Everlasting Light

by Shey Stahl

  “Beau?”

  I laughed, shaking the both of us. “Yeah?”

  “Kiss me,” she whispered, long lashes lowering as we moved as one. “Please kiss me.”

  I did.

  I poured everything I had into those kisses, wanting her to feel the love I had for her. I would always give myself to her, now more than ever.

  I held her hands above her head against the pillow before hitching her leg further, my head dipped down to whisper low and seductively in her ear. “I’ve waited so long to remember this feeling.” I panted as I slowly began to move. My orgasm was nearly there. I fought hard, not wanting my time to end with her.

  My hips moved languidly for a while as she caressed the length of my back, feeling the taut muscles. My body tensed at her touch, or from the sensations, each movement slower than the next for fear that at any moment this would be over.

  “I missed you,” I confessed, grunting with each movement. “I missed you so fucking much.” My hands curled around her shoulders, pulling her into my movements.

  “Me too, Beau…me too.”

  “You feel so good,” I grunted as my movements sped on their own volition, needing the release.

  She tightened her embrace, wrapping her legs around my waist, and I lost all sense of existence. We fell together, crashing into one another as our orgasms surfaced.

  Handling her with care as my breathing slowed and my shaking started to calm, I let out a long breath and eased her body from mine.

  She exhaled deeply, sliding to the side, but I wasn’t letting her go. Pulling her closer, I wrapped my arms around her waist, bringing her flush against my chest.

  We lay quietly, our eyes connected, remembering everything we’d missed about one another.

  A sweet smile spread across her face, lighting her up. “I love you.”

  There was no definition for what we were right now, and for once, I didn’t need it. Not with Bentley.

  I knew we needed very little in life to feel wanted, loved, and needed.

  With Bentley, she trapped me inside of her, made me feel those things even when we weren’t together. Made me believe it was possible not to feel lonely anymore. To believe there was someone out there for me.

  “Shhhh…sleep,” I whispered against her temple. “I got you.”

  Love doesn’t wait.

  Love grabbed you in an instant, taking a hold of your heart, forcing you to see what you needed, take what you wanted, and hold onto what you cherished.

  I held on.

  Though she didn’t think she did, Bentley held on, too.

  I once asked myself, how could a broken heart heal another?

  Easy.

  Together.

  IN THE MORNING, I let Bentley sleep in as long as she wanted.

  Me…I was amped. I’d gotten my girl back, won a fucking Grammy, and felt the happiest I’d been in over a year.

  “Will you go someplace with me today?” I kissed her temple just as she was waking up, tempting her awake with a cup of fresh coffee because I couldn’t take that she was still sleeping and I felt this alive.

  “Where?” she yawned, stretching her arms up and knocking me in the jaw. “Shit, sorry!”

  Rubbing the side of my face, I winked. “Back to the lake.”

  Our eyes met, memories of last night evident in our movements, and the way our bodies were reacting being this close. “I’ll go anywhere with you.”

  Anywhere was in bed, for another hour as I remember everything I missed about her.

  IT WASN’T THE first time I had been to Dixie’s grave since the funeral, though I hadn’t been as much as I should have.

  I wasn’t sure how to react, or what to say when we went to her grave. The two of us sat in silence, memories of the day I had to hold her up, watching the pastor say a pray for our angel.

  Only today was different. It was calmer, the emotions not quite as intense. It still hurt, and I knew Bentley felt the same way, but there was a year of difference now.

  On our knees in front of her grave, we remained silent until Bentley drew in a breath. “Is it so wrong that I miss her the way I do when I only had her for a few minutes?”

  “No,” I held her closer, my arm around her shoulders as I brushed my lips to her temple. “She signified a greater meaning in both of us. She wasn’t just our baby girl. She was a part of us, and it was taken from us before we had a chance to understand it.”

  Bentley drew away slightly, but I pulled her back, never wanting to let go. “Beau, what if I’m not that same girl you fell in love with?” Her tears slipped down her cheeks. “That song…I just…what if we’re not the same after Dixie?”

  “You are.” Twisting her to face me, my hands framed her face. “We are.”

  “I don’t think I am.” Bentley looked down, her lashes fluttered before she looked up at me, eyes wide, searching for forgiveness she thought she didn’t deserve. Her lips brushed the inside of my wrist placing a tender kiss against my skin. “You’re different.”

  I guess in some ways I was.

  I took an uneven breath as her eyes moved over my face. “Then I’ll love her, too. And I hope you can love the man I am now.”

  Leaning in, our lips finally touched. “I do.”

  AFTER LEAVING Mountain Brook, we made the trip back to the lake. Sitting on the edge of the dock, I gave a relaxed nod to the house behind me. “Miles’s parents sold this place.”

  “Oh really? Crap, are we trespassing?”

  “Yes, but I’d gladly spend the evening in the back of a cop car with you.”

  “Beau, be serious. We should leave.”

  “I’m sure the new owner won’t mind,” I hinted, wondering if she would catch on.

  She peered over my shoulder, wide eyed at the house. “Do you think they’re home?”

  Taking her face between my palms, I slowly kissed her. “They’re home now.”

  “Beau…” she gasped against my lips, finally understanding what I meant.

  “I couldn’t let them sell it when I had so many memories here.”

  Closing my eyes, I let out the breath I’d been holding. I wanted to ask her what she was doing for the next fifty years, and if I was in her plan.

  “So what’s next for you?” Bentley asked, settling into my arms.

  You. Us. Making lots of babies.

  “I just finished out my tour and I was thinking of relaxing a little. What about you?”

  “I’m still working at the hospital and living with Heather, but I have been taking classes in writing, of all things.” She giggled, as if she thought that was a silly thing to do. “I don’t like working at the hospital. It’s pretty sad I’m still paying on my student loans and I’m going back to school.”

  “Sometimes life takes you in a different direction. Look at Blaine. She’s still going to school.” We both laughed and then came the awkward silence. The kind that always presented itself when you knew there was something else that needed to be said, but both parties were stalling. I couldn’t look at her when I asked, needing the confirmation. “Do you see me in your life?”

  She didn’t hesitate when she said, “I see us together.”

  I kissed her then, slowly, and then grinned.

  “Can we please just admit I’m charming now?”

  She frowned, a smile desperately trying to pull through. She cracked, and then burst into tears. “You’ve always been charming, and I should have told you sooner.”

  Wrapping my arms around her tighter, I kept her against my body. “As long as you admit it at least once, I’m okay with that.”

  “You’re charming.”

  “Thank you. I can die a happy man now.”

  Her body tensed. “Wrong choice of words.”

  “I know, but I’m still charming, just so we’re clear.”

  “You are.”

  Staring over her shoulder at the lake, the memories of her and I together swimming in my head, I knew one thing for certain.


  I’ll never crave the waves of the ocean.

  I’ll always need the gentle ripple of the lake.

  I have heard the sound of “Mama!” screamed from a crib at two in the morning and held a wide-eyed little girl who wouldn’t sleep.

  I have kissed tiny scratches and held a chubby hand as we crossed the street.

  I have had my heart broken and filled again with a curly dark haired hell-raising, unruly little girl we call Willa Rae Ryland, or in some cases, her favorite nickname of Willa Bean given to her by her daddy.

  I have held a precious, beautiful, sweet baby girl in my arms as I rocked her in the chair Beau’s granddaddy gave to us while she cried herself to sleep.

  I have watched her grow and spit food in my face, pulled my hair and threw herself down in a tantrum.

  I have changed hundreds of dirty diapers and run after a toddler as she cackled down the hallways buck naked.

  I wanted to watch her sleep on Beau’s chest and taken pictures of them together like the obsessive photographer I was.

  I was doing everything a mother would do.

  It was the little things I appreciated now, like holding chubby hands and kissing rosy cheeks before bed. Sunday morning waffles and coffee on a country porch overlooking the lake that started it all for Beau and me.

  Beau and I had a closeness, something we never lost, but cherished. We had both experienced the same loss, suffered that unimaginable devastation, but healed separately.

  It wasn’t easy to come back from where we had been, and I still struggled with losing Dixie. I still had days where the pain felt like it would bury me alive. It was a struggle fought in minutes, hours, days and months, side by side with the one person who understood that same pain, fought those same struggles, and lived with the same heavy heart.

  I don’t think grieving should be a word.

  Grieving wasn’t something you could define by a word.

  It was a heart breaking with one breath.

  It was a pinky promise made by the tiniest of hands.

  It was pushing someone away, even when you loved them.

  It was sitting in a scalding hot tub to feel pain.

  It was thinking letters were going to heaven.

  Losing a child showed me parts of myself, the really ugly parts I would have never known under any other circumstance.

  I never thought I would have pushed someone like Beau away, but I did.

  “Here.” Blaine handed a sleeping Willa Bean over to me.

  Breathing in Willa’s precious scent, I smiled at my sister-in-law. “I don’t know how you carried her all the way from the house sleeping with your belly in the way,” I teased, rubbing her very pregnant belly.

  “I don’t know how you function with yours. I feel like you’ve been pregnant for the last two years.”

  “I kinda have been.”

  I got pregnant with Willa in April, just two months after the Grammy awards. Beau and I were married in June, on the same day I tripped into his life two years prior to that. Willa was born on January twenty-fourth, exactly two years from the day we buried Dixie.

  We apparently had a thing about dates and making them memorable, despite the tragedy that had occurred.

  In May, I got pregnant again.

  Now here I was, five months pregnant and feeling like I’d been pregnant since I met Beau.

  Looking up with my husband’s voice all around me, I memorized every detail I could from the way the air felt to the drum beat in my chest. Willa stirred in my arms when she heard Beau’s voice, lifting her head from my shoulder to look up at him.

  You know what healing was?

  It was staring up at a man on stage and knowing you were placed on that path, with him, for a reason. You may not have known what the reason was, but you were in it.

  “This song goes out to a girl who stole a kiss in the south.” And then he winked at me and went into the opening notes of “Something Bad,” the song he wrote based on that damn shirt I wore the night we met.

  Have you ever thought about when your life was changing paths? Do you see it happening or do you feel it?

  I didn’t know my life would change in the ways it did when I met Beau.

  I could honestly say now, I would never regret tripping into him.

  Beau stopped the music and began peeling his shirt off, eyeing the ladies in the front row. I wasn’t jealous, because it was just him working the crowd, and me. “I should sing this one song without a shirt on…because why the fuck not, right?”

  With the shriek of girly screams that came from the women in the front row, this was exactly why he did things like that.

  Naturally, I screamed too when I was rewarded with my husband, the man I dreamed out since I was fourteen, without a shirt on singing a dirty song he wrote for me.

  Thankfully Willa had no idea what any of the lyrics meant, just that her daddy was performing on stage.

  Smiling down at me, Beau winked as he sang, “Come a little closer baby, let me lay you down. Come a little closer baby, let me show you something bad.”

  He was still Beau Ryland for sure.

  Blaine shook her head beside me. “He looks like an idiot up there.”

  “Yeah, well, he puts on a good show.”

  She gagged for effect, and then smiled at the screams around us. “You got me there.”

  IT WAS HOURS later before I saw my husband again, his sweaty arms wrapped around a now sleeping Willa. “There’s my pretty girls.”

  I’d never tire of hearing him say those words, or the feeling my heart gave me when he held the two of us, or I should say three now.

  Adjusting our baby girl in his arms, he lifted my hand to his mouth, kissing tenderly over the promise he’d only given to me. A slight smile curved his lips. “Man, I’m going to keep you barefoot and pregnant for the next five years.”

  “Uh,” I turned to argue with him, my hand on my belly where I was carrying our newest little girl, “no you’re not. I think we should stop with two girls.”

  “Oh, yes I am. I want lots of babies running around. Little blonde haired Bentley’s all over the place.” I went to protest again when he shook his head. “Shhh…” He pressed his fingers to my lips, and then kissed Willa’s forehead. “Look up, baby.”

  I did and thousands of stars lit the night, bursts of light raining down on the beauty between us.

  Stars had a new meaning for me now. Some people would say they’re beautiful, but I don’t think a word like beauty does them justice.

  It was like looking at a photograph and attempting to capture the magic of the moment. You couldn’t. You only knew what that felt like because you remembered the experience.

  “Beau?”

  His lips brushed across my skin as he spoke softly. “Yeah?” The low resonance of his voice sent shivers down my spine.

  “I love you, everlasting.”

  If I do my job as a writer, it wasn’t because you read my stories.

  It was because you believed in them.

  With every release, I hope I’m offering that much.

  When the idea for this book came about, I was staring at a near cloudless sky and the one tiny fluffy feather cloud in it. I thought to myself, if there was a baby in heaven, she’d be on that cloud there. So many families lose their baby before they ever have the chance to hold it, let alone show them the love they deserve. My mother lost my older sister when she was four days old, never had the chance to even hold her.

  My good friend lost her twin boys the same way.

  It happens.

  This book was for every mom and dad who’d ever lost a baby before they could smoother them with the affection and love he/she deserved.

  I have to thank my husband for constantly supporting me in this dream. Despite it being hard on the two of us, we make it work.

  Thank you to my baby. Sweet baby girl, I’m so glad I’ve had the absolute pleasure of being your mommy, you silly stubborn, beautiful girl! I love you.

/>   Thank you to Cody and Brynn Johnson for being on the cover and your amazing love for one another through tragedy.

  Hot Tree Editing, I love you girls. You make my words make sense, because heaven knows when I give them to you, they do not.

  Tracy Steeg, I know this cover took a lot of rounds, but it’s absolutely perfect. Thanks so much for putting so much time into it.

  Brandi Sorem, thank you for the beautiful photographs on the cover. They turned out amazing. It was such an awesome experience getting to do a custom book shoot for this one.

  Adam Craig, thank you for allowing me to intertwine your music in this story. And Kristi Burke, thank you for getting in touch with Adam and making sure he didn’t think I was some kind of stalker.

  Janet, Barb, Shanna, Marisa, Jill, Ashley Slone and Ashley Schow, and Rachel, you girls are the best group to have around. Thank goodness for our group.

  To my SheyNanigan’s love you girls too. Thanks for all your support on another release!

  Shey Stahl is a USA Today Best Selling Author, a wife, mother, daughter and friend to many. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family in the Pacific Northwest where she was born, and raised around a dirt track. Visit her website for additional information, sign up for her newsletter and keep up to date on new releases: www.sheystahl.com.

  You can also find her on Facebook:

  https://www.facebook.com/SheyStahlAuthor

  Email: shey@sheystahl.com

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