Chapter Twenty-Two
My phone dinged, announcing yet another text message. In another twenty-nine seconds, it would ring four times and then go to voicemail. Another ten minutes or so later, it would begin again.
“You gonna answer that?” Sam asked as she passed me a plate of spaghetti over our bar.
I spun the noodles on the plate, but I couldn’t manage to eat them. “Nope.”
She let out an exaggerated sigh. “Ember—”
“Don’t. Just . . . don’t, because I can’t.” I spun another bite and let the spaghetti fall off the fork.
Sam sat on the stool next to me and studied me thoughtfully as she chewed. “You haven’t eaten since yesterday. You’re not crying. You’re not talking. What am I supposed to do with that?”
Everything was numb, chilling me from the soul outward. There was no hurt because I couldn’t feel anything. At this rate, my arm could have been ripped off, bleeding pints onto the floor, and I wouldn’t have noticed. All the color had drained out of my world, taking with it my ability to feel . . . anything.
I played with my food and watched the digital clock on the oven changing. Six more minutes. Five more minutes. Four. Any minute now he was going to call again, and I still wouldn’t know what to say. Who was I kidding? There was nothing left to say.
Fists struck our front door three times, and I cringed. “December!” His voice was rough, strangled.
Sam raised her eyebrow at me, but I couldn’t do it. I shook my head without raising my eyes from the red-checkered plate. How nice that the spaghetti sauce matched it. She sighed purely for my benefit and scraped the legs of the stool across the floor as she scooted back.
I heard the door open. “She doesn’t want to see you, Josh.” She sounded sad, like she was siding with the guy who’d just broken my heart.
“Please, Sam. I have to see her.”
I closed my eyes against the pain I heard in his voice. Letting it in would lead to madness.
“I can’t.” The door shut with a click, and I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
“December!” he shouted, the sound slightly muffled by the closed door. “I have to talk to you! I will pound on this door and scream your name until security arrests me or you come out!”
Sam sat back down and shoved a bite in her mouth. As she chewed and I spun the noodles on the fork, he continued to shout. Pain ripped through my stomach at the misery in his voice, but I quickly shut it down. The moment I acknowledged it, the rest would overwhelm me, and I wasn’t ready for it.
“December!”
“For f*ck’s sake.” Sam grabbed my hand and squeezed. “Before he gets arrested?”
I couldn’t let him get in trouble, not over something as trivial as me. I slid from the bar stool, wearing the same tank top and pajama pants I had been since yesterday, and made my way to the door.
“I’m not opening the door,” I spoke to the wooden frame.
“God, December. Please, we have to talk.”
I shook my head like he could see me or something. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“There’s everything to talk about!”
He was angry. Good. It was good that one of us still had emotions.
“One question.”
“Whatever you want.” Something knocked against the door, and from the position and sound, I guessed he’d leaned his head on it.
“Are you in the army?” I reached my hand up and pressed it to the door, where I knew his head was on the other side.
A long moment of pause passed, condemning him more than the uniforms had. “Yes. National Guard.” His reply was soft, broken.
I didn’t realize how much I wanted him to deny it until he said it. “Then we’re done talking, Josh. There’s nothing you can say. We’re just done.”
“December, please!”
“Go. There’s absolutely no chance for us.” I managed to keep my voice flat, unemotional.
I waited several heartbeats until something slid along the door. His hand? “I love you.”
“Good night, Josh.”
The door to his apartment opened and shut, and I leaned back against our front door for the barest of seconds before I slid my back down it. Once my butt hit the floor, I drew my knees up to my chest. There were no tears, no anger, just an overwhelming sense of weariness.
I wanted one thing: Joshua Walker.
But I wouldn’t do it. I would never become my mother. I would never love a man whose love could destroy me.
Monday morning wasn’t any easier. Wasn’t it supposed to get easier? This hurt worse than losing Riley, but maybe I was so lost in my grief over Dad that I hadn’t really noticed Riley’s loss? That wasn’t true. Riley hurt, but I didn’t love him like I loved Josh.
“Good morning, Ms. Howard.” Professor Carving nodded to me as he walked in the room just ahead of me. Perfect timing.
I slid in behind him, skipped my eyes right over where I usually sat, and spotted an empty chair in the back of the room. Bingo. I studied the tiles on the floor and dodged backpacks on the way to the back and claimed the seat.
One Mississippi.
Two Mississippi.
Three Mississ—
“Ember.”
My body physically reacted to his voice. Chills swept down my arms, and my throat tightened. I shook my head and reached for my notebook.
Josh beat me to it, pulling the purple spiral out of my bag and laying it on my desk. Before I could protest, he’d lined up one pencil and one pen exactly how I liked them. “You have to talk to me. Let me explain.”
Heads pivoted in our direction. The only thing more gossip-worthy than going home with him was our obvious break-up. I couldn’t speak. Hell, I was lucky to still be breathing with this pressure crushing my chest.
“Ember, please?”
“Mr. Walker?” Professor Carving said, saving me. “Could you take your seat?”
Josh sighed. “We’re not done, Ember.”
But we were.
I took meticulous notes, like always. Other than the gaping hole in my soul, everything on the outside was as normal as could be. The clock gave me another ten minutes to make it through this class. Then I could beat Josh to the door, run to my car, and get out of here before he had a chance to confront me. Yes. If I grabbed my stuff immediately, I could escape before everyone else had packed up.
As Professor Carving wound down his lecture and started to talk about our assignment for Wednesday, I slipped my notebook and pens into my bag and pulled it into my lap. I was half off my seat when he dismissed us.
As quickly as I could, without looking insane, I passed by the other students in my row and threw open the door in my exit. “Ember! Wait!” I didn’t turn around, didn’t pause, but instead launched into headlong flight. Well, extremely fast walking.
The halls filled with students, and I wove through the crowd. I would make it to the car. I wouldn’t have to see him, or face everything I couldn’t have. I could hold it together for one more day. The early March sunshine hit my face, and I took my first deep breath. I’d made it out.
“Ember! What are you going to do? Run forever?” Josh yelled out.
Half the students turned to gawk. My cheeks stung as blood rushed to my face, but I kept walking, picking my way down the path between the academic buildings to the quad. Keep it together. Stick to the plan.
The moment he touched my arm, I knew it was all about to fall apart. I stopped, took three breaths, and focused on anything else. The snow had melted, and the grass lay brown and bare. It was the ugliest time of pre-spring, when the pristine white had faded, but nothing had come to life yet. Everything was still cold and numb.
“Ember.” His voice was soft, pleading.
“Don’t.” It was all I had in me.
He stepped around me, but I refused to look up into those eyes. “Please. I didn’t mean to keep it from you. I just didn’t know how to tell you.”
Pieces of me cracked into a fault line, and every word he spoke expanded it. The blissful, numb feeling that kept me together was melting, leaving me bare. I swallowed back the need to look at him, to reach out and touch him.
“You have to talk to me about this. I’m not going to lose you over a job.”
I broke, snapped in half, my logic and reason flying away. “A job?” I stepped back, needing the distance. I finally looked up at him, but the misery on his face didn’t dispel my anger. He looked like shit. Good, that’s how I felt. “It’s not a job! And you hid it from me! You know how I feel about it!”
“When I saw you burn the West Point gear? I knew you would never accept it, that you’d push me away as soon as you knew, and I couldn’t let you go.”
“You selfish f*ck!”
He paled. “Yes. I needed to be near you. I had to.”
“Why? Why the hell are you in the Guard? You had a full ride! And you just join up and go over to get yourself killed?” The idea, the word struck me with nausea. Josh in uniform. Josh in a cold box draped by a flag. No.
“Mom got sick. I transferred here to take care of her. UCCS hockey is small; it didn’t have the funds to give a full ride midseason. Some of us don’t have rich families and doctor dads, Ember. I did the only thing I could think of to put myself through college. A weekend a month seemed like a damn good deal to be near my mother. I don’t regret it. Not any of it, and not you!”
My eyes glanced down to the scar I knew ran through his leg. “You don’t regret losing the one thing you love? God! You were shot! Wounded! Nearly killed, and you just stay in? Do you have some kind of f*cking hero complex, or something? Let me tell you, Josh. Heroes die!” My voice caught, and I sucked in a strangled breath. “They die.”
The muscle in his jaw flexed. “I haven’t lost the one thing I love, Ember. You’re still standing in front of me, and I’m fighting like hell.”
“Don’t. I’m not going to stand by and watch you die like my father. I don’t care if you’re almost done with college, nothing is worth that wait, that pain.”
“Your dad believed in his mission. He saved a lot of lives. I knew him, Ember. He was proud of what he was doing. He was proud of me!”
Jealousy stabbed deep. Josh had been friends with my dad because of Gus. He’d talked to him about things I never could, about why he chose the path he did. Josh knew my dad intimately in a way I never would, because I had been too scared, too angry with Dad’s choices to understand.
“Look what he got for it. A doctor in a hospital, not a soldier on the front, and he’s dead! Don’t try to rationalize war.”
Silence enveloped us, and I noticed the crowd gawking as they passed by at the same time Josh did. He pulled my messenger bag by the strap, gently guiding me under the nearby tree so we stopped entertaining the masses.
“Please fight for this, Ember. We are worth the fight. I love you, and that’s something I’ve never said to any girl. I love you more than hockey, or the air I breathe. You love me, too!”
That felt like a giant slap to the face. “My love? You want to use my love in this?” The tears burst free, streaking my face. “I never would have gotten close to you if I knew! I hate what you do. I hate that you lied to me. But mostly, I hate that you let me fall in love with you when you knew! I hate that I love you, so you don’t get to use that.” The tears drained my anger into a pit of misery.
Pain radiated from his eyes. “I love you enough for the both of us. I can’t regret anything that brought us together.”
His eyes, his words, they all started to melt through my resolve. “You should have said something.”
He took a tentative step, reaching out to run the backs of his fingers down my face. “I should have given you the choice and told you, but I couldn’t. You are this miracle, something I never thought I was worthy of touching, let alone calling you mine. I’ve wanted you since I was eighteen, but I was never good enough, not for someone like you.”
“Because I had a doctor daddy?” I threw his words back in his face, trying to hang on to the last vestiges of my anger. Anger would keep me alive when Josh had the power to break me.
“Because you were kind, and smart, and seemingly unimpressed with me. Oh, you’d watch; believe it, I noticed, but you had way more self-esteem than to throw yourself at anyone. I had too much respect for you to pursue you. I would have wrecked you back then.”
“You’re wrecking me now.” The confession was soft. I’d known from the picture that he’d noticed me at fifteen, but hearing him say it, the longing in his voice, brought me another notch closer to insanity. I had to be crazy to even entertain the idea of staying with him.
“I love you. You are everything, and I’m not going to let you walk away over a uniform.” He pulled on my waist, bringing me flush against his body. My traitorous nerves misfired, remembering all too well how it felt to be in his arms. “Just let me love you, December, because I can’t stop anyways. I’ve been at your mercy since I was eighteen.”
The fight bled out of me as I melted against him. His brown eyes shone in the patchy sunlight. It didn’t matter in the long run really. He only had a few months left until graduation. I did my math. “You enlisted for the typical three years, and those are up soon right?”
His jaw flexed. “Technically.”
My eyes narrowed. “There’s no technically. Don’t you dare hide anything else from me.”
He glanced around for a moment, like he was searching for his answers in the trees, the buildings around us. “I’ll be done with my enlistment the day I graduate.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Three months. I can do three months.”
His grip tightened on my waist, a little desperate. “My enlistment is up on graduation day because I’ll be discharged from service. A few minutes later, I’ll be sworn in and commissioned as an officer. I’ve been in ROTC since I was wounded. It paid my scholarship, and the guard paid my rent.”
Where was the numbness, the icy feeling that kept me distant? Instead, raw pain, gaping and ugly, clawed its way up and seized hold of me. “You’re commissioning. You’re going career.” Twenty years. The best years of his life given in service, risk.
His eyes said that he wanted to lie, but he didn’t. “Yes. That’s my plan.”
I nodded and smiled, swallowing the lump growing in my throat. Before he could say anything else, I reached up on tiptoes, wound my arms around his neck, and melded my mouth to his. I kissed him with abandon, pouring all of my love, my sorrow, my desperation into him.
As he responded, I found the tree at my back, his tongue moving with mine. His hands left my waist and held my face like I was something delicate, as he kissed me with obvious relief. Everything in my body called out for him and I gave in, angling to get closer to him, reveling that I could be so swept up in someone else.
Everything with Josh was so perfect, and yet so f*cked up.
I kissed him once more, gently, drawing onto his lower lip as long as I could, savoring the taste and feel of him against my lips. “I love you so much,” I whispered against his lips. “Thank you for getting me through losing my dad. Thank you for protecting April and loving Gus. Thank you for being exactly what I’ve imagined love would really be like.”
He smiled against my lips, but pulled back startled when my tears flowed against his cheek. “December? Don’t cry.”
I shook my head and stepped out of his arms. The cool air immediately took away the sweet warmth he’d left. “I love you,” I whispered once more.
Denial drew his eyes wide. “Don’t. Don’t do this.”
I cupped his gorgeous face in my hands and smiled through the tears. “Good-bye, Joshua Walker.”
I clutched my messenger bag as I walked away, needing something, anything to feel real. Gravity was gone. I’d just lost the one person who’d been holding me to the earth.