Page 140 of I Never Stopped Loving You

“Why did he tease you?”

“I never told him your name, but I told him I had a childhood crush who I was searching for. He always knew I had a type. Whenever it got brought up that I was seeing someone new, he would tease me saying he could guess exactly what they looked like. He’s known I was obsessed with you, but it was more than that. I’ve been lost without you, Willow. As much as I wanted to move on, I couldn’t. My heart wouldn’t let me because it’s always belonged to you.”

He leans away slightly and pulls off his jacket, dropping it to the floor behind him. His hand grips the fabric of his shirt, ready to pull it off, but he stops.

“There's something I want to show you,” he says softly.

“What is it?”

“Something I had done when I was seventeen years old. I'm surprised you didn't see it that morning on the couch.”

He smirks, and I can feel my cheeks blushing at the memory of that perfect morning.

“Okay. Show me,” I tell him before he hesitantly starts to lift off his shirt.

Beneath the fabric is the ink I remember seeing that morning. All the different images that didn't seem to have a pattern or reason. Just chaos. Beautiful fucking chaos.

My eyes drift over the different inks once again, then finally land on one on his chest. It's just above his heart. It looks like a flower. A very horribly drawn one, but a flower nonetheless.

He takes my hand and brings it closer until my fingers touch the inked skin on his chest. I can feel the sparks from our connection and it makes my breath catch. I take my time studying the tattoo. He watches me, staring at my eyes as I trace each line in it. Something about it seems familiar, but like everything else from my childhood, the memory is just out of reach.

“You drew this for me for my ninth birthday,” he says as I place my palm flat over the tattoo.

“I did?” I ask, slightly stunned.

He chuckles as he pulls his wallet out of his back pocket. He opens it and pulls out a faded piece of paper folded into a small square and unfolds it.

“We had a tradition for my birthday that we would go pick as many flowers as we could while we walked down our road, then we would go to Adler's farm to get freshly picked apples, and then on the way back we would stop by Beatrice's house on my family's property, and she'd have cookies made for us. Unfortunately, on my ninth birthday I was really sick with the flu. I could hardly leave my bed. But because I couldn't do our tradition, you drew me this flower.”

He hands me the faded paper with fold lines so deep from being folded up in his wallet all these years I don't think they could ever flatten back out. The drawing looks identical to the tattoo on his chest, and I'm stunned at how accurately they managed to tattoo it.

“You kept it?” I ask, emotion filling my voice.

“Of course I did. That was one of the last things you ever gave me. I'd never get rid of it. I loved that drawing so much that when I turned seventeen I got it tattooed on my chest…So that a piece of you would always be with me. Because no matter what, you were always meant to be mine.”

I can’t seem to stop the tears. All my life I’ve never known a love like this. Sure, my adopted grandparents loved and cared for me, but they took me in when I was young. They felt like it was their duty because their daughter was taken from them by her abusive boyfriend. They wanted to try to prevent that for others. They were actually the people that we were supposed to go live with the night my mom was murdered. I knew from an early age I was adopted and I was not allowed to talk about anything that I remembered from my past, even though I couldn’t remember hardly anything except through my nightmares. They finally told me the full story when I was sixteen and they felt like I was old enough to handle everything.

I felt it from the first time I saw those dark eyes in that elevator. It was like my soul lit up and recognized something familiar. Someone I should have been with all along.

“Are you ready to burn this place to the ground, Little Rabbit?”

I laugh at how completely absurd my plan was. What? Come out here in the middle of the night to burn a house down, yet expect somehow not to get caught? I keep laughing even as he looks down at me, confused.

“What’s so funny?” he asks.

“I was ready to burn this place to the fucking ground. You were ready to light the match. We were going to break so many laws tonight, all because of my panic attack.”

“So?” He says it as if I’m not crazy for wanting to do this.

“So? I can’t just burn someone’s property to the ground, no matter how much this place haunts my dreams. This house isn’t mine.”

“No, Willow. It’s mine.”

“What?” I’m looking at this man like he’s the crazy one now.

“When I finally had you back in my life, I knew that I wanted to give you the option to destroy the place that brought you so much pain. I tracked down the owner of the property the moment I walked away from you and my father, and then the night we were on our double date, I finalized the details. I own the barn, the house, and the small amount of land it sits on. The original owner still owns all the farming land. So you better believe you’re going to burn this fucking shit-hole to the ground and I’m going to be right by your side when you do it.”

I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him, almost painfully rough. He groans as I bite onto his lip and pull him closer. This man has done so much for me, even without knowing if I’d ever get my memories back. He searched for me for fifteen years and never gave up hope that one day we’d be back together.