Alyssa’s dimples appeared. “Which means, knowing you, you’ll still be hobbling down to my grave when you’re ninety, just to bring me flowers.”
“So what if I do?” Tears stung her eyes. Ninety—hell, was she really going to be still doing this in sixty years? Spending her nights alone, making Saturday treks to a cemetery to sit with a friend who never should have died so young?
“If I wasn’t meant to die so young, Bree, I wouldn’t have died.”
Feeling more than a little bitchy, Bree snapped, “Are you still going to be fussing at me for bringing you flowers when I’m ninety?”
But the expected retort didn’t come. She looked at Alyssa and found her friend gazing at her with something between grief and peace. “No. I don’t think I’m going to be fussing at you much more at all.”
Bree blinked. “Huh?”
Alyssa shifted her gaze, staring at a point behind Bree. “I still love him, you know. And if it was anybody but you, I think this would hurt like hell.”
“What are you talking about?”
Alyssa smiled. Her body shimmered, faded. “I love you, Bree. You were the best friend any girl could have ever wanted. Be happy with him.”
“Are we back to that?” Bree demanded.
But the question was posed to empty air, because Alyssa was already gone.
She didn’t know what made her turn.
She hadn’t heard his car, hadn’t heard him approach and she knew he hadn’t said anything. But he was there. She knew it even before she turned around. Slowly, her legs stiff, her heart slamming away, she turned to watch as Colby walked her way.
There was something different about him.
It had only been a week since she’d seen him, but something had changed. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
His hair was still too long, in desperate need of a cut. He looked a little tanner, like he’d spent some time working outside. But that wasn’t it. He moved… She nibbled on her lip, watched how he strode toward her and thought back.
His walk, she realized.
The past few weeks and before, really back when Alyssa and he had first gotten the news that the cancer was too advanced, he had walked as though he had the weight of the world crushing down on him.
Slow. Not feeble or anything. Just deliberately slow, as though, if he moved too fast, the weight on his shoulders would fall and crash. Or he would.
As if he were doing some sort of unseen balancing act.
But that had changed.
He moved with the confident, easy grace he’d been born with.
He came, halted beside her and smiled, reached up to brush her bangs back from her eyes. He glanced at the flowers on Alyssa’s grave, then down at the ones he held. It was a store-bought bouquet, a bunch of daisies that were dyed brilliant colors. They looked exactly like something Alyssa would have loved.
“Yours look better than mine,” he said.
Bree made herself smile and shrug. “Yeah, but yours look like something Alyssa would have picked out.” She took them from him and knelt, under the pretense of adding his daises in with her lilies. Really, she mostly needed to have a minute to get her breathing level before he wondered why she was practically panting.
The daisies’ bright colors should have looked silly next to the quiet beauty of the lilies, but she decided it looked just right. “How are you doing?”
“Good. I think.” He crouched down beside her. From the corner of her eye, she glanced at him and saw that he was smiling. The faint, easy sort of smile a person had when things were going right. An unconscious smile. “Was going through my office yesterday and found an old story I’d set aside. Ended up flipping through it and next thing I know, it’s nine o’clock, I’ve added fifty pages to the story and half the plot is worked out.”
“Really? That’s great.” She turned to look at him, smiling. He hadn’t written anything since he’d finished the last book in his contract a month before Alyssa died. “Your agent is going to be thrilled.”
He grimaced. “If she still wants to be my agent. I’ve left her hanging for quite a while.”
Without realizing what she was doing, she leaned forward and hugged him. “You’ve had a hell of a lot to deal with, Colby. She’ll understand that.” She squeezed, but before she could pull away, his arms came up and wrapped around her.
It was an awkward position, her kneeling, Colby balanced on his heels. But he didn’t seem interested in letting her go. Bree didn’t have the will to pull back from him, not even when he shifted around and settled on the ground so he could pull her into his lap. All without letting go. “I missed you,” he said quietly, his breath whispering along her skin.
It was an innocent statement.
Even his embrace was innocent. Bree knew that.