Wyn kisses the top of my head. Michael and Lou exchange a look I can’t read.
Maybe they’ve seen this before, I think. Maybe he’s always like this with his girlfriends.
But I don’t really believe it. I am in that phase of love where you’re sure no two people have ever felt this way before.
And over those four days, I fall in love again. With Wyn’s family, with all the new pieces of him.
I want to stay up late, digging through his old closet, where his mom stored his homemade stormtrooper costume. I want to sit for five hours in the woodshop, sawdust drifting in the air, while he recounts the fights he got into with Lou’s middle school bullies. I want to know where every single little white scar and divot carved into his permanently sunned skin came from.
The one from when he braked too hard on his bike and went skidding down the road. The white specks on his elbow from the agitated horse that threw him on his grandfather’s now-defunct ranch. The thin line where he split his lip on the corner of the fireplace as a toddler.
I want to stockpile these pieces of him: the quilt his grandmother made him before he was born, his embarrassing preteen journals, his horrifying childhood drawings, the dent in his mom’s truck from when he hit a patch of ice and slid into a split rail at sixteen.
He takes me to see it, the stretch where the beams are less dingy, having been replaced after his accident. He and Hank had done it themselves without being asked.
Wyn ran wild here, and this place carved him into the man I love.
With my hand on the wooden post he’d worked into the ground all those years ago, I ask, “Why’d you leave?”
“It’s hard to explain,” he says, grimacing.
“Can you try?” I ask. “You seem so happy here.”
He lets out a breath and searches the horizon for an answer. “They had money from selling my dad’s family’s land. And they always wanted my sisters to go to college, because Mom and Dad didn’t get to.”
“Your sisters?” I say. “But not you?”
His mouth quirks into a crooked half smile. “Told you, they’re little geniuses, like you. Big dreams. I guess my parents assumed I’d want to stay. Keep working with my dad.”
“Because you love this place,” I say.
He runs his hand over his jaw. “I do. But I don’t know. I was watching all these people with dreams and goals leaving, going other places. And I didn’t know what I wanted. I got scouted by Mattingly’s soccer coach, and it seemed like a sign, I guess.”
“But you didn’t stick with the soccer team.”
“I never loved it,” he says. “And I couldn’t keep up with it and school at the same time. It was all harder than I expected. The schoolwork, the social stuff.”
“Everyone loved you, Wyn,” I say.
He looks at me through his lashes, his mouth curling. “No, Harriet. They wanted to hook up with me. That’s not the same thing. I never fit there.”
I pull my fingers away from the icy fence and touch the spot where his dimple belongs. The corners of his mouth twitch, and the dip appears under my middle finger. “You fit with me, and I was there.”
“I know,” he says. “I think that’s really why I went. To find you.”
“That’s a very expensive dating app,” I say.
“You get what you pay for,” he replies.
My hands fall to the collar of his coat, the tops of my fingers tucking in against his hot skin. “Did you at least figure out what you wanted too?”
In the dying light, the green ridges in his eyes glitter like bits of mica underwater. His work-coarsened hands circle my wrists, his thumbs gentle on the delicate skin there.
“This,” he says. “Just this.”
Me too, I think. I can’t bring myself to say it, to admit that the rest of my life, everything I’ve worked for, has started to feel like set dressing. Like loving him is the only essential, and everything else is garnish.
He shows me the workshop too, the exact place where the heavy armoire fell on him one New Year’s Eve while his parents were out, where he lay for four and a half hours in the cold, waiting to be found.
It makes my heart ache. Not just the memory but the smell, the cedar and sawdust and that touch of something that’s all Wyn to me. “You don’t mind being out here?” I ask, walking along the table in-process, its top sanded down to be refinished.
“I always loved it out here,” he says. “So after the accident, my parents were adamant about getting me back out before I started fixating. It worked, mostly.”
I pause, fingers stilling on the table, and look back at him. “I like seeing you here.”
He crosses toward me, gently takes my hips in his hands. “I like seeing you here,” he says, voice low, a little hoarse. “It makes me feel like this is real.”
“Wyn.” I look up into his face, searching his stormy eyes, the rigid lines between his brows and framing his jaw. “Of course it’s real.”
He folds his fingers through mine and brings my hands to the back of his neck, our foreheads resting together, our hearts whirring. “I mean,” he says, “like I can make you happy.”
“This is me, happy,” I promise.
On our last night in town, we sample more of Hank’s scotch and play a highly competitive game of dominoes, and then sit in front of the hearth and watch the fire crackle and pop.
On a sigh, Hank says, “We’re gonna miss you, kiddos.”
“We’ll come home again soon,” Wyn promises, lifting my hand, brushing the back of it absently across his lips.
Home, I think. That’s new.
But it’s not. It’s been growing there for a while, this new room in my heart, this space just for Wyn that I carry with me everywhere I go.
18
REAL LIFE
Wednesday
I TAKE MY time in the movie theater’s neon green bathroom.
I wash my hands, then wipe down the sink area and wash my hands again.
On my way back through the burgundy-carpeted arcade in which the bathrooms are tucked, I nearly collide with Wyn.
“Sorry,” we both huff, stopping short.
My eyes drop to the smorgasbord of paper cartons he’s carrying: Twizzlers, Nerds, Red Hots, Whoppers, and Milk Duds.
“Going to a slumber party?” I ask.
“I was thirsty,” he says.
“Which explains the cup of water and nothing else,” I say. “You think shortbread’s too sweet.”
“Thought you might want something,” he says.
His eyes look more green than gray right now. I’m finding it hard to look at them, so I train my gaze on the candy. “It looks like you thought I might want everything.”
His eyes flash. “Was I wrong?”
“No,” I say, “but you didn’t have to do that.”
“Trust me, it wasn’t intentional,” he says. “I walked up for the water, and next thing I know I’ve got a wagon filled with corn syrup.”
“Well, that’s the Connor family thriftiness. If you buy a wagon, refills are free.”
His laugh turns into a groan. He runs the back of his hand up his forehead. “I’m so hungover.”