Page 75 of Left of Forever

She hooks her arms around my middle and looks over everyone making themselves at home in ours. “No. We’ll just slip away when we’re ready.” Her chin tips up against my chest, and our eyes catch. “We have whatever’s left of forever, you and me.”

CHAPTER 39

WREN

Ellis gives my ass an appreciative squeeze.

“Don’t get distracted,” I warn him under my breath.

“Too late. Shouldn’t have worn these jeans,” he murmurs.

“Ellis Orion Byrd. We have to stay focused here. They’re coming any second now.”

“Coulda been you, too, but you turned me down,” he complains.

I try to give him a stern look, but it stutters when I see his heated smile in the moonlight. “I seem to recall saying a lot of yeses when I closed the bakery for lunch this afternoon.”Lunchis in air quotes. “We’re gonna get caught again.” I let a groan slip free when I remember the exasperated look on my mother’s face when she came in the back door and found Ellis and me scrambling to right ourselves one afternoon two weeks ago. “We pushed my mother into an early retirement.”

“She was looking for an excuse.”

He’s not wrong. When we came back from our trip (a little over a month ago now), I found out that Mom had just straight up left the bakery closed for two of the days I’d been gone. She closed early on the others. Rather than let us throw her a party to celebrate her officially passing the whisk on to me, she and David jetted off to Hawaii on a whim.

Still. “Tonight isn’t about you or me or my mom, Ellis. Keep your eyes on the water.”

He rustles around in the sand next to me, rolling from his stomach onto his side and propping his head in his hand. “You look beautiful, Byrd. The moon makes your hair look silver.” He reaches over and plays with a stray coil.

I melt a little, even as I shake my head at him. He’s sharpened and honed his skills with compliments as of late. Sometimes he catches me so off guard that I don’t know how to reply, which is when he gets the smuggest. “Speechless again, I see,” he’d said yesterday morning when he met me at work and told me that watching me bake was like watching a conductor in an orchestra. “All passion and concentration for something with a bunch of moving parts that all need just the right amount of attention. All for something for everyone else to enjoy.” I stood there a little dumbly, flour on my face and a half-empty piping bag in hand.

Later, he told me he’d figured out that the secret to compliments is just saying them the minute they’re in his head, without trying to arrange them perfectly. It felt like he’d cracked an egg inside my chest, knowing that he’s been trying to speak from his so purely.

I wriggle closer to him, heedless of the sand scraping along my torso.

“I can’t wait to see her face,” he says.

“Me, either,” I say. Which is when a light catches my eye from down the small beach we’re currently hiding on. Two little phone flashlights, I see, upon closer inspection.

“It’s Micah and Silas,” Ellis says, and I can just make out their faces now from where they’re hiding behind another log, just like Ellis and me.

It’s a perfect late July evening. One of those rare warm(ish) summer nights we get in Spunes. The moon is full and bright in a cloudless, starry sky.

“Hopefully, Indy gets here in time,” I say.

“She will. She had to be at the house when they left so Sage wouldn’t suspect anything.”

Micah starts a crouched run over to us, kicking up tufts of sand and tripping over his own feet.

“What are you doing?! Get back to your hiding spot!” Ellis yell-whispers at him.

“Relax! I just need to ask Wren something real quick,” Micah replies. I hear a car door shut in the distance and see Indy making her way down to the beach a moment later.

“Wren,” Micah starts. “You know that little arched window above your kitchen sink? Do you happen to know where I could find a replacement?”

“Micah,” I groan. “No, I don’t. You are officially the worst tenant on the planet!” I’ve moved all my essentials back home with Ellis, as Micah has been making himself at home in my old place. It would be the ideal situation for all, if Micah didn’t happen to accidentally put a hole in a wall while moving furniture, break the refrigerator, and now break what sounds like a second window all in the span of a few weeks.

“Hey!” Indy says, excitedly jogging over to us. “You have the camera ready?”

Ellis lays a quick kiss to my hairline, still chuckling warmly over Micah’s cursed clumsiness.

“Yeah, I’ve got it here,” I say.