WORTHY

by Lexie Ray

  “But we went to where you found me,” Jonathan said. “Whatever I came in on and crashed, we’re saying, should still be out there.”

  “We did go there,” I said. “But we didn’t look very hard or for very long, remember?”

  Jonathan frowned, and I looked at the ground, remembering my panic when he had suggested that he crashed. We’d left the area almost immediately.

  “So, what now?” Jonathan asked finally, looking back at the suits. “You’ve apparently found Jonathan Nelson Wharton. I’m in the middle of making a life for myself out here, so what are we doing?”

  “Your family is currently abroad on business,” the man on the left said. “But they have been worried, Mr. Wharton. I’m sure they would want to see you—to see proof that you’re alive and well…well, physically sound.”

  “I don’t know who I am when they call me Mr. Wharton,” Jonathan said, smiling sadly at me. That’s apparently my name, though, isn’t it? Jonathan Nelson Wharton.”

  “Apparently,” I agreed. “We know who we are, though, Jonathan. Nothing changes. I still love you.”

  The suits glanced at each other again, and I had to tamp down my hate of them. They were ruining everything, making Jonathan miserable and insecure. How dare they suggest that what we had was just a dalliance? It was much more than that. We had true love.

  “I think I need to go with them,” Jonathan said. I clutched at my heart, trying to keep it from breaking. Now I was the one who was insecure. Had Jonathan only asked me to marry him because there was nothing better to do out here? At the first chance of escape away from me, away from the wilderness, away from my disfigurement, was Jonathan jumping at it?

  “Hey,” he said softly, taking me by the chin. It was unbearable. I couldn’t have him look at me full in the face, rake his eyes down my hideous scar. I turned to the right, my practiced response, showing him my pretty side, hiding what he had to be secretly disgusted by.

  “I think you probably should go, too,” I said, loathing the words as they tumbled from my mouth. I didn’t deserve him. He had a family who was worried about him. He had plenty of money—lord, probably more money than anyone could spend in five lifetimes. And he didn’t need me. He should be with someone more deserving, not a country bumpkin hiding from her past—and, yes, herself—out in the woods.

  “Michelle,” he said in a low voice, making me shiver. I’d never get over him calling me by name. I’d gone five years without hearing it spoken out loud. “It’s just like you said. Nothing changes. I still love you. I’ve just got a few more pieces to the puzzle now. I’d like to try to pursue them. Try to figure out who I am. Wouldn’t you want to know who I am?”

  “I know who you are,” I said, lifting my eyes to his impossibly blue ones. “You’re no mystery to me. But I do agree that you should go. You deserve to know who you are, Jonathan. I—I’ll be here if you decide you want to come back. Do what you need to do for you. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I always worry about you,” he said, smiling sadly. “And it’s not ‘if’ I want to come back. It’s when. When I come back. I love you. I just really feel like I need to follow up on this.”

  “I know you do,” I said. I didn’t need to make this any harder on him than it already was. He needed to go, and I needed to let him go.

  “Gentlemen,” Jonathan said, and I remembered about the suits standing in the open doorway. “I need to gather a few things, then I trust you can give me a ride to wherever we need to go.”

  “That would be the compound,” the man on the left said.

  “Compound?” Jonathan repeated, sounding a little faint.

  “The Wharton Group’s headquarters is located on the same site as the family home,” the man on the left explained a little too patiently. “That’s where your staff is, Mr. Wharton. Maybe seeing them will help you fill in some blanks. You can also wait for your family to return in the comfort of your own home.”

  As he said it, the man looked around the cottage, and I felt strangely vulnerable and defensive. The cottage was comfortable. We kept it clean and in good repair.

  “Michelle, can I borrow your backpack?” Jonathan asked, turning to me. “Can you spare it?”

  “Of course,” I said numbly. “I’ll go get it. You get your clothes together.”

  I made it to the bedroom before the tears started falling. I knew that as soon as he saw his family’s “compound” or whatever that he’d never want to come back out here with me. Life in the city, with the money he’d have at his disposal, would be much easier than our hardscrabble existence out here. I’d always viewed living out here in the wilderness as almost a luxury, but I doubted Jonathan would come back once he saw how he should be living.

  “Find it?” Jonathan asked, opening the bedroom door. I turned quickly away, trying to hide my tears.

  “It’s right here,” I said, my voice thick. “I was just getting some stuff out of it.”

  “Michelle,” Jonathan said, snagging my elbow and turning me around. I tried to shrink into myself, cringing away and to the right, the most defensive posture I had in my arsenal. “What is this, baby?”

  “I’m just—just going to miss you,” I said, tears pouring down my face.

  “You’re going to miss having your farmhand to boss around?” he teased lightly, kissing me on my forehead.

  Yes, I was, but it was much more than that. It was fear that he wouldn’t come back, that I’d spend the rest of my days waiting for my fiancé to come and get me, to be alone again. I’d been alone for so long, but these few months of sharing my home and life with another person—a person I loved—had ruined me for good. I couldn’t go back to the way I had been living. I didn’t want to. I wanted Jonathan. I needed him.

  “You go,” I said, trying to smile through my tears. “You go and get your shit figured out and come back to me.”

  “Michelle!” he said, mock scolding me. “That is the second time a foul word from your lips has besmirched my ears. Where do you pick up such language?”

  “I learned from the best,” I said, wiping the right side of my face with the heel of my hand. I’d rather let the tears run down the right side of my face than touch it.

  Jonathan leaned in and kissed me, long and deep, and I put the backpack in between us to break it.

  “Go,” I said, “before it gets any harder to say goodbye.”

  “It’s not goodbye, Michelle,” he said, tracing my lips with his finger. “It’s see you later. I won’t be gone long. I promise.”

  We could say these things to each other, could even believe them, but that didn’t make it any easier as Jonathan walked out of the cottage between the two suits, a backpack full of clothes on his back. I watched as he got into the dark SUV the private investigators had arrived in, but I couldn’t watch them drive away. That was too painful. I closed the door to the cottage and walked back to the bedroom, burying my face in his pillow, wondering how long it would take his scent to vanish completely.

  Chapter Eleven

  Misery slowed time down, I learned. I existed listlessly, completing my chores and living with a significant absence of joy. I’d been alone for five years before finding Jonathan in the woods. How had five months with him ruined me so thoroughly?

  I could only assume that I loved him and missed him so much that the absence of him would mean the absence of light from life.

  That worried me.

  I had gotten along for so long alone that it was more than a little shocking to realize that I was useless without him. The fact that the last of the Indian summer had left and the chill of autumn was settling in didn’t help the fact that for the first time in a long time, I was lonely.

  Being alone and being lonely were two completely different things for me. I knew how to be alone. I had practiced at it until I got it right, weaning myself off of the need to be around people when I was certain I didn’t deserve it anymore. Being alone became something that I was good at, something that I enjoye
d. I grew more or less comfortable with myself, with the constants that living in the wilderness gave me, with the need to keep busy, to fill my days with tasks so that I would go to sleep immediately, almost as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  Loneliness ravaged me. There wasn’t much to do once the garden went dormant. I winterized it, removing bulbs and seeds I’d replant in the spring, winding the bird netting around the plot that Jonathan had helped me expand through the summer.

  Without that, there were the chickens to consider. But there were only so many things I could do with them besides gather their eggs, feed them, and exercise them. I tried to start thinking about winterizing before it got seriously cold, but it was difficult consider the idea. Would I be spending my winter with Jonathan or alone?

  He haunted me constantly.

  There were times when I was sure he was in the cottage with me, in the bathroom or the bedroom or a room I just happened not to be in at the same time.

  “Jonathan!” I’d call, wanting him to come see or do or taste something, then remembering that he wasn’t here. I was alone. I was lonely.

  At night, I remained awake for long hours, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the woods, wishing I had Jonathan lying next to me. The smell of him stayed in his pillow, and I refused to wash the cover, refused to wash that bit of evidence that he had been here with me at all.

  Even my body responded physically to his absence. Thinking about Jonathan’s hands on me, I’d crave him deeply, crave his kisses, his caresses, the feeling of him plunging into my body.

  I tried masturbating, my old standby to combat loneliness, but it wasn’t any good. What I could do with my own two hands paled in comparison to the way Jonathan made me feel. My orgasm took my mind off of the situation for only as long as it lasted. It was a bandage on a gushing wound.

  What could I do? What was there to do? I had to keep busy, had to steer my mind from its despair. I had to exorcise Jonathan from my heart. It was just too painful to be away from him, to not know what was happening with him.

  He said he was going. He said he would be back soon. I went over our final exchange over and over again in my mind, trying to glean details and insight, analyzing it to see if I’d missed anything. How long was “soon”? When would he return? There was no way for me to get hold of him, no way to try to see what was happening, if anything was wrong.

  My greatest fear, of course, was him remembering everything from his previous life with a sudden rush, then laughing at himself for ever thinking he belonged with a disfigured girl who lived out in the wilderness.

  Maybe I’d never see him again.

  These thoughts crippled me, made me languish in bed, made me doubt reality, and I had to keep busy to keep them at bay.

  I fed the chickens, canned the last of the harvest from the garden and stored it, walked in the woods to gather walnuts and mushrooms and berries.

  I cracked walnuts, separating the meat of the nut from its shell, boiled the shells to make the stain I used on the floor of the cottage around this time every year. I made sure the cabinets and shelves in the barn that housed the jars of preserved produce that wouldn’t fit in the cottage were properly insulated. It wouldn’t do for the glass to break and to lose the food I’d worked so hard to grow and preserve.

  Then I checked the insulation in the cottage. I didn’t want to freeze, either.

  Days passed. Long nights passed. I took my winter clothing out of storage, mended and knitted fixes in sweaters and sweatpants that had any holes or tears or weak places in the fabric. I stored my summer clothes in place of the winter clothes, organized the drawers, kicked myself when I realized that Jonathan would need warm winter wear, kicked myself again when I realized I was trying to keep myself from thinking about him.

  The first frost came and went, the reality that winter was lurking just around the corner, the demise of the last flowers that had been trying to hold their own in the cold weather.

  When I cared enough to check the date, it told me that more than a week had passed without Jonathan.

  All manners of scenarios crossed my mind.

  The biggest nightmare would be his rejection. He knew where I was, but I didn’t know where he was and didn’t have a means to get to him, anyways. If he never wanted to see me again, he didn’t have to. He could simply start living his old life again.

  Other, darker thoughts worried me. What if there was something wrong? What if he’d been in some sort of accident and didn’t have a way to contact me to let me know?

  What if he was dead?

  My worries spiraled so thoroughly out of control that one dark night, the wind howling through the woods, I cracked open the laptop and loaded Google’s homepage.

  I never Googled.

  But I’d gone too long without knowing, too long with the loneliness and the uncertainty and the insecurity. I had to know what Jonathan had walked back into. I had to find out about Wharton Group.

  My search unearthed thousands of hits. There were news articles about Wharton Group, studies that involved their products, even a Facebook page for the company. I clicked on it, wondering what there was for a pharmaceuticals conglomerate to post about, but was surprised at everything. They had hired someone decent to take on this side of the company, the poster celebrating everything from drug approvals to mergers to sales to stock prices. The company apparently had a pretty big charity presence, as well, and whoever was posting took great delight in tooting that horn.

  Part of me thought that I’d surely turn up something about Jonathan’s disappearance, but there was not even the briefest of mentions of it in all of the news articles I saw.

  Why hadn’t anyone known about this?

  I guessed I could understand a theory about bad press, but didn’t his family want to find him? Had the police ever been involved? I felt like the disappearance of such a big company’s CEO would garner at least a couple of paragraphs.

  Searching for “Jonathan Nelson Wharton” did me no better. I turned up his profile page on the official Wharton Group website, which didn’t give me much more than his name and a very dapper photo.

  This Jonathan was giving a half smile at the camera, his hair perfectly coiffed, his skin buffed to a shine.

  This Jonathan was a stranger to me. He didn’t know me, and I didn’t know him.

  How could I trust Jonathan to come back to me? It hurt my heart to even consider the possibility that he’d stay away, but after more than a week, it was becoming more and more of a reality.

  What I’d do without him. I couldn’t think about it. Stupidly, I continued on with my winter preparations always thinking of “when Jonathan came back” or “when he’d get here.” There were things I put off, things that I’d done alone before but had always wanted another pair of hands to help with. It was pathetically hopeful, my sense of reason informed me, but I wanted nothing of it.

  He had to come back, didn’t he? We were going to be married. We were engaged, and we loved each other—no matter what. That’s what we’d said.

  Still, most of me got up to feed the chickens and told the rest of me that this was going to be it —my friendship with some fowls was going to be the extent of my social life from now on.

  He was gone. Jonathan was gone. He had to be. He never would’ve left me for so long otherwise. Something had to have come up—a suddenly flash of insight into his memory that would’ve kept us apart.

  Then, one day, without any warning at all, he was back again.

  I didn’t know what I’d been expecting—maybe the private investigators’ SUV again, though I was aware that they were probably out of the picture now that Jonathan was good and found. But Jonathan was driving a rugged Jeep—new, by the looks of it, one that could handle the gravel road leading out to the cottage without any problem at all.

  I heard the car engine from my bathroom and hurried to finish so I could meet it—it and whatever news it bore.

  It was an utter surprise
when Jonathan climbed down from the vehicle, dressed in what looked like a brand new fleece pullover and light jeans.

  “Nice ride,” I said as casually as I could, walking over to him and running my hand down the hood of the vehicle, pretending my heart wasn’t held precariously together by tape.

  “Nice ride?” Jonathan echoed, putting his hands on his hips. I couldn’t help but feel that I was shabby beside him. He looked like someone had been taking good care of him—something that I could never do so effectively. It was the wilderness, after all, and there just weren’t that many comforts all the way out here.

  “Nice car, I’m saying,” I clarified, patting the side of the Jeep.

  “I’ve been away for more than a week, and that’s the first thing you say?” he asked, dumbfounded.

  “You’ve been counting?” I asked softly, my voice hardly more than a whisper.

  “Of course I have,” Jonathan said. “I missed you so much.”

  That simple admission seemed to open a floodgate of emotions with me. I loved him. I’d missed him. I hadn’t been able to get used to the idea of not being with him anymore. Just the sight of him was a balm, a reassurance that everything was fine.

  “I thought you were never coming back,” I sobbed, losing control of myself and falling into his chest, my shoulders heaving.

  “What did I tell you?” Jonathan asked, stroking my back. “I told you I was coming back. I’m sorry it just wasn’t any sooner. I’m sorry I made you think that you were alone. You’re never alone, Michelle. Never.”

  The sound of my name on his lips warmed my heart even as I hung on to him for dear life.

  “Does this mean that we’re still together, you and me?” I asked, my voice small and muffled against his chest. I realized that I had cried on a very expensive-looking button down shirt. Had he found this in his closet at the compound, or was it the first of many purchases more befitting of his station? I hated my traitorous thoughts, but everything was changing.