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“If you change your mind and wanna talk, man, you know you can anytime. Even if we’re both outside the wire.” He slapped his free hand over my shoulder, meeting my eyes.
“Yeah, same for you.” I nodded, then turned to the side to see his mom hollering for him to head into the living room where the party was.
Everyone had been outside up until an hour ago when the storm decided to crash the party, forcing us inside.
I faced the window once again when A.J. did as his mom said, because you didn’t want to cross Deb Hawkins, that was for sure.
“What are you doing alone in here?”
I caught sight of Marcus in the window’s reflection. “Food is in here,” I joked, then turned to look at him.
Marcus slapped a hand to his chest and smiled. “The Hawkinses and their parties.”
“Ain’t that the truth. Give Deb a reason, and she’ll give you the party of the century.” I gulped back some of the beer.
“Am I really married, though? I mean, it’s been months and yet it still doesn’t feel real. You know? I just keep asking myself how’d I get so lucky? All my dreams have come true.” He erased the space between us, and I set the back of my head against the window.
“Because you’re a good person, Marcus. That’s how. Got yourself the heart of a lion.” So A.J. tells me.
“Don’t go telling the bad guys that. I’ve got a reputation with them. They like to call me Rambo.” He chuckled. “Wrong military branch, but I shoot them before I can correct them.”
“Sounds about right.”
Marcus set his palm to the glass, eyes on the storm. “But really, it’s wild to think I’m married. Only hanging out a handful of times before tying the knot is probably why it feels surreal, too. But Savanna says the whole falling in love through letters and emails had a Notebook-movie feel to it.”
I pushed away from the window and looked toward the living room bustling with people. “I don’t know what that means, so I’ll take y’all’s word for it.”
“But hell,” Marcus drawled, stealing a look at me, “when you know, you know. Right? Whether it’s through writing or drinks at a bar. Savanna and I just clicked from the start.”
I searched for my “when you know, you know” girl in the crowd in the distance.
Ella was holding her niece, McKenna, at her hip. McKenna’s father, Beckett, was now a single dad. His daughter’s mother had abandoned them shortly after McKenna was born, and—
My thoughts stopped when Ella leaned in and nuzzled McKenna’s nose with hers while tickling her belly, making her laugh.
Fuck. Me.
I’d never been more certain of what I wanted in my life.
That woman. And our child in her arms.
Up until tonight, I’d started to think my heart was dead. I’d even been struggling to sit and write Ella what I’d nicknamed in my head “the lost letters.” Lost to the war. To the chaos of it all.
Dead men didn’t write. And I’d felt at the brink of death every day. Alive enough to keep moving forward. Keep me in the war.
Long operations. Days bleeding into one another. Time as lost to me as the letters.
And in the last few months, my heart had become encased by titanium. Nearly impenetrable. Well, the only thing to cut me down would be a bullet in that fucked-up organ of mine. One kill shot would be all it’d take to finally put me down.
But seeing Ella again was like discovering there was still breath in my lungs. Somehow this woman always gave me the will to fight. To do more than simply survive. To try and be more than “just alive.”
Ella’s eyes met mine a few seconds later, and her beautiful blues stunned my thoughts into silence yet again as she stared at me.
“When are you ever going to tell her how you feel?” Marcus’s comment shocked my focus away from the vision in the pale pink dress and back to him. “A.J. will approve. Don’t let that stop you.”
“How do you . . .” That was one sentence I wasn’t prepared to finish.
Marcus smiled, set down his beer bottle on the nearby table, and fidgeted with the black band on his wrist. His lucky charm. A.J. said he rarely went anywhere without it. “Pretty sure everyone in this little town knows how you two feel about each other. I think even folks in Tuscaloosa know. Definitely in Birmingham.” He shot me a cocky wink.
