Runaway Groom

by Virginia Nelson

  Gracie closed her eyes and reclined on the couch. “Lord, no. Epic buzzkill. Epic.”

  Carnie clamped a hand on Abigail’s shoulder. “Focus.”

  Sighing, Abby pinched the bridge of her nose. “You check the mail.”

  Gracie perked up, eyes narrowing as they focused on Abigail. “Yes, I do.”

  “I went to the post office today. Braxton says—”

  “Oh, fucking finally.” The snort from Gracie punctuated her sentence.

  Abby released her nose and raised a brow. “What?”

  “It’s about damn time, that’s what. I thought I’d be plucking letters out of the mail for the rest of my life.” Uncrossing her legs, Gracie stretched like a cat and adjusted her bra.

  “You stole my letters?” Like a spike of pain, betrayal choked Abby and she couldn’t force more words out.

  Gracie took advantage of the silence, filling it with words. “Yeah, Grams made me promise when she was on her deathbed that I’d collect them until you asked for them. Some crap about your heart not being open until then, I don’t know. I thought you’d never ask. I am so tired of checking the damn mail to pluck out letters—”

  Bounding up and out of the room, Gracie showed her first real animation since they arrived. Abigail shot after her, catching her arm. “Seriously? You’ve been stealing my mail?”

  “Yeah.” Gracie shrugged off her hand. “I had to.” Snapping her fingers in Abby’s face, she grumbled, “C’mon, sis, keep up, here.”

  “Gracie, that’s against the law.”

  “Yeah, you tell Grams that. She made me do it, like I said.” Yanking a box down from the top of a closet, she shoved it into Abigail’s arms. “If you sue me, I’ll plead insanity or some shit. Not that you can juice a beet, but whatever.”

  Filled to the brim with letters, some looked old and some looked like they’d come in within the past few days. “Gracie, federal law. Just saying.”

  “You’re going to sue your sister for obeying your grandmother’s last wish? Fine. Call the cops then. Gram wanted me to keep them so keep them I did. Now, get them the hell out of my house. I’m kind of sick of them taking up my closet space. These two boxes are yours too. Oh, and this blue crate…”

  “That’s a milk crate. It’s illegal to—” Gracie silenced Abby with one hand.

  “Bite me, Abby. God, you’d think you’d be grateful I kept the damn things. Mom would’ve pitched them.”

  Meeting her sister’s eyes, Abigail paused. Heart welling with emotion, she reached out a hand to catch Gracie’s arm. “Thank you, Grace. I’m sorry I don’t come see you more.”

  Smacking her hand away, Gracie rolled her eyes and shoved out of the hallway. “Cripes, now you’re going all emo. Let’s save the heart-to-heart sister moment, ‘kay?”

  “I love you, Gracie.”

  Gracie’s snort carried down the hall.

  “So…” Carnie blew out a breath, fingering one of the letters. “Mystery solved.”

  The top letter was dated ten years before. Pulling it out, Abigail stared at Braxton’s familiar handwriting. “Apparently.” Tears threatened and her fingers tightened around the envelope until her knuckles went white. “He wrote me?”

  Carnie pulled her into a hug. “Yes, sweetie. He wrote you.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  September 11, 2011

  Abby,

  It’s been a decade since 9/11 and everything on the television has been about that tragedy. Everyone is talking about where they were that day and what they were doing.

  I remember what I was doing. You and me, we were getting ready for graduation that year. School was just back in and it was like we were sitting at the top of some rollercoaster that would end at the last day of school…like we’d climbed the mountain and all we needed to do was raise our arms in the air and enjoy the screaming thrill of the ride.

  And then the world stood still. We walked home together and there wasn’t a single plane in the clear blue of the sky. I remember thinking that if something happened, it was so much bigger than us and that I wouldn’t be able to protect you.

  I think that’s the first time I realized I couldn’t protect you, not really, not from the things life would bring at us. We got home and they kept replaying it on the tv so we headed out—you, me, Lou and Carnie—for Watkin’s Pond. The line at the gas station was probably a mile long, so Lou turned around and went back home and you and me ended up alone.

  I gave you a beer. You thought I was being nice, but I know how you get. You wouldn’t have slept a wink that night if I hadn’t given you some alcohol. So we lay together, two kids in a world gone insane, and I wondered what the next day would bring…

  I figured at the time that was probably the worst day I’d ever experience.

  But at least we had each other.

  Guess I’m being a bit morbid, but, well, hell. Today would be easier if we were together, don’t you think?

  Write me back, baby. I need you.

  Brax

  The sunset was a gorgeous one, all reds and golds splattered across the sky. Abigail drove toward home after dropping off Carnie. The boxes they’d hauled from Gracie’s condo to her house weighed on her chest like a stone.

  The sign for Oakdale Cemetery caught her eye and without really thinking it through, Abigail turned the wheel and pulled in.

  She spent a lot of time in the past few years in this cemetery.

  Putting her car in park, she walked to the familiar grave still marked with flowers she recently left. Curling her feet under her, she sat on the grass, one hand stretching out to trace the letters on the headstone.

  “Hi, Grandma.”

  For a few minutes, she sat touching the headstone, wishing for some sign perhaps of the comforting spirit of the woman who so long was her rock in this world. Other than the shifting colors in the sky slowly turning darker and the song of tree frogs, no sign seemed forthcoming.

  “Those letters…that you told Gracie to keep. It’s like you’re taking care of me even now that you’re gone. Hearing Ernie talk about you as if he’d just seen you yesterday, I don’t know, it sort of opened it all back up again. I miss you so much. Sometimes I want to cry as hard as I did when I learned you were gone.”

  Quiet for a moment, she went back to tracing the letters on the cold stone headstone.

  “If you were here, I would talk to you. Ask you what you would do. You see, I realized I hadn’t checked sooner because I was afraid there were letters. Sounds stupid but…if there were letters and he wasn’t a liar, then it was me that was broken. He didn’t love me enough to stay, Grams. And I’m so scared. I lost him once and it hurt so bad. You didn’t want me to find those letters until I was ready. Maybe I’m still not ready, won’t ever be anywhere near ready. I’m not sure I can take losing him again.”

  Plucking at weeds that never had a chance to become overgrown because she visited so regularly, she continued. “If you were here, you’d know what to do. Then again, you always told me to take risks. Live an adventure. Seemed like really silly advice. There weren’t many adventures to have in this town.”

  Pausing, she considered the sky. “Then again, when we were kids, Brax and me, we came up with a thousand adventures, even if they were pretend… I don’t know what to do.”

  Silence answered her. She would give just about anything to curl up in her grandma’s lap again, like she had when she was little, all safe from everything.

  “And I’m scared too, because of Mom. I know you said I wasn’t like her. Mom was always a little weak and you said I was stronger. But what if I’m not? What if I end up like her? Even if he doesn’t leave me, how selfish would it be to stick him with that? Especially if I really love him. If I never stopped.”

  Night closed in, wrapping the graveyard in muffled silence, broken only by the songs of the night creatures and the sound of the breeze shuffling through the leaves.

  “I wish you were here. If you were here, I would ask you.”
>
  Standing, she brushed off her jeans.

  “Love you, Grandma.” She headed home, leaving the shadows of the past behind her to face her demons.

  Just because the boxes sat in her living room, smelling of dust and old fish, didn’t mean she had to read the letters inside it.

  And even if he wrote her thousands—thousands! The number still seemed unreal—of letters, it didn’t make him leaving any more forgivable.

  She ate dinner. She checked email. She took a bath.

  Desperately, she tried to ignore the boxes and the single blue crate that sat on her coffee table, demanding her attention.

  A letter every day for a decade.

  Finally, dressed in her comfy flannel pjs and cupping a mug of sugar cookie tea, she faced the boxes.

  It couldn’t hurt to read one.

  Pulling one at random, she ripped open the seal. This one was dated 2004, June.

  Abby,

  It’s been a few years and you still aren’t answering me. Some days I tell myself I won’t write another letter.

  Then night falls and in the quiet time before I fall asleep, I want to talk to you, like we always did when we were kids.

  I’m supposed to get married tomorrow. She’s great. You’d like her. She has hair a little like yours and soft lips. She doesn’t have your spunk, though. You were always such a little shithead. No one could control you. And you sure were good at calling me out when I was full of it.

  I miss that sometimes. I wonder what you’re doing. Did you get married to someone else? Do you have a couple kids? I didn’t deserve you. I know that. I wish I did and I could have been what you needed.

  Does some other man curl his body around yours at night, like I used to when I slept over, and do you tell him your dreams like you used to tell me?

  I don’t know why I am torturing myself with this, tonight of all nights.

  Well, love you.

  Brax

  He was going to get married in 2004? He must not have gone through with it, or gotten divorced.

  Suddenly, she had to know more.

  Ripping another letter, she began the long process of finding out where he had been for the years in between.

  And crying a little when she realized that in every single letter, he told her he loved her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  July 9, 2013

  Abby,

  I think you and I should start fresh.

  Hi, I’m Braxton Dean. I’m a small town boy who fell in love with his best friend when he was a kid.

  Okay, maybe starting fresh wouldn’t work. I can’t erase the past. Wouldn’t want to. Too many of those memories were some of the best of my life so far.

  But I want new ones with you. I want to get to know you now. I want to see what changes time made on you. I want to hear what you think.

  I never knew what the hell you would say next. That always blew my mind. That was why I agreed to “Amazed” as our song. I know you liked it because it was popular, but me? I liked it because you really surprised me. You shouldn’t have been able to. We spent so much time in each other’s back pockets; I should have known you as well as the back of my own hand.

  But you never ceased to amaze me.

  I’m thinking of coming home. Whaddya say? Break a trend and actually answer me and tell me what you think?

  Love, B

  “This is the wrong size roofing nails, Braxton Dean. Your girl, she tried to cheat me and charge me for the other ones. If your father was here today, this wouldn’t have happened. I clearly told her—”

  “Look, Billy, I’ll get it taken care of for you.”

  Billy McDowell was a drunk and he probably ordered the wrong damn nails but telling him so wasn’t going to make this Monday any less monotonous.

  Braxton still stewed over the mystery of the letters. Abby wasn’t a liar. If she said she hadn’t gotten the damn things, she probably hadn’t.

  On one hand, it was a good thing. Over the years, there had been some very low points of his life and he wrote her every day, even when he was feeling like being a bit of a jackass. But some of the letters were him working through the very things that chased him back to her side.

  So he had to find the words all over again to tell her why she mattered.

  Everyone knew that the post office in this town was about as unreliable as they came. But for Ernie not to have delivered a single letter in ten years?

  It seemed more than coincidence.

  The bell dinged on the door at the front of the store and glancing down the aisle, he saw her reflection first on the polished hardwood floor.

  His eyes tracked up, gaze finding her face, and he knew that if she hadn’t read a single letter the last time they spoke, she’d read at least a few now.

  Which meant he wanted privacy when he talked to her. She looked raw with emotion, eyes bruised with lack of sleep, and he rushed to her side.

  “C’mon,” he said without preamble. “To my truck.”

  Palming the keys, he caught her arm and towed her after him before she could answer.

  She didn’t speak as he opened the door and basically shoved her inside, clicking her belt into place. She still didn’t say a word when he leapt up after her, clicking his own into the lock and starting the engine. He paused for a second, not sure where to go.

  And then the answer seemed simple.

  Driving out to the Watkin’s farm, he turned into the oil-well driveway that led back to the secluded pond that started it all, the place where he first revealed that he felt more than friendly toward his best friend.

  He slammed the truck into Park. She still hadn’t spoken.

  He headed over to her side of the truck, handing her down, and she walked away from him to gaze out over the water.

  “I read the letters. Mom apparently wanted them destroyed. My grandmother, because she loved me and I think, even when she was sick understood me, had Gracie keep them. Because Gracie is Gracie, she took her at her word and kept them—all of them—until I went to collect them on Saturday afternoon.”

  She was silent for a moment and the sounds of frogs started up before she spoke again, the quiet lasted so long.

  “I stayed up most of the weekend reading them. Thousands of them. You really did write me almost every single day from the one you left me standing at the altar.”

  “I did.” His voice came out husky.

  “Why did you come home?”

  “I told you that in the letters.” He wanted to go to her, to touch her. To turn her around and make her look at him so he could read her expression.

  “I want to hear it, Braxton.”

  “You were my first best friend. No one or nothing has ever been able to fill the hole that leaving you left inside me. Maybe it is selfish, but I want you back. I didn’t know how to be what you needed, not back then. I’m ready now. I want to be your partner, like we talked about. I want to learn to be what you need, be the one who collects your tears on my shoulder. I want to be the one to hold you while you dream. I want to love you, Abby. I know it’s been a long time. I get that we both have changed and grown. I want to get to know you.”

  “I feel like I still know you. I did before I read your letters. I do even more now.”

  Her words lit a light inside him. It felt like hope. “You do know me, you’ve always known me, and the letters were me making sure you knew who I was becoming. I want to know about the silent years, the ten long years I missed with you.”

  “It isn’t going to happen overnight, Braxton.” She still hadn’t turned to face him.

  “I get that.”

  “But I thought maybe it could start with me trusting you a little.”

  She turned and in one movement, she was in his arms. He dreamed of this moment a thousand times. Like always, with everything she did, she put her all into the kiss. He gave back as good as he got.

  Their mouths met and it tasted like years of repressed passion. His cock didn’t slowly ha
rden, it jerked to life so fast and hard he thought he was going to rip a hole in his jeans. He wanted her flesh under his hands, her skin next to his, her body riding his.

  But this wasn’t the past and he wasn’t making the same mistakes again.

  Pulling back from the temptation of her mouth, he asked, “Are you sure, Abs?”

  “Braxton, I haven’t been sure about anything since you drove your damn pickup truck back into town. But I know I want you. I also know I want to trust you. Can’t we start with that?”

  Which meant he still had something to prove.

  His fingers glided across her neck, kissing his way up her neck from her collarbone to the delicate shell of her ear. “That means we should take this slow, sweetheart, not that we should put it in fifth gear and blaze into the night.”

  “Fuck careful, fuck slow and fuck waiting, Braxton Dean. Do you want me?”

  She caught his dick in her hand, rubbing it in one long stroke from base to tip through his jeans. Pleasure shot from the pressure of her hand to the roots of his hair and down to his toes.

  “I’m not going to lie to you, Abs, I told you that. I want you.”

  “Then show me all the things you said you wanted to do to me in those letters.”

  His hands streaked across her flesh, ridding her of garments she wasn’t going to need for a while. Laying her out in the soft grass, he saw her naked for the first time in years and, not for the first time, found her more beautiful and desirable than any other girl in history.

  Her hands tried for his clothes but he deflected them easily, instead spreading her so he could delve into the moist flower begging for his kiss. He would give her what she wanted, but he would do it the way he dreamed of doing it. There would be no rushing him, not this time.

  When his tongue flicked her clit, her hips bucked and her soft cry rippled out across the pond. He smiled then, and slid his fingers inside her. “You’re hot and wet for me, my Abby.”

  She whispered his name as he caught the hard nub between his teeth and sucked it, flicking faster with his tongue, matching the rhythm with his fingers inside her tight passage. Releasing the bud, he looked up her body, her hips rocking to the beat he created. “Come for me, Abigail.” Rubbing his face back between her slick lips, he nuzzled her clit before again catching it and sucking and flicking it.