To Say I Love You

by Anna Martin

  It didn’t take long to pick up the few things I needed from the store, even when I got carried away selecting paper plates and streamers and napkins in Will’s favorite color.

  I’d ordered cake, which was being delivered to my dad’s place too, a huge thing with a miniature Space Needle on it to remind him of home.

  The chores took longer than I expected, especially when I was forced to loop back to get the soda he’d asked for, and I was in a flustered rush when I got back to the house.

  “Need a hand?” Will yelled from his open office window.

  “Nah, I’ve got it,” I said, balancing things as I kicked the car door shut. “I’ve got cold stuff, though. I need to get it in the freezer.”

  “Okay. I’m nearly done here. Give me half an hour?”

  I nodded and blew him a kiss, feeling very Romeo and Juliet, calling messages of love from the balcony. It didn’t take long to pack everything away, and then I had to figure out how I was going to keep him out of the house until it was time for his surprise. My original idea had been to get him to take Baby for a walk with me, but it was way too hot, and I knew he’d only grouch about it.

  Inspiration struck while I was rooting around in the second drawer of the freezer.

  “Hey,” I said, taking up my spot leaning against the doorframe outside his office. “If you get changed, I’ll take you out for ice cream.”

  Will laughed. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. There’s this really cute place in town that’ll give you a free sundae when it’s your birthday. So pick up your driver’s license as well.”

  “I can’t turn down free ice cream,” he said, eyes twinkling. My stomach lurched—he still had the ability to twist me up with love for him, even after so many years together.

  I left him alone to finish up his work and went about re-tidying the house—it wasn’t messy but I needed to do something with my hands, and this was as good a job as any. Plus, it meant the place would be extra clean for when people came over.

  Will changed into khaki shorts and a gray T-shirt and flip-flops, managing to look stylish and laid-back at the same time. I let him drive, even though he didn’t know the way, and gave him directions, even though he hated it when I did it in a GPS voice.

  The ice cream parlor was locally owned and had been built in the 1940s. My grandfather used to tell me and my sister stories of when he worked there as a teenager, too young to go off to war and fight, instead scooping ice cream for a few cents an hour. It was, so he said, a great place to pick up the ladies.

  There was a long bar in front of the pink-and-white-tiled serving space and a sign over the till with the promised free ice cream for anyone’s birthday. Since it wasn’t too late in the afternoon, it was fairly quiet, and I managed to snag us a booth.

  A pretty girl with a bouncy ponytail came to take our order.

  “It’s Will’s birthday,” I said immediately.

  “Happy birthday,” she said with a grin.

  They took care of the whole showing-the-driver’s-license business while I scanned the menu.

  “Thanks, Mr. Anderson. What can I get you?”

  I hooked my foot around his under the table and grinned.

  While he went for a strawberry-coconut-caramel combination, I chose vanilla-pistachio-chocolate and felt entirely more grown-up. Especially when his came out with fireworks and streamers and a paper umbrella stuck in the top.

  “We used to come here all the time when Jen and I were kids,” I said, digging in while Will carefully removed all his adornments. “It was a tradition, that we’d come here for all our birthdays.”

  “But your birthday is in February.”

  “Dude. I still used to have pool parties every year.”

  “Fuck,” he grumbled. “So, I’m a summer baby, and I never got to have a pool party. Not once.”

  I made a face at him and quickly scooted my legs back so he couldn’t kick my ankles.

  “I was thinking earlier,” I said, trying to make sure I had a bit of each flavor on my spoon before eating it, “about moving.”

  “Yeah? What specifically about moving?”

  “Being here. If I should be working. Whether you’re happy.”

  “I’m happy, Jesse. I’m with you,” he said immediately. There was a pink splodge on the end of his nose, and Will was trying to lick it off, going cross-eyed in the process. I snorted with laughter and passed him a napkin. “Thanks. You wanna talk about it?”

  I shrugged. “Can do.”

  “So talk. Jesus, you’re hard work sometimes.”

  “Hey, I bought you ice cream.”

  “The ice cream was free.”

  “I paid for the gas to get us here.”

  “Moving, Jesse. You were going to talk about moving here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, this is painful. I’ll start. I don’t want you to work unless you’re ready for it. It has to be your decision. I think pushing you into doing something you’re not ready for is only going to cause more problems in the long run. I’ll support you whatever you want to do, you know that.” He punctuated his statement with another decisive mouthful of ice cream.

  “I always thought we would live in Seattle forever,” I said. “I suppose moving here hasn’t changed what I expect for the long term.”

  “I want for us to have a family, to be a family together,” Will said, suddenly serious. “There’s no one else in the world I want be with. Whether we do that here or in Seattle doesn’t matter that much to me.”

  “I know,” I sighed. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize,” he said, hooking his foot around mine under the table again. “We’ll work something out, I promise.”

  I was quiet for a few minutes, still eating my ice cream, thinking about whether I wanted to push the issue or not. Our family—the one we had at the moment and the one we wanted to make in the future—was a big deal to both of us. It was his birthday, though, and probably not the right time or place to talk about it. Will rubbed his thumb gently over my wrist and gave me a little smile.

  The talk took longer to unravel than I’d anticipated, and we were fashionably late by the time we got back to the house.

  “Someone’s got a cookout going on,” Will said as he climbed out of the car.

  I forced my face into a picture of neutrality. “Yeah.”

  “Damn. I’m jealous.”

  I laughed then, throwing my arm around his shoulders.

  When I steered him away from the front door and around the side of the house, he gave me a strange look. The sound of people, that many people at least, was hard to hide, and we stood at the edge of the yard for a moment before anyone noticed us.

  Then they launched into a very tuneless version of “Happy Birthday.”

  “Thanks,” he said with a laugh. He swallowed hard when his mom stepped forward, and smiled with surprised delight when she enveloped us both in a hug.

  “Oh, I’m so pleased to see you!” Cara said, her eyes watery even as she smiled. She kissed each of us on the cheek, then pulled back. “You’ve got a tan! I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with a tan.”

  Her hand was on Will’s cheek, and he turned his head to put a kiss on it. “Blame Jesse.”

  “Blame Jesse? I need to congratulate him. You’ve always been so deathly pale.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I can’t believe you came all this way just to insult me.”

  She laughed and tossed her glossy, brown hair over her shoulder. “Blame Jesse,” she said again easily before dragging us off to find other people.

  My father and Will’s had taken control of the grill, and I guessed Jennifer had been responsible for putting the rest of the party together. We bitched at each other, as was our prerogative as siblings, but she always came through for me when it mattered.

  “Thanks for coming,” Will said once I’d tugged him up onto the top step of the deck. “Um, it means a lot to me that everyon
e managed to be here. Jesse was trying to get me to go home for the weekend, I’m not sure why. Anyway, it was probably my wonderful partner who organized all this, so thank you.”

  I smiled when he kissed me in front of all our family and a few friends.

  My dad insisted Will get the first burger, even though we were both pretty full of ice cream. The kitchen had been laid out with salads and cold food, the air con turned up to try and keep it all cool.

  “I can’t believe you did all this,” Will said, setting his plate down on the counter and pulling me into his arms. He kissed my neck. “Thank you.”

  “If we were counting up the favors we owed each other, I’d need to give you a lot more than just a birthday party.”

  “I haven’t had a birthday party like this since I was a kid, though. And you got my whole family down here. Where are they staying?”

  “At my dad’s,” I said with a smile, leaning back against the fridge and wrapping my arms around his neck while he pinned me in place. “I think it’s going to be a bit squished, but they’ll all fit somehow. I did try and get your parents a hotel but they refused.”

  “What about Jen?”

  “She’s staying at Trent’s for the weekend. She did all this, you know,” I said, gesturing to the food.

  “I’ll go say thank you.”

  “Kiss me first.”

  He did, very carefully, a kiss that said he was still a bit in awe. Will wasn’t the sort of guy who expected someone to do nice things for him. It made surprising him all the sweeter.

  Chapter 13

  THE LATE-AFTERNOON sun fizzled softly into early evening, and I lit the tall citrus candles I’d bought to keep the bugs away. They were surprisingly effective, meaning we didn’t have to chase everyone inside. It wouldn’t get properly dark until much later, and I’d always liked the time of day between losing the heat and gaining the night.

  I spent far too long catching up with Cara, who wasn’t just a mother-in-law to me. She was an extra parent, even more important to me now that she was my one and only mother. I knew it would take a long time for me to come to terms with the loss of my mama, especially with the circumstances around her death, but Cara would help me through it. She always did.

  My role for the day mostly meant making sure everyone had a drink when they wanted one, and the food kept coming, and clearing up dirty plates, and occasionally kissing Will. I wouldn’t let him help with stuff and left him in intense conversation with my dad and his, talking about something or other.

  I had a couple of beers, not enough to make me feel drunk, and was working on my third while standing on the deck, people-watching.

  “All this wood is rotting,” I said as Will came up behind me. My elbows were resting on the railing, but I was being cautious of putting too much weight on them. The next project for outside would have to be replacing it all.

  “So get someone in to fix it.”

  “I will. I just wanted to get the rest of the painting done first.”

  I switched our places so my front was pressed to his back, our hands linked together.

  “Our wedding could be like this,” I said quietly into his ear, not wanting anyone to overhear us. I gestured with our joined hands to the grill, where our fathers were still deep in conversation, where my sister and one of his were laying on loungers while kids ran in circles around them.

  “I’d like that, I think.”

  “If we made it more formal, get the decorations to be more elegant….”

  “Nicer clothes,” he added. I laughed and moved our hands under his T-shirt, not caring who saw. “You really want all that, Jess?”

  “Mm. It’s about time, you know?”

  “You’re in a funny mood today.”

  “I’m in an ‘I love you’ mood.”

  “I know that one well.”

  He turned in my arms and reversed our positions once more, so my back was to the railing and his arms braced on either side.

  It didn’t seem to matter that there was family all around us. I wasn’t scared of this intimacy. When he leaned in and fitted his lips to mine, I smiled into the kiss and cupped his cheek in my hand, reveling in the sweetness of it all.

  I really should have known better. Getting distracted by his kisses meant not paying attention to my surroundings. The rotting wooden railing creaked as Will put pressure on it leaning in to me, then cracked and splintered.

  In the distance, I heard someone scream, and I grabbed at Will’s shirt as the whole deck gave a massive shudder and the railing fell away behind me. It wasn’t a big drop to the ground, a few feet at most, but it felt like my stomach went there before his arms caught me.

  “Saved your life,” he said with a grin, walking back to a safe distance.

  “Jesus.”

  Cara had run over and immediately started fussing, checking we weren’t damaged by the experience.

  “I’m fine,” I said and gave her a shaky grin. “Promise.”

  Will ran his hand over my hair and pressed another, harder kiss to my temple.

  “You,” Cara said, smacking Will on the shoulder. “Need to be more careful.”

  “Ow,” he complained.

  “Saves us a job in the week,” Dad said, checking the damage from below us. “If you want to destroy anything else by making out with your boyfriend, just let me know.”

  I was probably blushing as Will’s dad laughed too. I grabbed hold of Will’s hand in solidarity. “I’ll let you know,” I said drily.

  Several beers into the party, we ended up in the same lounge chair, Will draped over my lap while talking to his sister next to us. Leanne was closest to him in age at just under a year younger, and she had a little girl already and another on the way. I’d always gotten on with Leanne; despite the fact that she lived quite a way away from us, she made the effort to meet up so we could hang out with her kid. I liked taking all my surrogate nieces and nephews around the museum. It was designed for kids, after all.

  “This is so nice,” Leanne said with a sigh. “I could stay here forever. I don’t blame you for buying this place.”

  “It’s nice,” I agreed. “Not sure if we’re going to make it a permanent move, though.”

  “Really? You want to go back to rainy old Washington after living here?”

  “It’s home,” I said with a shrug.

  “This was your home once,” she said reasonably.

  “He’s my home now,” I replied, giving Will a squeeze. He rolled his eyes and laughed, but I could tell he was secretly pleased.

  Quietly, I was hoping Leanne wouldn’t press and ask why we were still down in Georgia instead of back home. A few months after my dad had asked the same thing, I still couldn’t answer. We were doing okay on our own, muddling through life while I desperately tried to make sense of this world without my mother in it.

  It was probably inevitable I was drawn toward Cara as the day ambled on. I’d called her “Mom” for the longest time even though Will and I weren’t married. She treated me like another son, too, since there was only one among her children.

  “You should call me more,” Cara said.

  We had moved into the living room, mostly to get away from the bugs. I’d let her take the comfy chair and sat at her feet with my head on her knees. She was gently combing through my hair, reminding me I probably needed to get it cut.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, call me more.”

  “Living here is like something else, you know? Like a different world almost. I suppose I don’t want to think about a life on the outside.”

  “Will you come back to Seattle?”

  “Mm,” I hummed. “Yeah.”

  “We miss you, Jesse. Not that I would ever begrudge you time spent with your dad, but you should know there’s people back home who love you too.”

  “Thanks,” I told her, fighting back tears that were already pricking my eyes.

  “Any time,” she said with a wink.

/>   When the day grew late and the kids got cranky, the party started to wind down, and we sent people away with the promise of brunch in the morning. I had no idea who was going to cook, or where we’d go to eat locally where there was room for us all, but that could be figured out later.

  I didn’t have the energy to do much in the way of cleaning up, and just shoved all of the cold food back in the fridge to be dealt with later.

  Will was in the shower, and I joined him, knowing there was just about space for two and wanting to take advantage of the fact.

  “I can’t believe you did all this for me,” Will said when I pressed our chests together and let the water sluice over my skin.

  “I just wanted to do something nice for you. I know I’ll never be able to repay you for all this—the whole moving thing—so….”

  “It’s not something you need to thank me for. I’m really not keeping tabs, Jesse.” He ran his hand over my wet back.

  “I appreciate it anyway.”

  We changed into pajama pants and T-shirts, then crashed on the couch in front of the TV, each with a bowl of cake and ice cream. My blood sugar would be through the roof by morning.

  I plonked my feet in Will’s lap and gave him a hopeful look. After sighing and changing the channel, he obliged and pushed his thumbs into the arch of my foot. There was no point in holding back that deep moan of satisfaction—I’d been on my feet all day and they were sore.

  There were very few shows we followed religiously; I preferred documentaries or the news, and Will had recently developed an obsession with the Discovery Channel and the new stuff they were putting out. Continuing that routine here felt good… right.

  The foot massage was distracting, not that I was complaining, and I barely paid attention to the TV as he worked all the sore spots out for me.

  “Thanks,” I murmured as he resumed a far more gentle stroking instead.

  Will kissed my big toe. “I’ve got an idea for a session,” he said. “It’s something we haven’t done before.”