Page 76 of Beach Cottage Kisses
“Seeing you with that back injury, and the leg, seeing that chair… I lived in one, Scott. Thinking I’d be in it for the rest of my life. Sometimes it’s okay not to master a skill. You tried. You’ve spent years trying. Spent money trying. You aren’t good at it. And it’s okay. You indicated that as long as you’re surfing, you haven’t failed. So the only way to prevent the failure is to just keep surfing. But quitting doesn’t make you a failure at life. Or litter in the world. It just means you aren’t meant to be a champion surfer.”
Relief flooded him. She hadn’t been referring to his failed marriage in terms of letting a fear of failure stop him from trying. As in trying to get him to try again. She, like Sage, maybe with Sage’s instigation, just wanted him to quit surfing. To be okay with failing so he’d let surfing go.
Why his mind had jumped to the other—the idea that it could be wrong to let one failure stop him from trying something, a committed relationship, a second time—he put down to the rest of the weirdness of the past couple of weeks.
To experiencing such high levels of pain that he’d had moments that lacked complete lucidity.
To sharing his home with a woman who was important to him.
Not to any desire on his part to change his life.
Chapter Eighteen
Iris woke up Thursday morning eager to get on with her day, in spite of a lack of sleep. An hour or so before dawn, she’d helped Scott back into his chair and watched him wheel himself off down the hall.
There’d been no big ending moment. No hug. No acknowledgment that their conversation had been anything but ordinary for them. Just a yawn. A suggestion that they should get some sleep and get him off the bed. All very practical.
And very them.
She woke up with the sense that she and Scott were back to normal. Thinking of him as the valued friend he’d become over the years, not a sex mate.
And she felt free.
To the point of wondering why she thought she’d had to reinvent herself, move hundreds of miles south, to be able to live a somewhat-normal-to-her life.
Maybe Dr. Livingston and she had both been right. She’d come full circle and her psyche had had a bit of a resurgence. Allowing her to bring her past into her present. To quit pretending that she hadn’t suffered. And she was right, too. The emotional overload—a surge as the result of the melding of her two selves.
Not a psychological choice to reignite an emotional way of life that had died when a drunk driver hit her and Ivy head-on.
She was accepting her past. She couldn’t ever bring it back to life.
As she walked the beach with the dogs midmorning, she wondered if maybe she’d needed the distance from what had been, in the beginning, but that time had healed her more than she’d ever thought it would.
And at the same time—even with new perspective, with the ability to accept what had been, to be able to welcome some good memories back—she was in full approval of her current life. She liked herself. Her choices. Her world.
So while she felt as though she’d undergone major change—nothing in her daily life, or life plan, was changing. Or needed change.
The same couldn’t be said for Scott. Maybe because of being so in tune with his sister, or because of his awareness of what made others tick, the man was far too giving to spend the rest of his life alone.
He’d failed once. By the sounds of things, in a big way. But as she talked to Sage on Thursday afternoon—a daily check-in to let her know that Scott was fully cooperative and doing well in all aspects of his treatment—she couldn’t help but mention that which had been bothering her so much she’d had to bring it up the night before.
“He’s actually really easy to share space with,” she reported to his worried sister. “Respectful, but also aware…like preserving hot water for a second shower, considering my needs into the timeline, giving me space to work, physically, but by not interrupting, too.”
“Gray said he was a great roommate,” Sage offered. But Scott with a boarder hadn’t been where she was going.
“I was thinking more in terms of his failed marriage,”Iris said, glancing at the dogs as they trotted beside her for their afternoon trek by the water. “Scott takes full responsibility, but it seems to me that if he was even half as attentive to his wife’s autonomy and comfort, there’d at least have been some indication to her that he was present in the relationship. That he cared.”
She heard the words. Shivered as fear sluiced through her for the second it took her to catch her breath. Yes, Scott was present in their friendship. Of course he cared, as did she. Both qualities were basic to any good relationship. She wasn’t seeing herself in his ex-wife’s role.
She was seeing Scott blaming himself for a failure that might not have been all his to claim. Or for which to take the blame.
“I think he did care,” Sage said. “As did she. Just maybe not enough.”
“On both their parts.”
“That’s how I saw it. Why?”
Afraid that Sage was reading her wrong, Iris wished she hadn’t started the conversation. But she had. Was in. “He takes full responsibility. As though the failure was one hundred percent his.”
