A Perfect Mess (25 page)

But, now. Now I knew who he was and I was…had…fallen for him.

I loved him so much. So much.

After drying off and getting into a sleep shirt I slipped into bed. I checked the glowing alarm clock. Two. I closed my eyes.

I was behind on the work for Dr. Wells, but for the first time in my life I didn’t care. He’d given me a few days to handle my personal business, which had been kind of him. I wished I could immerse myself in my work. Let it take my mind off what had happened with Booker. Oh, I wished he had heard me out. Had listened to everything I had to say before leaving like that.

As soon as my mind returned to Booker, a wave of shame washed over me. I’d made a fool of myself. The image of his blue eyes and his wicked smile filled my head. The memory of his touch set off shivers that rippled from my neck downward. I was sorry I had kept that terrible secret from him for so long. Sorry that my consuming, desperate need to be perfect had burned what we were building into ashes, like Booker’s beat-up old piano. Apparently Booker couldn’t see beyond who he thought I was, and I certainly couldn’t live up to that kind of image.

Making love to Booker, god, it had been everything.

Tossing the blanket off me, I got out of bed, went to the French doors, and pulled them open. The night was just a tad on the chilly side, fragrant with the scents of summer that promised humidity and heat.

I turned my head. The Magnolia tree near the corner of the house still had a few blossoms, creamy, waxy white, nestled among the broad, leathery, dark green leaves. I used to love Magnolias.

I could see Wild Magnolia Road from my balcony. That old dirt road that I’d always used as a shortcut home.

I could see the old, burned-out churchyard, and I shivered.

Time slipped away as I stared down that road I had traveled that long-ago day in August, my emotions so raw that my throat kept closing up.

“Oh, god,” I whispered, closing my eyes and pressing my forehead against a smooth column. “I should never have come back here.”

A scrap of cloud scudded across the sliver of moon. A sultry breeze whispered through the branches of the trees. A chill raced over my skin and I gasped. Was that a figure in the graveyard?

I strained my eyes, staring into the darkness, sensing a presence. The sensation lingered like a dark, intent gaze, and the hair rose on the back of my neck. Langston, my mind whispered. Both of them haunting me.

The sense of being watched was thick in the air.

I backed up, swallowing hard as my heart climbed into my throat. Slowly I backed toward my bedroom, almost tripping on the lip between the balcony and the room.

I tried not to think about the figure I convinced myself I’d imagined standing in the graveyard.

A sense of relief flooded through me after I darted inside and locked the French doors behind me.

On my bedside table, my phone chimed. I gasped, my heart startling. Could it be Booker? The hope alive in me, I rushed over there, but the text message I read chilled my blood, dashed that bright feeling.

I know what you did.

#

The nightmare twisted inside me like something alive. I woke with a gasping start, sitting up in bed, panting like I’d run a really fast mile. The bleakness of my thoughts and the memories of Booker intermingled, turning the experience even more volatile, even more dark and dangerous. The air around me was warm and moist, a pocket of heat and humidity that had sneaked in through the French doors to escape the storm. The room was dark and still, a stillness that held something other than simple, quiet. Loss. I felt alone in a way I had never felt alone before in my life, and my thoughts turned automatically toward Booker.

I hadn’t been alone. I’d just isolated myself because that is what I had always done with my mother. I’d closed myself off from my aunt, from Booker when I was sixteen, because I just didn’t know any other way to be. Alone was what had felt right, normal. Now I just felt loss.

That also had never happened to me before.

Heart bumping hard against my breastbone, I fought to untangle my legs from the sheet and then raced out onto the balcony in nothing but my white camisole and numbered shorts. Down the stairs I ran till I reached the ground. Everything was all tangled up inside me, and it was time I faced what I needed to face.

I sprinted towards Wild Magnolia Road without thought or purpose. A small, rational corner of my brain told me to let the numbness back in, let it make me safe, but I fought against it. Something inside me was pushing me toward recklessness. I didn’t understand it, wasn’t sure I wanted to understand it, but I couldn’t seem to stop.

Where was my self-control? That rigid bitch inside me that held me to the most impossible standards? Where was she? I wanted to kill her.

When my feet hit the dirt road, I kept pelting down it, my lungs screaming, my legs straining, my heart breaking.

I reached the burned-out church, then ran into the graveyard, where I tripped and fell. I got up on my hands and knees and crawled. I didn’t know when I had started sobbing.

When I reached the spot, I pounded on the dirt mound. “This is all your fault! This is all your fault!” Anger bled from me, the fury that had lurked in every pore of my body. I screamed and howled and beat at the dirt mound until my fists throbbed, until every single ounce of scalding rage was gone. Expunged. Released like a torrent of pain that flowed out of me and into the face of the dawn.

But it wasn’t Damien’s fault. I knew that. I was railing at myself, the breakdown bringing a new chance to look at the possibilities. I screamed into the new morning. “I love Booker Outlaw!”

I gasped for air and the truth hit me, hammered home like my backpack full of bricks had just been dumped on my head. It was okay not to be perfect. I could never be perfect because I was real. I was human and flawed and beautiful! Every mistake I’d made had brought me to this moment and had been the building blocks of my uniqueness. Attaining perfection was an illusion I had maintained for so many years. The relief of letting that weight go made me feel as light as the breeze that blew across my moist, heated skin.

And I forgave Booker in that instant as I realized the very same thing about him. He was also not perfect, and I understood why he struggled with what I had done to him. It wasn’t that my actions were unforgivable. It was that, like me, his illusions had been shattered. But, unlike me, he hadn’t been able to let them go. I had made a huge mistake with him when I’d said nothing about what I had seen and, most importantly, what I felt for him. How much I admired that he’d had the courage and loyalty to stand by me even when I didn’t know he was doing it. There must have been something he’d seen in me that he believed was worth it. I hoped one day I could find out what that was. And, in that moment, I allowed myself to hope that his ability to see all the possibilities would someday, at the very least, allow him to forgive me.

When the sun hit the horizon of the new day, I got up and went back home, slipping up the stairs. Before I got into the shower, I heard my phone chime. But all that settled over me was an eerie calm.

Where’s the body?

My bruised hands ached as I typed the very short, very succinct message back.

Fuck you!

After my shower, I headed downstairs. My aunt was in the kitchen. The terrible ache wasn’t going away any time soon. And when I met my aunt’s eyes, I had to look away. I was so raw. There were things that needed to be said between us as well. “Good morning,” I said. “How was your date with the sheriff?”

“Good morning, Aubree.” The sheriff walked into the kitchen in his robe, looking like he belonged there. My eyes snapped to my aunt’s and she blushed ever so lightly. Even with the pain that twisted my heart, I was so happy that my aunt had found love, even as it eluded me.

“Well, I guess it went pretty good.”

My aunt’s laughter and the sheriff’s mingled. As I stood there, it hit me like a backlash. This is what love looked like. This was happiness. And, it looked so much like…what Booker and I had shared. The longing welled up in me to once again see that patented Outlaw grin that was so uniquely Booker’s.

“Maybe you should start calling me Mike?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said, giving the sheriff a weak smile. “That just seems so…um….illegal.”

He chuckled again. “Okay, how about Uncle Mike?”

He looked at my aunt and she nodded.

“Get out! Really?” Then I saw the ring on her finger. I flew across the kitchen and wrapped my arms around her, my throat tight. “I’m so happy for you. So happy.” Because this woman who had come into my life when I was twelve years old meant more to me than my own mother.

“I’ve got to get going,” he said, giving my aunt a knowing look. “I got that itchy feeling there’s gonna to be some powerful female bonding going on real soon. And wedding plans…” He shuddered. “Best the menfolk be absent.”

I punched him in the arm. “Good idea…Uncle Mike.”

He hugged me then, and I hugged him back.

After he had left the house and I put my cereal bowl into the sink, I turned to my aunt, who was at the French doors in the kitchen looking out on the beautiful garden patio, a cup of steaming coffee in her hands. She seemed so pensive all of a sudden, as if she, too, had a terrible secret.

With a newfound wisdom swirling inside me, I said, “Well, you waited a long time, but you’re finally going for it?”

“I did. And I am. The man I loved and married, he died very young. It was devastating. Then when Mike moved here, there was a spark, but I resisted it for such a long time. After I woke up from my concussion and he was there, looking so concerned, I saw the love in his eyes. And I asked myself, what am I waiting for?”

I walked over to slip my arm around her waist. It was easier to do that now. Another thing Booker had made easier for me. “It’s hard to let go of that safety net,” I said. “Hard to let go of being alone.”

She looked at me with surprise. Setting down the mug, she cupped my face. “You were never alone, Aubree. I have always loved you from the first…moment…” She broke off.

“Aunt Lottie. Do you know how my father died?”

“What?” she asked, her eyes widening with astonishment. “Didn’t your mother tell you about your father?”

“No. She never did.”

She took my hand and led me to the living room. She went to the liquor cabinet and poured out two shots of whiskey. My eyebrows rose. “This is going to be a whisky-shot kind of conversation?”

“Now that I’m getting married and you’re nineteen years old, a woman, I think it’s time that we did talk. I sense a new openness in you that wasn’t there before. After that scare in the hospital, I don’t want to wait another moment to tell you something that’s been so heavy on my mind. A secret that I’ve kept. But no more secrets between us, my girl.”

I sat down. I was prepared to hear what she wanted to say. She wasn’t wrong. There was a new openness in me. I’d lost that rigidity and self-righteousness in the fire of my revelations.

She set the shot glasses down on the table and settled herself on the couch. “Aubree, before I moved here to Hope Parish, I did missionary work in Indonesia, teaching English. I met and married another missionary while there. We had a daughter. She was wonderful. Happy, sweet and very squeezable.”

“What happened to them?”

“There was a tsunami. A devastating one. I lost them both.”

Instead of deflecting the pain in her voice, I absorbed it, my compassion for her welling up and spilling over. “Oh, God, Aunt Lottie. That must have shattered you.”

She sat there for a moment and I could only imagine the emotions that must be swamping her. When tears gathered in her eyes and her breath hitched, I watched as she valiantly fought them back.

“Yes, it did,” she said, her voice still wobbly. “I came back to Hope Parish, and I settled here and taught English. Then, as you know, I inherited this house and a substantial sum of money from a distant relative. That gave me a lot of freedom to do as I wished. I never got over their deaths, though.” She paused again the pain bleak in her eyes. “Mike encouraged me to get closure, find peace, and I decided he was right. I made a trip to my husband’s home town. That’s where I saw you, at his boyhood home, coming home from school the day your mother died.”

“What?”

“The minute I saw you, I knew who you were.”

I clasped her hands. I looked into her eyes and I knew who I was. “We didn’t die,” I whispered brokenly.