To Have and to Hold: A Returning Home Novel

by Serena Bell

“Tell me a story?”

  She smiled into the dark.

  “Was it good, even the first time? Was I nervous? I bet I desperately wanted to completely and totally snow you. Ruin you for all men for all time. That’s how I felt the first time in the tree house.”

  “I don’t think so. If you were, you sure as hell didn’t show it—either time. You were super in charge, super alpha. Sexy.” Her whole body flushed, remembering the power of his body over and in her.

  “Make that sound again.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one you just made.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did. Like a breath and a moan. Were you thinking about it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About me fucking you that first time?”

  Earlier that evening, while the girls had been reading in the other hotel room before bed, he’d reread all the emails they’d sent back and forth while he was deployed. It wasn’t quite as good as getting his memory back, he’d told her, but it came damn close. In one of them, she’d referenced a discussion they’d had about dirty talk, and he’d made her rehash the conversation. It had taken place early in their days together, when he’d sworn aloud during sex, then apologized, and she’d told him she liked the word fucking, even used as a verb. She’d told him she liked dirty talk, the way it felt in her own mouth, as if the words had weight and shape, something she could swirl her tongue over. And she liked it in his mouth, the words twining and insinuating, amping her up faster than touch.

  Oh, really? he’d said, giving her a look that said the girls’ bedtime couldn’t come soon enough.

  Really, she’d said, smirking.

  He slid a finger easily into her, then another. In. Out. A pace just slow enough to make her desperate for more. “Hunter.”

  “Mmm-hmm?”

  “I wanted to spoil you for all women that first night, too. I wanted to blow away your reasons we shouldn’t be together. I wanted you to forget all of them.”

  “There were no good reasons we shouldn’t.”

  “Well, except the girls. Being careful of their feelings. That was legit.”

  “Which we pretty much sucked at.”

  “Yeah.” His thick, strong fingers between her legs were muddling up her thinking. “We tried. Neither of us was counting on amnesia.”

  “And PTSD.”

  They both got really quiet then. He didn’t remove his fingers from inside her, but his movements stilled.

  “You—gonna be okay?” she asked.

  He took his hand away and sighed. “Not yet. Not completely. But I’m here. And I think I’ll get a little more okay each day, with setbacks. I’ll get some help. I’ve got a therapy referral, and Jake gave me some info about counselors and groups.”

  “Is that—would you do that? I know guys aren’t always into that stuff.”

  “If it were just me? No. But I’ve got the girls to think of, and you. So I want to do whatever I can to be okay. And if it means sitting and talking it out with someone, whatever, I can handle it. Sometimes that’s what it takes to man up, you know? Doing something that’s out of your comfort zone. Plus, it does help to talk to other people who’ve been there. Nate said some stuff to me that really resonated. He said, ‘It’s hard to be the one who survives. You’re supposed to be grateful to be alive, but that doesn’t mean you are.’ ”

  His words made her heart hurt. “You feel like that? Like you aren’t grateful to be the one who lived?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Like—you wish it weren’t that way?” She was holding her breath.

  “You mean would I off myself? No. No fucking way. But does it feel like it’s all wrong? Hell yeah.”

  “When that happens—when you feel like it’s all wrong—tell me? And I’ll—” She hesitated. “I’ll make you forget. Just for a little while. Just as long as you need to, to be glad you’re alive.”

  He rolled her over, his mouth searching hers out in the dark, and when he found it he gave her the most overwhelming sensation of coming home. In the dark, he blew a breath out, and she reached for his hand and held it, hard.

  “Would you do that now?”

  His voice was low and a little shaky.

  “God, yeah. Any time. Every fucking time.”

  And she did.

  Chapter 32

  She’d expected it to be more…prepossesing. It was just an office building with hundreds of small glass windows, surrounded by a not-terribly-elegant fence. She did have to give her name, and Stefan’s, at the security station in the front, but the guy in the booth reminded her more of a parking-lot attendant than the kind of high-minded caricature you’d see in the movies or…on TV. It was kind of funny that even when TV portrayed TV, it fancied it up.

  Stefan stepped out of the elevator, looking—well, good. Movie-star handsome. But her heart didn’t skip a beat or clench with longing, and there was no regret left anywhere in her. He was just a man. Maybe if he’d never stood on a stage with that ferocious snake-oil salesman energy, she never would have seen him as anything other than a good friend. But then Phoebe wouldn’t have been born, so she couldn’t regret even that.

  He hugged her, and she let him. And then she said, “I’m so sorry, Stefan.”

  Startled, he scanned her face thoroughly but still looked puzzled.

  “I can’t take the job. I can’t stay. We’re not going to stay.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not going to stay?”

  “I’m sorry about the bait and switch. I know you held the job for me—”

  “Damn straight I held the job for you.”

  “But I also know there are probably a hundred people breathlessly waiting behind me, and that it’s going to take you all of ten minutes to fill it.”

  A little flicker in his expression acknowledged the truth of that. But he shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Can we go somewhere we can talk?”

  He took her to the cafeteria and they sat and drank bad coffee while she told him the story. The whole story, including his unintended role in it.

  “I see,” he said, when she was done.

  “Do you?”

  He was no longer angry. His face had sagged a little, and she could see how he’d look when he got older. She was reminded about how brutal his profession was, how unforgiving. Behind the glamour, that was the truth of it.

  “He’s like the anti-me, right? He stuck it out with his pregnant girlfriend and kid. He stayed because it was the right thing to do. And I left. I abandoned the two of you, even knowing it was the wrong thing to do.”

  She didn’t know what to say. Whether to argue with him, say that wrong was a strong word, that she and Phoebe had been okay. Or—to let him own his failure.

  “From what you’ve told me, Hunter is the kind of father Phoebe deserves to have.”

  There, she wouldn’t argue.

  He took a deep breath. “I’d hoped for a second chance with Phoebe. But there just aren’t that many second chances in life. I can’t blame you at all for wanting to grab hold of yours. But you’ll let her visit?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I do want her to know you. And get to spend time with you. She’s getting old enough that she could probably fly down here on her own occasionally. Weekends here and there. You’d buy her ticket, of course.” She didn’t even bother to feel guilty about that. Stefan could afford it, and there was that whole matter of back child support…

  “Absolutely,” Stefan said.

  Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t buy those tickets, and when he disappointed them or canceled at the last minute, that would be okay, too.

  She and Hunter would take the girls on a marvelous consolation trip instead.

  She sat with Stefan for a while longer, talking about Phoebe, mainly; then he excused himself, saying he had to get back to the office to offer the job she’d just turned down to someone else.

  Later that day, he led the four of the
m on a studio tour, introduced them to his stunning actress girlfriend, and took them out to dinner at his favorite restaurant, pointing out stars to the dazzled girls. But Trina noted that he never asked Phoebe anything about what she liked to do or what was important to her, and by the end of the evening, she could tell from his body language—and his girlfriend’s—that both were eager to say goodbye.

  Stefan didn’t offer to take Phoebe out for lunch or do anything else with her, and in the hotel room afterward, Trina sat with her almost-full-sized daughter curled up in her lap while Phoebe sobbed her hurt out.

  “Not everyone is cut out to be a dad,” Trina said quietly. And felt grateful that Stefan had known that about himself at age seventeen, long before she’d been willing to accept it about him.

  A few minutes later, the tears having subsided to occasional hiccups, Phoebe said, “I’m glad we’re not staying here. I’m glad we’re going home.”

  The word home cut a warm swath through Trina’s chest. The ease with which Phoebe said it.

  “Hunter is a good dad. Don’t you think?”

  That took Trina’s breath away. When she could speak again, she said, “Yes. Yes, he is.”

  “Do you remember when we had the stomach flu?” Phoebe asked.

  It had been awhile since she’d looked, really looked, at her daughter. There was a smattering of small pimples at the side of Phoebe’s nose, and her eyebrows had darkened from baby strawberry blond to a more adult color. Her expression was older than her years.

  Funny that she was asking about that night, which had been a turning point for her and Hunter a year ago. “Yeah.”

  “Hunter held my head the first time I threw up.”

  Of course he had. It had never occurred to Trina to ask what had happened before she’d arrived at Hunter and Clara’s that night, but of course he had.

  Her heart filled with love for him. Her heart would always be filled with love for him.

  I promised my feelings for you wouldn’t change. And, Trina—they never really did. Only how hard I tried not to feel them.

  “Hunter is the best man I know,” Trina said quietly. “Stefan—he’s not perfect, but he’ll be a friend to you, if you let him, and that’s worth something, for sure. But you can let Hunter be your family. And your home.”

  Phoebe sighed, the soft, yielding sigh at the end of a good cry, and settled more thoroughly against her mother, and Trina held her tight and felt her heart overflow with gratitude.

  —

  The four of them drove out to see Linda and Ray, who had a lovely, immaculately kept double-wide in an beautiful park north of L.A. Ray was a short, bald retired Coast Guard admiral who appeared to be a decade younger than Linda; Hunter couldn’t bring himself to ask. The introduction between Hunter and Ray was awkward, since Ray had met Hunter once before and Hunter couldn’t remember one fucking thing about the guy, but he’d just have to get used to the occasional mental blank along those lines. There were little scraps here and there coming back to him from the past, but he wasn’t putting his life on hold to wait for everything to return in a rush. Not gonna happen.

  He let his mom take the girls for short motorcycle rides. Trina couldn’t even watch; she had to go inside, and afterward she said she’d covered her ears. But both of them agreed that there was a fine line between protecting against risk and depriving kids of experiences, and a few hundred helmeted yards on a Gold Wing on deserted roads with a grandmother at the handlebars was a pretty low-risk proposition.

  Afterward, Hunter and Linda went for a walk, and he told her what had happened, the whole story, from Clara’s disappearance to the proposal on the airplane.

  “Thank God you came to your senses,” Linda said.

  “I heard you played a role.”

  She ducked her head.

  “Mom.”

  “I might have made a few suggestions here and there.”

  “Fake her period? Go missing?”

  “You’re not mad, are you?”

  “Of course I’m mad,” he said. “You manipulated two little girls to get your way. You manipulated me and Trina. That’s not acceptable, and I don’t want anything like that to happen again.”

  She gave him a look. It was the same look she’d given him countless times over the course of his life when he’d broken a rule or come home after curfew or talked back to her. “Someone had to get you to see the light,” she said sternly. “And who else, if not your mother?”

  They were rounding back on the trailer now, and Ray was showing Clara and Phoebe something in the motorcycle engine, while Trina watched. The expression on her face—

  She was glowing. He’d never seen her that happy. And while he watched, she looked down at her hand and turned his ring this way and that, admiring. He almost couldn’t stand the rush of love he felt; it seemed to want to knock him off his feet.

  “Besides,” his mother said, and he looked up to see her watching his family—his family—with an expression not unlike Trina’s. “You have to admit, it worked. Right?”

  He didn’t have to answer that, because she looked up then and saw the expression on his face, and she said, “Oh, Hunter, that’s all I ever wanted for you,” and burst into tears.

  Chapter 33

  The sun shone brilliantly on Hunter and Trina’s mid-September wedding day. Hunter stood beside Nate under the arbor that he’d built and the girls and Trina had threaded with ribbons and greens and flowers. The audience stretched before him—his parents and siblings, Trina’s older sisters, Stefan and his girlfriend, Jake and Mira and Sam, Alia with Nate’s adopted family Suzy, Jim, and Braden, and a few of his platoon-mates who were back stateside.

  The DJ started the wedding march and Phoebe and Clara came down the aisle toward him.

  “I know they’re too old, but I always wanted flower girls,” Trina had said, and so they were dressed in identical white dresses with pale blue sashes, and they scattered rose petals as they walked, looking a little pale and tremulous and deliberately not making eye contact with all the people on either side of them.

  They didn’t look anything like sisters, Clara with her frothy cloud of bright red hair and Phoebe’s all satin blond, Clara’s face freckled and angular, Phoebe’s fair and heart-shaped just like Trina’s—but as they came close to him they snuck looks at each other and exchanged smiles that tipped up at opposite corners, and it struck him that they were sisters, in their hearts, and probably always had been.

  But then he couldn’t watch them anymore because Trina had stepped around the side of the house and was coming toward him, and his breath stuck hard in his chest.

  Her dress wasn’t anything fancy. He didn’t know all the official names for fabrics and cuts, but this one was made out of a light-looking fabric, silk, maybe, pure white. It had skinny little straps and an uneven, draped front, and a high waist that made her breasts look even bigger and softer and rounder and—

  Wasn’t he supposed to be thinking loftier thoughts than this?

  He couldn’t spend too much time staring at her breasts—he could indulge in that later anyway—because as soon as she was close enough for him to see her face, he couldn’t look anywhere else. She was wearing just a little bit of makeup and smiling a sweet, small, secret smile, and she glowed. And her eyes were on his and her smile grew for him and he thought his heart was absolutely going to burst.

  I’ve never felt like this before, he wanted to say. I’ve never felt anything remotely like this, ever before.

  He tried to tell her with his eyes, and maybe he succeeded, just a little, because as she got closer he could see that her eyes were full of tears, the way they’d been on the airplane when he’d told her how he felt. He’d always thought it was just crazy talk when people said they had eyes only for one another, but he swore to God it was like there was no one else in the backyard. And, in fact, everyone around them had fallen silent, probably because they all wanted to stare at her, too, at her beautiful hair piled up on her head a
nd the diamonds sparkling in her earlobes and in the hollow of her throat.

  She’d refused to stay in his house the night before—said that even though they’d been together already it wasn’t lucky—and had gone to stay at Bonnie’s, and he couldn’t believe how fast he’d gotten used to having her in his bed. It felt so big and cold and goddamn empty, and he’d lain sleepless for hours wanting to bury himself in her. He guessed a body could get damn used to frequent sex pretty quickly, and he didn’t know if it was how they’d always be, but for the last few months it had been twice a day at least—quick in the morning, with the door locked against intruders, and slow and languorous at night.

  “Hi,” she said, arriving at his side.

  It made him laugh. Everything was so formal and serious, and she was just her.

  “Hey, you.”

  The justice of the peace began to speak, but he didn’t hear it. He only saw the sparkle of her blue eyes and the way that smile softly curved her mouth. He saw her chest rise and fall. He didn’t hear another word until it was time for the vows.

  Her eyes brimmed with tears, but her voice was steady. “I, Trina…take thee, Hunter…to be my husband…to have and to hold…from this day forward…for better, for worse…for richer, for poorer…in sickness and in health…to love and to cherish…till death do us part.”

  He felt no qualms. No doubts. No sense of worry that he might not be enough for her or she for him.

  Phoebe was crying. Clara unwrapped a handkerchief from somewhere inside her bouquet and handed it over.

  And then it was his turn to say his.

  “I, Hunter…take thee, Trina…to be my wife…to have and to hold…from this day forward…for better, for worse…for richer, for poorer…in sickness and in health…”

  He hesitated.

  It wasn’t enough. Not quite.

  “In light and in darkness,” he said.

  Someone in the audience gasped. Trina looked up at him, startled.

  “In memory and in forgetting.”

  “Hunter.”

  “I just wanted you to know,” he whispered. “In case I get old and senile. My body doesn’t forget. My heart doesn’t forget.”