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His voice was hoarse with emotion, and I wanted to tell him to stop. I didn’t want him dredging up these painful memories.
“Maybe I do blame him for more than I thought, Otto. Even though I didn’t have to honor the promise I made… if Ross hadn’t thrown that punch in the first place, I wouldn’t have left you.” This last part was said in such a broken voice I quickly pulled his head up to kiss him.
“You can’t change the past, Seth,” I reminded him, speaking against his soft lips. “We’re together again, and who knows? Maybe if all this hadn’t have happened, we would have gotten together, but something else would have torn us apart. Hell, maybe even stupid youth would have gotten in our way somehow. We can’t look back and regret at this point, Walker. We have to just acknowledge the past and move forward.”
I kissed him some more, unable to keep from sipping from his sweet lips and enjoying access to him that had been cut off from me for so long.
When I finally came up for air, I met his eyes. “I’m so, so sorry about your brother, Seth. I can’t believe you lost Ross, and I wasn’t there to help you through that. If I’d known…”
“I know,” he said, looking down and then laying his head on my chest again. “It was awful. My poor parents were beside themselves.”
“How did your little brother, John, take it? I haven’t seen him since I’ve been back.”
“He changed. It was like a light went out in him that never came back on. I always thought maybe he felt helpless being so young when it happened. He was sixteen.”
I was surprised at that. John Walker had always been lively and outgoing; so much so he told everyone to call him Johnny just so we could all tease him about his name. “Really? He was the first to move back here, right?”
He nodded. “After college, Dad managed to get him a job at the insurance office here selling policies. He met Beth while he was in school. She already had two sons from a previous marriage—Hal’s who’s thirteen and Cody, a nine-year-old who’s Tisha’s best friend. Then together they have a five-year-old daughter named Eliza. I think John was hoping to take over the Hobie office when the position opened, but then Dad decided to move back and take over instead. And now Jolie is working there too.”
I’d heard a rumor that Jolie had taken the place of the woman who’d been answering the phones there for a million years, but I didn’t say anything. Walker’s dad had never been one of my favorite people, and I wasn’t surprised he’d fired the woman to make room for Jolie. I wasn’t sure I could really blame the guy. He probably wanted to provide her a steady income and flexibility to be close to Tisha when she needed her mom.
There was one question that had been burning inside of me since I found out about this whole thing. “When did you two get married? Like… whose idea was it to actually go through with it?”
Chapter 13
Walker
Dear Walker,
Well, I’m just going to pretend we’re still together, because one day, by god, we’d better be.
Graduation was a shitshow. A thousand Wildes and what seems like only twelve other people in attendance. Sometimes family can be a blessing and a curse.
So here’s the scary part… I’ve decided to join Saint in applying to the navy. I’m terrified, but I also know I can’t sit around here waiting for you to change your mind anymore. I’m going to go drown my sorrows in the world’s greatest oceans.
Okay, just kidding. I’m going to try and become a navy SEAL. And if that doesn’t work, at least I’ll get a nice dose of seamen…
Miss you, More than I can say.
Wilde
(Unsent)
I didn’t blame him for wanting to know more about my marriage. Had he been the one to leave me and marry a woman, I don’t know what I would have felt like. Angry, betrayed, sad, desperate… I had no idea how he could even begin to forgive me.
“She was almost six months pregnant when Ross died. They were all set to get married that April but he died in March. Like I told you, he made me promise to marry her just to give the child his name. At first, I almost went back on that promise.
“But then I saw how sad and alone Jolie was at the funeral. She sat over on the side, not really a part of the family but not one of his friends either. I’ll never forget… she was wearing this thin green dress that looked like something that came from the thrift shop, but she’d done her hair in this elaborate twist to try and dress it up as much as she could. I realized she had nothing and no one. It was going to be her and that baby living in some homeless shelter unless we helped them.”
