First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances (113 page)

And the photographs. God, the photographs. I’d torn them, shredded them, flung them wall to wall. The drawings of the sea and our little school, ones we’d done as kids that decorated the baby’s room, all gone.

But I hadn’t gotten rid of this, his proposal. In the box still rested the red velvet case that held my ring, a tiny blue stone on a silver band, as by then we knew Finn was a boy. I set the letter back in the box and picked up the case, popping it open. The ring was loose on my finger now that I was no longer puffy with baby weight. I held out my hand, trying to remember what it felt like to be secure in Gavin’s love, to have never known any other way to live. I had zero doubts back then.

But he’d walked away. He’d said all these things to me, written them on paper, and still, he left. On the worst day. When I needed him the most.

I tore the ring off my finger and shoved it back in the velvet box. I didn’t bother rolling up the scroll or putting the ribbons back on, just tossed everything back on top of the blanket and thrust the whole thing under the bed.

I was right to avoid Gavin. One night with him alone and look what happened! I was so stupid. So stupid.

I crawled up on my bed and buried my face into the pillow, annoyed when I could smell him on the fabric. I pushed it off the edge and curled up in a ball, all the lights still on, and decided to hold my breath.

The minute I started I knew it was different. Hardly any time had passed when my chest started heaving, trying to make me take in a breath, the way it used to be before I worked so hard for control, to stay calm, to slide into the blackness with acceptance and peace.

My lungs felt like they would explode, my whole body trying to make me breathe. I pressed my face into the sheets, but it didn’t help, I rolled over and gulped in air. The tears came, streaming down my face in a hot rush. I needed this. I had to do it. I couldn’t handle thinking. I wanted oblivion.

I jumped up for the lights, dousing the room in darkness. This time when I held my breath, I let the void come over me, no thinking, no impulses, and when my body resisted, I exhaled into it, floating into the perfect stillness. This time, when the blackness descended, hopefully I would just stay asleep.

~*´`*~

I woke up to the sun blasting through the window. My body ached from all the walking yesterday and chafed from sleeping in my clothes. I was tempted to see if Gavin had written me again, but then, my phone had gone all night without charging and was probably dead.

Just as well.

I heard people talking outside my window, a low murmur as though there was a small crowd. People here mostly just came and went, although an occasional party spilled out of someone’s door. The apartment buildings in this complex were small and placed between trees, a setup that always helped me feel like I wasn’t quite so hemmed in by neighbors.

My bedroom window faced another building, so I wandered to the living room. The blinds were closed, so I carefully pushed a couple of the slats aside.

Unbelievable. I stepped back a minute to blink, then looked again.

In the trees outside my door, hundreds of colored paper butterflies hung from the branches. Their wings glittered in the sunlight, winking, the wires so thin as to almost be invisible, as though an entire flock of them had chosen this moment to breeze by my window.

I ran to the front door and wrenched it open so I could see it better. That’s when I noticed the neighbors walking through the butterflies and touching their sparkling bodies.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” An older woman I’d seen a few times walking to her car cupped a bright blue one in her palm.

A younger girl in a red beret saw me and smiled. “They lead to your door.” She pointed behind her. “See, there’s just a few up there, and then they get thicker as we get closer to you.”

“Come see,” said the first women, her silver hair sparkling as she gestured for me to walk up the sidewalk. I stepped out carefully in bare feet, avoiding the bits of bramble and fallen acorns on the path. I saw what they were talking about. As I arrived at the street and turned around, I could see a clever progression of the butterflies in color, depth, and density.

The young girl held one close to her face. “These are all hand cut.” She glanced over at me. “Whoever did this for you spent a lot of time on it.”

I moved up the path again. White butterflies with iridescent sparkle gave way to pale blues, then pinks and gentle yellows, moving to minty greens and lavenders that shifted to plum and fuchsia and deep red and sapphire. I caught a movement at the corner of the building and we all turned to it. Gavin stepped out, as beautiful as I’d ever seen him, fresh and combed and wearing a crisp button-down shirt loose over khaki shorts.

My breath caught and the women murmured their appreciation as he came toward me, holding out his hands with another butterfly, a lovely, opulent eggshell blue. “One more,” he said and handed it to me by the slender wire. “For Finn.”

He held my hand as we both lifted it to the branch closest to the door and tied it around the slender limb. The other women moved away as I brought my palms to my hot cheeks. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say you’ll spend the day with me.” He backed away, giving me space.

The setting was like a fairy tale, Gavin, looking so much like he had in high school, the trees and morning sun striking the glittering butterflies. A breeze wafted through, shifting the strings and making the bits of color dance among the falling leaves. I nodded; what else could I do? Each of these moments were new wonders, memories I could hold on to. Even if it all fell apart later, we would have this.

Chapter 27: Gavin

The sand packed beneath our feet as Corabelle and I walked along the shore at La Jolla. She’d refused to ride my motorcycle over, which made me laugh, but I climbed into her car and let her drive us.

My fingers were cut up and sore from all the butterflies, but making them half the night had been bittersweet, remembering doing it years ago for Finn’s crib. Corabelle had gotten the idea from some Etsy shop. I resisted, saying we should just buy a plastic one with a battery and music. But she had this vision for the nursery, all our hopes and dreams with the drawings we’d made of the sea.

So I dutifully cut butterflies from card stock, laying them out on newspaper to be spray-painted. Served me right to be making hundreds more years later, since I was pretty sure I grumbled and complained the whole time we did it the first time.

The wind whipped Corabelle’s hair into a frenzy, and she fought it constantly, twisting it in her free hand, holding her shoes in the other. This was probably a good thing, as it kept me from reaching for her, which I knew was too much for the moment, despite the other night. She was distant and reluctant, and I had to tread carefully.

“Do you come down here much?” I asked her.

“Not this far. It’s quiet.”

We’d walked about half a mile from the parking lot, the umbrella rentals, and the beachgoers trying to get a last weekend of sun before it got any colder. Compared to New Mexico, the temperature was downright chilly, but I had gotten used to it. “I prefer to stay away from the crowds.”

“You always did,” she said.

Rocks rose to our right, brown and sparse and dotted with tide pools. The great expanse of the ocean spread to our left, blue and sparkling, occasional white crests breaking across the surface. Gulls swooped along the shore, their distinctive caw the only sound other than the roar of the waves. It seemed we were the only two people in the world.

Shouts broke the peace of the moment and we turned to the rocks, where a father and his two sons scrabbled along a path. “Wait for me!” the dad called. The boys were young, maybe seven and four. The little one tripped and skidded in a bit of sand. Before he could cry, the father had scooped him up. “Almost there, Champ, no tears.”

I realized I had stopped walking, watching the man with the boy the age Finn would be now. Corabelle slipped her hand in mine, and I knew she was thinking the same thing. The threesome continued past us back the way we’d come and I forced myself to look ahead, not to turn and see them go. The missing part of our picture was very real and all my optimism that Corabelle and I would move on together began to crumble.

She leaned her head on my shoulder. “It is always that hard for you?”

“No. I normally don’t pay any attention.”

“Then it’s me.” She tried to pull away, but I gripped her hand hard. Her hair was completely wild, blowing like a black specter, a haunting image against the backdrop of the tumultuous sea.

“I’m glad it’s you,” I said. “I didn’t know how numb I’d been until you came back.”

She nodded, her expression lost in her hair.

“Here,” I said. “I think I remember how this goes.” I dropped my shoes and let go of her hand to gather up the wild mane. She turned into the wind so it all blew back and I separated it into three sections. I learned to make a braid when we were in middle school, after she left me one weekend for a slumber party with other girls. I felt lonely and betrayed and when I asked her why she chose the girls over me, no doubt with some pathetic sulky look on my face, she said they could fix each other’s hair.

I stole one of my sister’s dolls to practice this, working out the pattern. The dolls were easier than the real thing, though, as the layers and head shape made the lengths inconsistent, and I never quite knew what to do with the ends. But I wanted to learn. I wanted Corabelle to never find me lacking in any way.

My fingers felt fumbly and uncoordinated as I tugged her hair into a braid. When I got to the end, I told her, “Hold this,” and reached for my boot, swiftly removing the lace. I tied her hair down, weaving the lace back and forth across the bottom half of the braid so that it wouldn’t come out easily.

When I let go, she ran her fingers along its length. “Not too bad.”

I scooped up all our shoes, lashing them together with the ends of the other lace, and didn’t hesitate, but took her hand again. She accepted this, more relaxed than before. It wasn’t until we resumed walking, this time with our feet in the water, that I realized we’d gotten past that hard moment together, and I felt sorrow for all the other times we could have shared those hardships instead of bearing them alone.

“So are you going to feed me or do I get to walk for hours on an empty stomach?” Corabelle asked. She looked so young with the braid, her face so innocent, a few stray tendrils curling along her forehead.

“We’ll have to turn back to La Jolla for food,” I said. “Ahead is Black’s Beach and there’s nothing there but naked sunbathers.”

Her eyes grew wide. “I’ve heard about that beach. I’ve never been.”

Just the idea of her there, her body laid out in the sand, made my blood start jumping. “Go with me and I’ll be your slave forever.”

“You’re already my slave forever.” She cracked the smallest smile, but still it was a smile.

“We’d get arrested. I couldn’t possibly keep my hands off your delectable body.” I pulled her toward me, letting the shoes drop again.

She didn’t resist, tilting her head up so that I could kiss her. She tasted like sand and salt, and her cheek beneath my thumb was gritty. I pictured her skin drenched by the sun, and I could scarcely keep myself in check, pulling her in so tight that she fitted against me, my mouth feverish over hers, tongue sliding between her lips into her warm waiting mouth.

When our hips moved together, she broke away, gasping. “This is so hard,” she said.

I pressed her face into my shoulder and just held her. “It doesn’t have to be.”

“I don’t know what I want.”

“I do. I know that I want you.”

She shuddered against me. “The butterflies. I destroyed the mobile.”

“That’s okay.”

“Tore it apart with my bare hands.”

“I’m sure it’s what you needed to do at the time.” I stroked her head.

“I shouldn’t have done that. It was Finn’s.”

“It’s okay.”

Her breaths were fast and shallow, like they had been in the stairwell that day. I started to worry about her fainting again, but she quieted down, slowing down her exhales. I just held on and waited for her to come back around. At last she looked back up at me. “Thank you for the new ones.”

I kissed the top of her head. “You can thank me by getting naked on Black’s Beach.”

She half-smiled again and pulled away, punching me on the chest. “In your dreams. Besides, you’d pummel anybody who looked at me.”

I snatched up the shoes. “True. They’d have to call it Blood Beach.” I turned to lead her back to La Jolla and get her something to eat, but she stood staring at the waves. “You okay, Corabelle?”

She looked at me, her brown eyes so full of sorrow. “I don’t know how to be happy.”

My heart squeezed. “I think it can be a choice.”

“But I’m trying to choose it.”

“Here’s what I think.” I knelt and picked up a stick that had been washed ashore. “I can draw this line.” The end of the stick cut through the smooth surface of sand between us. “On your side is grief.” I pointed at her feet. “On my side is happiness.”

I stood up and tossed the stick away. “Now you can step across it and not look back.”

Corabelle kept looking at the line, the sharpness of it stark against the miles of smooth unbroken sand. “But I want to look back. I want to remember Finn.”

“Crossing the line isn’t about forgetting the people we love. It’s about not letting our past sorrow steal our future joy.”

She still didn’t move. I knew this was hard for her. I crossed over years ago, not exactly into happiness, but at least away from the misery. Our lives were made up of hundreds of these lines. Choosing when to cross was different for each person. We each had our own timeline for letting go.

She looked up at me, and I held out my hand. Her eyes shifted to it, waiting there for her to accept what I offered, hovering between us like an unspoken promise. Then she reached for it, closed her fingers around mine, and took that first tremulous step, out of her old world, and across the line into mine.