Daydream (Maple Hills, #3)(127)
Maybe there can be a long list of complimentary adjectives when someone talks about me.
When Henry talks about me.
I have no choice but to step out of the line with my bags. My heart is pounding, hands shaking as I pull at the envelope, frantically trying to get past what is apparently the world’s strongest adhesive.
It finally comes loose, just as Henry begins talking again.
“Chapter One…”
The book that comes out of the mailer isn’t one I recognize. The cover is hand painted; two people are lying in a meadow full of daisies. The sky is the dreamiest purple and pink and my name is right there beside them.
Turning the first pages as Henry reads my words to me, I notice his tidy scribble on the title page.
This might be my favorite romance book, but we’re my favorite love story.
Yours always,
Henry
Each page I turn has more and more Henry between it. His art is sketched onto the pages, over my words, binding us together. Every drawing fills me with more and more life, and I don’t realize I’m crying until a tear drops onto the page and spreads across the ink.
As much as I don’t want to, I pause the audio.
I have some calls to make.
Chapter Forty HENRY
NATE TOLD ME TO TRUST the process and I’m trying to listen to him, but as it turns out, I’m not really a trust-the-process kind of guy.
I can be laid back, sure, but am I trusting that urge to just let shit play out? No.
I like predictability. I like routine. I like certainty.
Which is why when I sent Halle that email, I threw all those things I like into chaos, and I’m going to have to practice patience—something I’m not known for—to wait a week until she gets home to find out what she thought.
After only a handful of text messages to make sure she knew I was thinking about her during the month, I can hardly expect—okay, I’ve been told by the guys that I can hardly expect—her to contact me right away.
JJ said what I haven’t learned from hooking up with whomever I want and then moving on is that when you do really like someone, it is inevitable that you will, at some point, cause a fucking mess that you need to fix.
All the guys agreed, so I’m taking this as one of those times JJ gives out okay advice.
According to him, followed by a team cosign, this is my “grand gesture” to make sure she knows how much she means to me.
After Russ finally caved and let me look at the book, I was immediately mad at myself for not insisting Halle let me read it sooner. I loved seeing her words on the page, recognizing her voice but seeing it tell someone else’s story. It was magical, and maybe if I’d spent more time encouraging her and less time distracting her, we could have reached this point sooner.
Someone knocks on my door, and the beeping of the code being entered follows when I shout come in. Russ appears with a cup of tea for me, an unfortunate habit I’ve developed in the past month. As a rule, I hate listening to Aurora, but I’m going to let her have this win.
“Halle good?” Russ asks, putting the mug on my bedside table and sitting at the foot of my bed.
“I think I should have called her first. I caught her off guard; she poked me for some reason. I don’t know how to describe it properly. She seemed… out of reach. Even though I could touch her. She seemed far away.” Russ rubs his neck. “Go on. Say what you gotta say.”
“It’s hard saving someone from themselves,” he says. Russ repositions himself to face me, leaning against his knee. “It might take her a minute to find her footing again. You guys went from spending every spare minute together to nothing, when you were still only just starting. Things were never going to be totally normal when you shut her out.”
“But I didn’t only shut her out, I shut everyone out. And in the end, I was trying to help her.”
“It’s hard for people to understand that other people sometimes just shut down; that not everyone’s brain works in the same way when dealing with stress. I think she gets you better than anyone, though.” I nod in agreement. “She knows that if you’re left unchecked, the chances are you’ll spiral and procrastinate and all the other shit, okay? But she also knows, like the rest of us do, that the more she forces you to try and do something, the longer it’ll take for you to do it. You know that you’ll hit a point and then you’ll fix it. It’s not the same thing, but with addicts it’s called hitting rock bottom.”
“The past month felt a lot like rock bottom.”
“Yeah, exactly. For her, you know that she’ll drop everything for you, even if it means putting herself last, which you obviously don’t want. I don’t mean this in a mean way, dude, but Halle wouldn’t have finished her book if she’d helped you stop spiraling and get up to speed last month. You were keeping her away to help her help herself, while suffering because you missed her. And she was staying away because you asked her to, suffering because she missed you and probably believed that she could fix it. Am I making sense?”
This feels a lot like a riddle, but I think I’m following. “We both had to struggle for a while and do what we needed to do for ourselves, for everything to work out now?”
“Basically,” Russ says, nodding.