Page 54 of Light in the Dark
"Is there any more sexual assault?"
"No."
"Then we're good."
She stays like she is, arms around my neck, fingers laced at my nape, cheek on my clavicle. "So okay—the point in telling you that was that Dutchie was the healing I needed. I didn't trust anyone after that. But he…he had the patience of a saint. I watched him sit in a meadow once with a handful of birdseed. He sat there and waited without moving for so long that a bird landed on his hand and ate the seed."
I snort. "Bullshit."
She raspberries my neck. "You calling me a liar?"
"Yes."
"I took a picture. It's on my phone. Remind me to show you later—I'm comfortable and I'm not getting up right now."
"I wouldn't let you get up."
She giggles, which does delicious things to her curves. The giggle vanishes, replaced by a sigh. "For a while, we just traveled. I let him pick where we went because by then I'd already seen pretty much all of the contiguous US. I don't remember which one of us had the idea, but we decided to try being van life vloggers."
"What now?"
"Hashtag van-life. It's a whole thing on social media. We were one of the first accounts. We bought some equipment and started recording our travels, our lives living out of my bus. Eventually, we got a sponsor, and then another, and after a couple years we were able to stop taking random work and live off our sponsorships."
"So you were, like, professionally nomadic."
"Yup."
"Wow." I nuzzle her temple. "Pretty fuckin' cool."
She grins against my cheek. "You really think so?"
"Hell yeah, I do."
She's quiet for a while, and then sighs. "It was a good life we had. Way outside the norm, but it was ours. Dutchie loved it. He'd lived his whole life on that farm, and I mean he never once left even the county he lived in until we left. So traveling the country, seeing so much of it? He fucking loved every second of it. He had a passion for life, Fee. Everything was an adventure, even when things went wrong. He was never cranky, never yelled at me. We almost never argued. And if we did, it was about stupid shit and we made up fast."
She shudders, shakes her head.
“We got married in a little white chapel in Roanoke, Virginia, two years after we left Portland. It was a justice of the peace and three people we'd met in town." Ember swallows hard. "My wedding dress was a little white sundress. I loved it because it had pockets, and he loved it because my boobs looked great in it. He bought a suit off the rack that fit like shit, but I still thought he looked super handsome."
"Mmm," I growl. "You in a little white sundress."
She giggles. "I don't have that one anymore—our luggage got stolen out of the van in Red Hook, New Jersey a couple years later. But I do have other sundresses. I'll wear one for you."
"Who the hell steals someone's luggage?” I grumble.
"Assholes," she murmurs, “that's who. Dutchie used it as an excuse to spend a week nude. That was fun. He only put on clothes when we had to go into a town. Eventually we got tired of it and bought new clothing."
"He sounds amazing."
"He was. I loved him with my whole heart. We were together for almost eight years." A long silence. "And then he got pancreatic cancer. It started as pancreatic and metastasized before we knew he had it. By the time we knew he was sick, it was everywhere. He didn't live a month past the diagnosis.” Her voice drops to a whisper I have to strain to hear, even with her mouth inches from my ear. "His death was fast and agonizing. Just…just like Mom. It was so fucking fast, I barely had time to process that he was sick, that he was gonna die, and then he was gone."
"What…" I clear my throat, emotion thick in my throat. "What about his family?"
She doesn't answer for a long time. "His father passed of a heart attack while plowing a field a few months before we got married. We drove back for the funeral. His mom died of a broken heart, essentially, just a few months later."
"The man buried both parents within months of each other?"
She nods. "Yeah, he did."
