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“What were you taking pictures of, then?” I ask, confused.
“You,” he says softly, finally turning those beautiful dark eyes towards me. A pink petal falls from the blossoms above us, settling into his hair, a vibrant pink against the sleek blackness of it.
“You were taking pictures of me?” I repeat, disbelievingly. We’d spent hours by that tree every fall and spring growing up. And he was always taking pictures.
“It’s always been you,” he admits hoarsely. “I have thousands of pictures of you. Every time I tried to take pictures of something else, it just felt off. Because there wasn’t anything as beautiful and interesting as you to take pictures of. You were all I saw.”
He takes a deep breath.
“You’re still all I see.”
I can’t help but cry at his words. I didn’t know how much I needed them until this moment. He pulls me close to him, and I snuggle into his chest. We sit there for a while, listening to the sounds of the park around us, his heartbeat a steady and calming drumbeat beneath my ear.
I finally pull back once I’m able to control my emotions and take a huge swallow of wine, while he watches me almost nervously.
“So you were kind of my stalker in high school,” I say with an impish grin.
He laughs and rolls his eyes, apparently relieved at my reaction.
“I always did love a good stalker romance. Wish I’d known that I’d been living out one while growing up.”
He lets out a shaky laugh and takes his own huge gulp of wine. This wine is the good kind, the kind you are supposed to elegantly sip, but we both guzzle it for liquid courage. My mother would have been disgusted.
“Well, that’s good to know. If I’d known that sooner, it would have saved me from feeling like a creep all growing up.”
“Do you still have the pictures?” I blurt out, the wine obviously going to my head because I do not want to know the answer to that question.
I don’t want to hear that he burned them in a fit of rage and betrayal after I left.
There’s another long silence. We never used to have those types of silences between the four of us. Or at least, they weren’t so heavy.
“I still have them all,” he says with a sigh. “I tried to get rid of them over and over again over the years. I think I intentionally stayed out on assignment just so I wouldn’t stay holed up in my apartment staring at them. They’re in a shoebox in the deep recesses of my closet. And I’ve resented you every day that I wasn’t able to throw them away.”
There’s a lot to unpack in that statement. “You have all my pictures in a shoebox?” I ask, and then for some reason, I start laughing.
And then the laughing turns to tears.
I can feel that Carter is just staring at me worriedly like I’m losing my mind, and maybe I am. Because isn’t that just the saddest fucking thing—that our huge, epic love has been relegated to a fucking shoebox for the last ten years?
My hands tremble as I bring them to my face, spilling my cup of wine as I move. I watch as the dark liquid seeps into the ground.
“Sorry,” I whisper. “We just wasted so many years. And it’s all my fault.”
“Maybe this is how it was always supposed to be,” Carter says as he once again gathers my trembling body into his arms. “Maybe our love story needed to grow, to mature. Maybe we needed to find out who we were without each other.”
“That is such bullshit,” I sob.
He laughs, and now I can hear the tears in his voice that he’s trying to keep back. That stupid shoebox. “I know. That’s absolutely the fucking dumbest thing I’ve ever said.”
And then we’re both laughing again for no reason, and gradually, the sadness fades away for the time that’s been lost, and what’s left is gratefulness that we’re here under this tree at all.
Once we get ahold of ourselves, Carter pours us both another huge cup of wine and then we talk. And we talk and we talk. He tells me about his travels all over the world. He tells me some of the terrible things he’s seen, but he tells me about the moments that gave him faith in humanity too. He tells me about his life in New York and his coworkers. He tells me about the few times he’s seen his brother, Alex, over the years, and the talk they had at his Grandma Pearl’s funeral two years ago. He tells me about who Carter Hayes has become over the last ten years, and I soak it all up. Every single word he gives me.
By the time the sun is setting and there’s a faint chill in the air, the man sitting next to me isn’t a stranger anymore. He’s Carter again. And I love him so fucking much.
We walk back to the hotel holding hands once more, both pleasantly buzzed from the bottle that we finished off. Logan and Quaid are both waiting for us when we get back, sun-tanned from an afternoon of surfing. After dinner, we all watch a movie, and for the first time since we began this adventure, there’s no tension as we sit there watching some stupid comedy that still has us all laughing. I’m leaning against Quaid with my feet in Logan’s lap. Carter is sitting on the ground in front of me, holding my hand.
And I can’t remember a more perfect evening.
