Текст книги "All It Takes"

Автор книги: Sadie Munroe

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

All I hear is Star.

“I love you, too, Ash,” she whispers, and I squeeze her close and just breathe her in. “I love you, too.”

Chapter 20

Star

“Now are you sure that you both don’t want to stay with us,” Ash’s mother asks for the hundredth time since she first suggested it. “We have plenty of room.”

“That’s okay, Mrs. Winthrope,” I say, and try to suppress a grin as Ash rolls his eyes and leans against my shoulder. “We’ll be fine at the house.”

“It’s just that you’re both still healing, dear,” she says. “And I don’t like the thought– Roger! Roger, turn here! I don’t like the thought of the two of you being on your own at a time like this.” She’s turned around in her seat now, looking over her shoulder at us, her eyes soft as she catches a glimpse of Ash’s arm around my shoulders, her son cuddled close to me. I wonder if she’d look so happy if she knew the things Ash has been muttering to me the entire ride over, low enough so she can’t hear them.

He doesn’t mean them, though. I can see how happy he is to have his parents around again. So I’m not going to blow his cover. “Really, Mrs. Winthrope,” I say. “We’ll be just fine.”

“Well, if you’re sure,” she says. “And really, dear, call me Nadine.”

“Okay,” I say, and smile at her, even though I have absolutely no intention of doing any such thing. Just because Ash and I are together doesn’t mean I’m ready to get all chummy with his mother. Not when I wasn’t even that close to my own.

Maybe Brick was right. Maybe I do built up walls around me. But sometimes people manage to get inside them with me. Like Ash did. I smile and lean over and press my lips against his cheek. “Your mom is going to make me crazy,” I whisper in his ear as Mrs. Winthrope argues with her husband over which is the best route to get to my mother’s house. Well, she argues. He just kind of nods and phases her out.

“Join the fucking club,” Ash murmurs back, a little too loudly, and I poke at him with my good hand, trying to shut him up before his mother catches us. Or before she catches onto the fact that he’s faking sleep. One or the other.

“You keep quiet,” I say. “We’ll be alone soon enough.”

I can feel his smile against my skin.

“I like the sound of that.”

All told, we were in the hospital for just over two weeks, but it had only taken hours after we’d been reunited for us to find out what had happened.

It was Preston. Lacey’s boyfriend. It was his car that hit us. An accident, they said. Both cars were totaled, my mother’s old station wagon completely destroyed. And even though his buddy who’d been in the car with him had messed his back up real bad, my injuries and Ash’s had been far worse. The doctor had come in while Ash’s mother was explaining what happened, and he’d confirmed what I’d known to be true. The pinkie finger on my left hand was gone. Amputated. Too destroyed to even try saving. On top of that I had some bruised ribs and a black eye to end all black eyes. Ash had made out only slightly better. Broken wrist, deep puncture in his thigh and another in his lung that they’d managed to get to before it got too bad. That wasn’t even counting the innumerable bumps and bruises between the two of us.

All things considered, though, I figure we made out okay.

And Preston? That bastard had walked away without a scratch.

“Gonna beat that guy’s ass into the ground if I ever see him again,” Ash had muttered into my skin, snuggling closer to me on the hospital bed. Despite what the doctors and his parents had said, he’d refused to be budged, and for the past two weeks, we’ve barely been out of each other’s sight.

To be honest, I’m kind of starting to get used to it.

It’s . . . nice.

“Now,” his mother says, turning around in her seat to look at me as the car pulls into the driveway. “Are you sure that you and Ashley will be all right here? It’s perfectly all right if you want to stay with us.” She turns around in her seat again, and orders her husband to move the car up farther in the driveway. “No, farther! There. Was that so difficult?”

“She says that now,” Ash mutters against my shoulder. “But the second she catches us doing more than holding hands, her brain will explode.”

“Shut up,” I murmur in his ear, but I’m smiling as I do it. “Ashley.” I get a poke in my side in response, but it’s in one of my—very few—uninjured spots, so it doesn’t bother me all that much. I turn back to face his mother. “Honestly, Mrs. Winthrope—Nadine,” I correct myself before she can do it for me. “We’ll be fine here. We’ll just clear a couple extra paths and—” and take it easy, I’m about to say, but as I turn and look out the car window, the words catch in my throat. There, on the front porch, is Autumn. And Roth. And as I watch, Maisie and York and about half a dozen other people I’ve seen around town but have never actually met begin filing out the front door to stand with them. What on earth?

My heart is slamming in my chest as I shake Ash into sitting up, and I can feel the second he sees it by the way his body jerks against mine. Slowly, I turn back to look at Ash’s mother, and I’m blinking through tears to see that she’s smiling at me.

“We wanted it to be a surprise,” she says. And that’s when I really start crying.

They cleaned it. Autumn and Roth and York and Maisie. Ash’s parents. Them and a handful of people they’d recruited, they’d cleaned out the whole house.

Ash and I walk through the house in a daze, leaning on each other for support. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot. There’s still work to be done, walls to be painted, boxes of things they deemed important to go through. But those are stacked up neatly in the corners of the rooms, and the color of the walls was never my problem. My mother’s hoard was. And it’s gone.

I’m crying again, and I’ve shed so many tears lately that my face actually aches from it. But Ash is gripping my hand like a lifeline, and every time I turn to him, he’s smiling at me.

“I can’t believe it,” he says. “I’m thinking maybe I’m still in the hospital, and they’ve got me on the really, really good drugs.”

I laugh and sniffle, reaching up with my injured hand to wipe away what I can from my wet face. “Then how do you explain the fact that I can see it, too?” I ask. He smiles and leans over to press a kiss to my temple.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m pretty sure it’s real. And if not, then it just means I’m sharing the good drugs. Win-win.”

My laugh comes out like a sob, and I feel a gentle hand land on my elbow. I turn and see Autumn and Roth, and I drop Ash’s hand briefly so that I can reach out and wrap my arms around them both. “I can’t believe you did this,” I whisper.

They squeeze me back, Roth a little bit uncomfortably, and I’m struck by a sudden urge to reach up and ruffle his hair. He’s so bad at being a real boy. Instead, I just lean into them both, and Autumn nuzzles into my shoulder.

“What else were we supposed to do?” she asks, and when she pulls back I can see that she’s been crying, too. “Just leave it while you guys were in the hospital? There was work to be done.”

I pull out of her embrace, but reach down with my good hand and squeeze her hand in my own. “Thank you,” I say, but I have to force the words out through the boulder in my throat. She squeezes my hand back, but then she doesn’t let it go. I look up at her through aching, tear-damp eyes, and she tugs on my hand. “Come on,” she says, pulling me gently forward. “There’s something I want to show you, something we found.”

I let her pull me through the house, down hallways I haven’t seen the floor of since I was a little kid, past pictures on the walls that I barely recognize. Finally, we stop at a door. It’s the door to my childhood bedroom. Even after months of working on the house with Ash, we’d never even gotten close to making it this far. Keeping my hand in hers, Autumn reaches out and opens the door.

And the bottom drops out of my world.

The walls. They’re murals. Image upon image, layered together to form a single story told in pictures. Horses and pigs with wings, unicorns and princes and even a princess with her very own sword, wielding it against a fearsome fire-breathing dragon. I want to look everywhere, all at once, but instead I’m frozen, standing sagged against the door jam, my heart in my throat.

It has been so long, so long that I had forgotten.

My father had painted these.

He’d painted them for me.

And now they’re mine again. I sag back against Ash, who’d followed after us, and I’m caught between laughing and crying. I never thought I’d find any of his art ever again. Now I have a whole room of it, a thousand images to choose from.

“Thank you,” I whisper, turning and burying my face in Ash’s shoulder because I don’t know what else to do. His hand comes to rest on my back, rubbing up and down and I see Maisie come up behind him, tears in her own eyes.

“There’s one more thing,” she says, and for the first time I notice the shoe box she’s holding. She looks down at it, strokes her fingers over the top of it. “We found it when we were cleaning.”

She holds it out to me, and I pull away from Ash just enough so that I can reach out and take it. It’s lighter than I expect, but still my arm sags, exhausted. “What is it?” I ask, holding it out to Ash so that he can help me remove the lid. But I don’t need them to answer. As soon as the lid’s off, I can tell what it is.

It’s letters. Dozens of them.

I turn to Autumn, confused, and she gives me a sad little smile. “They’re from your mother,” she says. “They’re for you.”

All of a sudden, I can’t take it anymore, and the gentle stream of tears that has been escaping my eyes turns into a torrent, and I collapse against Ash.

These people, right here. They’ve given me everything. Their time, their care.

Their love.

They’ve even given me the impossible.

They’ve given me my parents back.

Ash

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask as Star settles down next to me on the bench. It’s not even dark out yet, but the campfire York built before he and the others left for the evening is already crackling away in front of us.

“Definitely,” she says, and shifts around so that she can drop the box Autumn had handed her from underneath her good arm into her lap, without using her injured hand. Not gonna lie, I’m so so glad that we both survived the crash, and that we managed to do so without any life-altering injuries, but I’m fucking gutted that she lost her finger. And no matter what a brave face she puts on, I know she is, too. The pinkie-swearing was kind of our thing. But I’d rather have Star with me than just about anything else, even our stupid little ritual.

I’ve been turning it over in my mind ever since I woke up. The crash. Maybe if I’d done something different, we wouldn’t have been hit at all. Maybe if I had just taken her dancing, or not taken her out at all, or not looked at her or not gotten distracted, or a million other things, then we’d both be okay. Star caught me thinking about it once. It must have shown on my face, the guilt, because she asked me what was wrong. And after a token of resistance, I told her. I don’t know what I expected, I guess that she’d be pissed off at me or something, having realized I’ve messed her up permanently.

But all she did was roll her eyes at me.

“You’re an idiot,” she’d said, leaning over to give me a kiss to ease the sting of her words. “If you’d done anything different, yeah, we might have been okay. But at the same time, we might have died. So don’t be stupid and think about what-ifs okay? You’re here with me now, and we’re okay. That’s what matters.”

Then she’d stolen my Jell-O and winked at me. So that was that.

“But seriously,” I say, nodding down toward the box, reaching over to help her tug the lid off when she starts to struggle a bit. “These were from your mom. Are you sure you don’t want to keep them?”

She looks up at me, and there are tears in her eyes, but she nods. “I’m sure,” she says. “I can’t turn into her. I can’t keep everything. If you keep everything, you end up losing what’s most important.” And it’s true. Her mom kept everything, but lost Star. I feel my own eyes start to prick at the thought of what that woman must have gone through, and reach over to wrap my arm around her shoulders. “Okay,” I say. “If you’re sure.”

“I am,” she says. “Besides, this way, I get to say goodbye to her on my own terms. Not anybody else’s.”

I lean over and press a kiss to her mouth, holding her tight until I feel her start to relax, then I pull away. Her eyes are shining with tears, but she nods and reaches down into the box and pulls out the first letter.

“Dear Daughter,” she reads.

One by one, she reads the letters her mother had written for her. And one by one, after she’s done and has read aloud the last line Love Mommy, I watch as she places the letters into the campfire, and says goodbye. After the first letter, I can tell she is starting to get choked up, so I reach over and wrap my arm around her shoulders, and hold her as tightly as our injuries will allow. After the second letter, tears are flowing freely down her face. She doesn’t even try to stop them. After the fifth, my own face is wet and my throat feels like it’s strangling me from the inside out. After that, I stop counting. I don’t know how long we sit there, but by the time she’s read the last letter, the one her mother had written just days before she died, the sun is staring to dip behind the horizon, and the light is beginning to fade, making the fire cast little dancing shadows around the yard.

I press a kiss to her temple as she finishes reading the last letter, her voice so choked up that the sounds she’s making are barely even words anymore. Then, instead of leaning forward and placing it into the fire as she had with the others, she takes a deep, shaking breath and carefully refolds the last letter, placing it back in the box. She sets it down gently on the ground next to her. Then she turns and wraps both of her arms around my middle, and burrows her face into my aching chest.

“It’s okay,” I murmur into her hair. “It’ll be okay.”

“I want to keep that one,” she whispers, and I can feel the moisture from her tears seeping through my shirt. I bring my good hand up and slide it down her back gently, nodding.

“Okay.”

“I want to get it tattooed, too,” she says. “Her handwriting. Dear Daughter, Love Mommy.”

I press a kiss to her hair, my heart aching for her, for all she’s lost. “I think she’d have liked that,” I say. “I know I would. It’s really nice.”

She pulls back just enough to look at me. Her eyes are wide and shimmering with tears, so I reach up and use my thumb to brush them away. She blinks and presses the side of her face into my palm.

“I love you,” she says, her voice still choked up.

I lean forward and press another kiss to her forehead.

“I know,” I say. “I love you, too.”

We sit there silently, just us and the fire, and together we watch the last of the letters burn into nothing, sending little bits of ash up into the darkening sky like stars. I take a shuddering breath. I need to do this.

I need to move on.

I pull my arm from around her shoulders, and reach deep into my pocket, pulling my wallet free. Star looks at me, questions in her eyes, but she says nothing. Slowly, heart in my throat, pain in my chest, I open my wallet and pull out the slip of paper I stashed there what seems like forever ago, but really it was only a matter of months. I unfold it gently, and try not to flinch when Star reaches out a hand to tilt it toward her. She needs to see this. She needs to understand.

FATHER OF TWO KILLED IN CAR CRASH the headline reads.

She tilts her head back, reaching up and raking the fingers of her good hand through her dark hair, shoving the strands away from her face. “It’s about that night,” I tell her. “The crash.”

“The accident,” she says, and for the first time, I nod at the word, instead of brushing it off. That’s what it was, after all. Beyond anything else, it was an accident. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Not that night, and not any night before or since.

“I . . . ” I let out a breath and tilt my head back toward the sky. Why is this so hard?

Letting go shouldn’t be harder than holding on.

“I think I want to burn it,” I tell her.

“Are you sure?” she says, but it’s not a question, not really. I can see it in her eyes. She just wants me to be certain, like she was. I reach out with my free hand and link my fingers with hers.

And then I nod.

“I need to,” I say. “Holding on, it’s killing me.”

“Then do it,” she says, and nods toward the fire. “Let go.”

It’s as easy as falling. I reach out and let the fire take it.

I have something else to hold on to now.

Star

It’s late and everyone has finally gone home, and I just…

My heart feels so full right now. So thankful. I can’t believe everyone came out to help us like that. It . . .

It doesn’t feel real.

“So,” Ash says as he eases down onto the porch swing next to me. The swing shifts a little, and I’m worried about how sturdy it is. I mean, it looks good, but it’s been out of use for a long time, and I have no way of knowing if it’s going to stay attached to the porch ceiling. I’m having visions of it suddenly giving out on us, sending our already-injured bodies sprawling across the porch, covered in debris. But he manages to make it down onto the swing without incident, even though his movements are slow and stilted by pain. I wince in sympathy. I know the feeling.

“So?”

He kicks his feet out in front of him, and the swing begins to sway back and forth.

“Are you ever going to tell me what your other tattoo means?”

A smile sneaks across my face as I realize which tattoo he’s talking about, and before I know it I’m grinning so hard my face hurts.

I reach over and link the fingers on my good hand with the fingers on his good one, and squeeze them tight. And in that moment, I know that no matter what’s headed for us, we’re going to be okay.

Better than okay. We’ll be together.

He glances over at me and catches me smiling at him like a maniac, and his eyebrows raise a touch in confusion, a little furrow burrowing between them. But then he’s smiling, too, and Bruiser trots up and settles at our feet, shifting with a groan and then I can hear the thump of his tail against the wooden planks of the porch floor.

Still grinning, I lean over and press a gentle kiss to Ash’s mouth, careful of the bruises on his face. His free hand, the one with the cast, comes up to cradle the back of my head gently and our lips slide together until we find just the right spot, and his mouth opens under mine.

Long moments later, we ease apart, gentle as breathing, and the streetlights start to blink on in the distance. “That’s not an answer,” Ash murmurs, and presses a kiss to my forehead.

And I just shake my head and smile, closing my eyes as I lean back into him. “I don’t have to tell you what it means,” I whisper against his skin. “You’re going to figure it out on your own.”

Ash lets out a soft chuckle and tugs me forward to kiss me again. “Okay,” he says. “I can do that. After all . . . ” He presses another kiss to my neck.

“We have the time.”

Acknowledgements

To C, for being the best writing buddy ever. Thank you for all your help and support. You’re still my favourite.

To D, for helping me fix it. Thank you so much. You’re amazing.

To A, for reading it first. Literally. I forgot to read parts of it before sending it to you. You’re wonderful.

To K, for just being amazing. You’re one of the best friends I’ve ever had. So just thank you.

To Megan Erickson and Jennifer Armentrout, thank you both for your kind words of encouragement. They really meant a lot.

To all the bloggers out there, thank you for all the work you do. I really hope you like it!

And to everyone else. No matter who you are, what you’ve done, or what you’ve had done to you, someone out there loves the hell out of you.

Let them

Sadie Munroe has been dreaming up stories for as long as she can remember. She is often found staring off into space, brainstorming her next plot, even when she hasn’t quite finished the one she’s currently working on.

It’s a problem.

She lives in Ontario Canada with her family and her dog Trips, as well as what some people would consider far too many books (they’re wrong).

All it Takes is her first novel.