Troy picked up his bean bag chair and placed it in front of me. “When we figured out we had a connection out there, we decided to hide it,” he said slowly as if he was gathering his thoughts. “By then, Molly and Jace had been dating for some time.”
I felt sick to my stomach as I looked down at my finger nails. I had felt insecure about their relationship before and those feelings still lingered.
He reached out and squeezed my leg. “He made a valiant effort to separate himself from her. He really did. Everyone, except for Jaxson, thought we were past the point of getting one. Especially Remy.
“Jace made the final break with her when he chose to leave the state and start teaching. I think she hoped that he would still come back to her. He’s just having a long overdue discussion. He’s probably clearing the air so that she knows he’s committed to you. In the past, he told her they needed space apart, and find themselves.
“When he got that teaching job, he was surprised when he found you. His student. He wanted to make sure you were the one we had been searching for.” He rubbed his head. “I remember a phone call between us, shortly after he got there, but everything is foggy after that.”
Drake sat down in front of me. “I wasn’t there to confirm our connection like I had been the first time. Jace was worried about your safety, and he wanted to speed our meeting up. I saw our connection the first time and the second time. I knew she was the one,” Drake said to us all, looking guilty. “I thought I was going crazy again. I would be walking in the halls at school, and I would see a faint wisp of green, like a thread. I followed it once and saw you as you were walking into a class. I let it go, then I saw you in the quad and I knew. I should have told you guys,” he looked apologetically at Troy, Jaxson, and Noah.
“When Noah introduced us, I recognized your voice, but something was off, “Jaxson said. “We talked together for years, but when I met you in person, it was like I thought maybe it had been a dream. It wasn’t until after you guys connected,” Jaxson pointed at Noah and me. “That I knew you hadn’t been a dream.”
Troy reached out and patted him on his back. “We’re all learning. We all realize our mistakes. We got our Misty now.”
I looked at him in shock. He hadn’t called me by that nickname since we had been reunited. Misty was short for Silvermist. Jemmy said I reminded her of Silvermist, Tinkerbell’s friend. She had told me the guys were like my own lost boys.
I smiled at him and then looked at the door. “Should someone go check on Remy?”
“No,” Troy shook his head. “Molly’s like family to us, but she is Remy’s cousin. Sometimes when she comes around, he doesn’t want to hear what she has to say.”
I knew they weren’t telling me something, but I was more concerned by the fact I was just now learning about Remy and Molly’s relationship. “Why wasn’t I told this before?” At their looks of confusion, I sighed. “Before time was taken from us, I was told about Molly. Molly and Jace had been on gossip magazines together, but no one told me she was related to Remy and why or how he came to be here.”
Jaxson frowned. “We all have our own secrets, some of them shared secrets, maybe we didn’t want to push you away.”
I felt even more confused by his statement. I felt Jaxson was my open book. He never seemed like anything bothered him. He was always laughing or trying to make other people laugh. I thought he never expressed any negative feelings because he never let anything get to him. His statement made me realize, that sometimes, the happiest people could be the ones hiding the most pain.
“It was my secrets that pushed her away,” Noah snorted self-deprecatingly.
I reached over and grabbed his hand. “We got a second chance. We’re better now.” I reassured him.
“But it was our secrets that drove us apart,” Troy said quietly. “You know mine, but maybe I should have been more upfront with you. I should have communicated better with you. I wish we could tell you why we may have kept it from you, but some of those secrets aren’t ours to tell.”
I nodded in understanding. I was the queen of secrets. At least I had been. I felt like we needed transparency in our relationship. However, I wasn’t going to force them to tell me everything. My short stint in the mental health facility had thought me that. Some people needed to come around when they were ready, not when other people thought they should be.
They had tried to force me to talk about my father. They thought if I talked about him often, it would help me cope with my pain better and my ‘voices’ would go away. I hadn’t wanted to talk about him. I hadn’t been ready. Everyone’s grieving process wasn’t on a specific time schedule.
We had turned the movie back on and watched twenty more minutes of it before Jace came back out with Molly. She looked like she had been crying, but she stopped and waved at us. “Goodnight, all. It was great meeting you, Blake. You take care of these guys, will ya? You’re one lucky girl.” Her voice nearly broke as she hurried out the door.
I looked over at Jace, and without a word, he came over to me, picked me up, and started walking me up the stairs. “Night guys,” he called down to them as we headed towards his bedroom. I was a bit confused at his cave man tactics, but I had a feeling he was going to fill me in on his conversation with Molly.
When we reached his bedroom, he closed the door, without saying a word to me. He quietly undressed down to his boxers and then placed me in his bed. He pulled me to his chest and began stroking my arm. “Molly was the first and only girl I had loved.” I felt like he had stabbed me with the admission. “She and Remy didn’t have the greatest upbringing, and she was so introverted and broken, I wanted to fix her.”
“Do you want to fix me?” I asked in a small voice. Yes, I was broken, but did I want him to fix me? Is that the only reason he wanted me in his life? Was I a poor substitute for the feelings he had for Molly?
He sat up on his elbows and stroked my face. “It has always been you. When we were kids, I always wanted to protect you. I failed you so many times. Then you were gone. It always haunted me.” He leaned down and kissed my lips gently. I felt myself responding but he pulled back. “When I met Molly, she reminded me a lot of you. I thought God had given me a second chance to help you, inadvertently. She had been painfully introverted, suffered from anxiety, and had a whole list of insecurities. She still suffers from those afflictions to this day. She’s just learned to cope with them. I did all that I could do to help her.