by Katy Paige
He leaned forward, resting his lips against hers, more to stop her words than to kiss her. He moved his lips softly, brushing against her lips, licking them then brushing them again. When he drew back, he could make out her eyes in the moonlight, blue pools of worry, of hope, of uncertainty.
“I love you, Zoë. I love you. They’re not just words I said to get you in bed.”
“I know that. But, you also didn’t sign up for—”
“Yeah, I did. The second I said: ‘I love you,’ I signed up for all of it. All of it. In fact, it’s mine. It’s mine now. It belongs to me.” He saw the muscles in her jaw clench and release, and he released her hip to brush her hair away from her face slowly, holding her eyes. “This is true love. Do you think this happens every day?”
She sniffled and grinned at him. The Princess Bride.
He nodded and kissed her nose.
“So, I’ll be there when you go under and I’ll be there when you wake up, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. She tried to smile, but her lips didn’t quite turn up. “I don’t deserve you.”
“Shush. I don’t deserve you,” he murmured.
But the quiet sweetness of his declaration was interrupted by her stomach, which groaned and growled loudly between them. Her eyes flew open and she burst into an embarrassed chuckle.
“Do you have a small child in there?”
“Well…after tonight…”
“You said you were on the pill!”
“I am! I’m just kidding!” she said, raising her eyebrows and biting her lower lip in teasing.
“Quit that.”
“Why?”
“It drives me crazy.”
“Maybe I want you crazy.”
“You want round three?” he asked, jerking her body against his, evidence of his readiness obvious. “And here I was thinking you wanted dinner.”
She leaned back from him, grinning, eyes sparkling. “Can’t I have both? Food first, you for dessert?”
“You can have whatever you want.”
“Dinner would be good. Then I want to come back here and stay right here until the second I have to fly home.” She traced the outline of his lips thoughtfully, leaning forward to press a kiss against them.
“Speaking of you going home...” Paul started.
“You’ll come see me in October. In three weeks.”
“I will. But, I can’t stay past the weekend. And I…I mean, I meant it at school tonight—when I offered you the job. Will you, I mean, would you consider—”
“Yes,” she said, taking a deep breath and releasing is slowly. He could see her making the decision before his eyes. “Yes, I’ll take the job. I’ll come back.”
“You’ll come back,” he whispered.
She smiled at him and nodded.
He clasped her to him, pulling her against his body and threading his hands through her hair, closing his eyes and kissing her neck.
“Will you live here? With me?” he asked, barely daring to hope.
“You want me to move in with you?”
“It will kill me if you living in this town doesn’t include you sleeping in my bed every night.”
“I wouldn’t want to be responsible for your death. I like you too much,” she said, and then more quietly. “I love you too much.”
“When can you come back?”
“Well, I have the surgery and then a follow-up appointment three weeks later, and…” Her voice trailed off and she looked away from him, thoughtful for a few seconds before finding his eyes again. “I have to work out things with Thea before I leave for good. I know this will sound weird, perhaps especially to you, in light of your history with Jenny Lindstrom…but Nils said I reminded him of her—of Jenny—and hanging out with him made me realize how much I miss being someone’s little sister. I need to make things right with my sister before I move here. I don’t know how long that will take. But, let’s say this…if she and I haven’t worked things out by Thanksgiving, I’ll come either way. I’ll be here by Thanksgiving at the latest.”
“Thanksgiving.” He couldn’t help the heaviness in his voice. It seemed like a million years away.
“But possibly as soon as Halloween,” she added. “I have a follow-up three weeks after my surgery, and after that, I’m done.” He winced and she shook her head. “I know it sounds bad, but it’s the last one. I’m sort of excited.”
“Well, I’m going to be a wreck.”
She kissed him lightly. “Don’t be a wreck.”
“So then what?”
“Well, I rent my apartment from Sandy, so I don’t have to break a lease. I’ll resign from my job with Stan when I get home and work the two weeks until the surgery finishing up projects for him. I don’t want to leave him in the lurch. He was kind to me, you know, when I was so lost.”
“It must have hurt to give up teaching.”
“You have no idea.”
“You’ll teach again. In just a few months.”
She smiled and nodded at him. “Remember what I said before? At the school? You gave me hope. You gave me my life back. You keep doing it. Making things better. Making me better. How do you do that?”
“You let me. Maggie used to say....” He adopted a crisp Scottish accent. “Ye have all this bonnie romantic energy. I hate to see it go to waste.” He smiled at her, running his hand lightly up and down the warm, soft skin of her back.
“It’s not going to waste anymore.”
“Thanks to you.”
She narrowed her eyes, staring into his. Finally she blurted out, in an amazed whisper, “Why do you love me?”
He reached up and caressed her cheek, tracing the line of the scar gently, holding her eyes.
“Sweetheart, I’ve been waiting for you all my life.” The dueling images of Alice and Gia, of Princess Buttercup and Miss Temptation stood side by side in his mind until they merged like chalk on a sidewalk during a rainstorm and all that was left was Zoë. She was everything he had ever looked for. “You’re brave and beautiful and noble. Hot and mysterious and vulnerable. Strong, but you still let me help you, love you. You’re funny and light…serious and dark. Adventurous and courageous, but still searching and uncertain and…you’re complicated and sad sometimes but then you smile or giggle and it’s like life can’t get any more perfect. You’re full of contradictions, and the thing is? The thing that scares me to death? I don’t know if I would have recognized you if we hadn’t happened the way we did. I wouldn’t have seen Miss Temptation. I would have been blinded by Buttercup. I wouldn’t have realized that what I actually wanted—needed—was both. Does that make any sense?”
She nodded at him wordlessly.
“What I needed…” he finished, feeling the relief of knowing his search was over and Zoë belonged to him as surely as he belonged to her. “…was you.”
She pushed him onto his back, lying across his body, holding his face between her hands and lowering her lips to his. “Dinner later.”
CHAPTER 20
They barely made it to the kitchen.
“Hey!” said Zoë, peeking in his refrigerator, his light blue button-down shirt rolled up to her elbows, and hanging down just above her knees. “We never had dessert on Monday night. Do you still have everything I brought over?”
He came up behind her, wearing flannel pants and a smile. He put his arms around her, burrowing his face in her hair. “Yes.”
“Want me to make you something?” Her stomach grumbled again. Loudly.
“For God sakes, yes, before that small child summons legions.”
She smiled, turning back to the fridge, taking out the eggs, dark chocolate and butter.
“Hey,” he said, as he hefted himself onto the counter opposite her. “The tattoos on your shoulders. I got to study them, um, during round two.”
She glanced up at him through lowered lashes, amazed by his beauty as he hopped onto the kitchen counter, his gorgeous, bare chest on full display. The space between her thighs
ached, but she wanted him again. God, he made her hot.
“And?”
“What do they mean?”
She swallowed, holding an egg suspended in midair. “The accident. One when it happened because we survived. The other in honor of Brandon, my little lamb.”
He jumped down off the counter and took the egg from her, placing it on the counter beside her and pulling her into his arms. “You’re going to make it right with Thea, sweetheart. I know it.”
She took a ragged breath then nodded at him. “I will. And fast. I won’t come back until I make peace with her, and I can’t stay away from you for long.”
He dropped his lips to hers, kissing her longingly, rubbing her back through the cotton of his shirt.
“Let me make cookies,” she murmured as he kissed her throat, then released her regretfully, resuming his perch on the counter.
“Nils has a tattoo,” she said softly, then added, “I think something terrible may have happened to him.” She looked up. “Do you have a mixing bowl?”
Paul’s eyes were concerned as he pulled one down from a high shelf, handing it to her. “What do you mean?”
“What happened to him ten years ago?”
Paul shrugged, thinking a moment before answering. “Beats me. He would’ve been…eighteen. That’s years before I got here.”
Zoë measured flour and sugar from canisters on Paul’s counter and found her baking soda sitting on top of the microwave.
“Something happened,” she sighed.
She cracked the eggs into the bowl and added butter melted from the microwave, careful to separate the two with the flour and sugar mountain in the middle so the eggs wouldn’t scramble. She handed him the three bars of dark chocolate. “Break these up into chunks, okay?”
She stood across from him, against the kitchen sink, stirring the cookie dough as he broke the bars into uneven pieces.
“What makes you so sure?”
“He has two small crosses tattooed over his heart, along with the year. When did his mother pass away?”
“Umm, just a few years ago.”
“Then it’s not about her.” She paused then looked up at him. “You asked about my tattoos. You know, I wasn’t the sort of girl to get a tattoo before the accident. But it changed me, and marking my body was a way to keep it close. Terrible things can become so much a part of you, it feels almost wrong not to wear them. And somehow—at least for me—by wearing them, you acknowledge them as a part of you forever, and there’s a peace that comes from that.”
Paul nodded, pouring handfuls of chocolate chunks into the bowl as she stirred to blend them into the batter.
“Here’s where I’m going with this…Nils has a tattoo over his heart of two small crosses and a date. It means something to him. Something big. Something important. And I think whatever it is, it keeps him from being free.” She shrugged. “I just wondered if you knew anything.”
“I don’t,” he said. “But it’s interesting what you said about him not being free, because he’s loved Maggie forever, but they’ve had an awfully hard time finding their way.”
Zoë nodded. “I know. And I think that tattoo has answers.”
The kitchen was quiet for a bit before Paul broke the silence. “Hey, um, I want to be sensitive here and I care about Nils, but…should it bother me that you saw his naked chest?”
Zoë rolled her eyes at him, holding the bowl against her chest as she mixed the ingredients. “I’m not even dignifying that with an answer. Cookie sheet?”
“So, it shouldn’t bother me?”
She put the bowl on the counter and stepped into him, looking up at his face. “You see me?”
“I see you.”
“I only see you, Paul. That’s how it is. That’s how it’s been since I met you. That’s how it’s gonna be.”
He put his hands on her waist and lifted her onto the counter so they were eye to eye. He braced his hands on the counter on either side of her, hanging his head, staring at his shirt covering the upper part of her thighs.
“Paul,” she whispered, without touching him. If she touched him, she’d have to have him. Right there on his kitchen counter. “There’s only you for me.”
He looked up, his face taut and intense, reflecting the full measure of his love for her.
“Then can you please finish these cookies? Fast?”
She grinned at him and he backed up, reaching down to open a cabinet and hand her a cookie sheet.
***
Thirty minutes later, they sat on the sofa in front of the fireplace in his back parlor, eating cookies and drinking cold milk with Cleo curled up on Zoë’s lap.
“These are good,” he said, biting into a third cookie, intending to eat his fill before carrying her back up to his bed. He needed his energy for rounds four, five and six. And maybe seven. And hell, while they were at it, maybe eight too.
“It’s the dark chocolate,” she said, grinning at him, a fleck of chocolate hanging on the edge of her lip. “My mom swore by it.”
He leaned forward to kiss the crumb, then sat back, grabbing another cookie.
“She was a good cook? Your mom?”
Zoë nodded. “She and my aunt owned a restaurant.”
“So, that was true.”
She raised her eyes to him, looking worried. “Paul, you have to know…almost everything was true. You just got some information out of the order it actually happened.”
“Was anything not true?”
She seemed to consider his question for a moment before he saw her lips tilt up in a little grin.
“What?” he asked.
“Well, really and truly, almost everything was true. Just out of order. I was a teacher before the accident. I had a great relationship with my sister and nephew before the accident. There was really only one bold-faced lie that I can think of.”
“Which was?”
She blushed. “I never wanted to be pen pals.”
He stared at her for a second before laughter, deep and pure, bubbled up from his chest, and he pulled her to him, disrupting poor Cleo, who leaped to the floor just in time before being squished between them. He held Zoë on his lap, in his arms, enchanted by her, beguiled by her, totally in love with her. How in the world was he going to make it two months without her?
“What’s wrong?” she asked, as his laughter subsided.
“I’m going to miss you a lot.”
“You’ll come see me in October. And hey—if Thea and I can work things out? I could be back by November first.”
“Will you come home with me for Christmas?” Paul asked.
“To your family? In Maine?” She bit her lip in thought. “You know, come to think of it, you weren’t one hundred percent honest with me either. I should probably be a little mad about that. You sure glossed over your relationship with them.”
“Yeah,” he exhaled. “It’s not good. I don’t love going back.”
“Well. Maybe just for this year, we could both stay here together. For our first Christmas we could just stay home.”
He looked into her blue eyes and just like that he knew: wherever she was, that would be home. And in an instant, his house wasn’t his anymore…it was their home, their bedroom, their kitchen, their dog. Everything he had was hers too. Just like that: Zoë Holly Flannigan was Paul’s true home.
Whether or not he would ever work things out with his family was ambiguous; who he wanted to be with for the rest of his life was not. He would have to figure out how to best go about making that happen. But not now. Not right now. Right now he was too happy thinking about his future to be distracted with heartache from his past.
She ran her fingers through his hair, pushing it off his forehead, and he couldn’t bear it anymore. He had to have her. He stood up, scooping her into his arms and heading for the stairs.
“Round four?” she asked, burrowing into his shoulder and sighing contently.
“Round four,” he confirmed, continuing up the
stairs of their home to their bed, where he would memorize every inch of her body so that he could dream about her until she was home for good.
***
Because her flight left early on Saturday morning, she only had Friday while Paul was at school to say her goodbyes to Maggie, Jane, Lars and Nils. As Zoë walked to the Prairie Dawn, she saw Gardiner through a new lens: she looked at her surroundings and assessed them as her future home.
To finally let go of that fear and be free to love him was so incredible, it made everything look, feel, appear new. Blissfully, beautifully new. Almost as though she’d been given a new chance at life, Paul’s heart—his love for her—paving a new path, a whole new direction for her.
She hugged herself against the chill of the morning air, happiness bubbling up inside of her and telling her for the first time in two years that she was going to be all right. Life was going to be all right again. She had found love, and she was ready to open her arms to it, welcome it into her life and protect it with every bit of strength in her small body.
Having her future ripped away so shockingly would always be a touchstone in her life—a corner of intense wreckage and change—but without the accident, she never would have found the love of her life. She would spend the rest of her days in awe of the strange way that life can take away and give back at once, in unexpected, even bewildering, ways.
She swung open the door of the Prairie Dawn and found Maggie behind the bar.
“Well,” said Maggie, lips tilting up in a surprised, yet somehow knowing, smile. She snapped her laptop closed and put her hands on her hips. “Look what the cat dragged in. I’ve been wonderin’ which way it had gone. But, now, oh, look at you, Zoë! It’s all been managed, hasn’t it?”
Zoë scrambled toward Maggie just in time to wrap her arms around her new friend as she made her way out from behind the bar.
The women hugged each other and giggled and cried a little and when Maggie finally released Zoë to make her a cappuccino, she demanded to know the details of the big reveal.
“He offered me a job,” said Zoë, grinning from ear to ear as she sat down on one of the stools. “And a place to stay.”
