don’t know how to leave this bed, knowing I’ll never see you again. Will I ever see you again?”
“I wish I could say yes, Molly. I do. Because, leaving this bed, not knowing whether I’ll ever see your face again…” He shook his head, his eyes squeezing shut. “But you and I need to live. I see that now. We’ve spent twelve years apart, and what have we accomplished? You’ve cemented yourself to this place in hopes that I’d return, like some knight in shining armor, so we could make that backyard wedding fantasy a reality. Hell, you even tried to marry Dean in a desperate attempt to replace me.”
His words stung, but they were true. I might have stayed here at first because I had been afraid to venture out on my own, but then it’d become my home base, hoping eventually he’d return here, to his home, to me. And when he hadn’t, I’d tried to marry my best friend.
“And I’m the worst one of all. I ran away from home rather than facing my grief. I stuffed it so far deep inside me that, now, every patient I work on is just another faceless part of the job. And, to make matters worse, I chose to work on heart patients in some deranged attempt to connect with my dead mother.”
Silence fell between us.
“We’re total nutjobs,” I said softly.
“No, we’re just a little broken, and we’ve been depending on one another for far too long to pick up the sharp edges of our broken lives and put them all back together again.”
