Another was of Molly on Parker’s shoulders as they tried to recreate some abstract, artsy pose up on Jane’s Peak during the golden hour. I remembered the day clearly, since I’d been the one taking the shot.
Another was of me, leaning on my old, green car in my baseball jacket.
The last was a shot of me that I didn’t remember at all. It was wintertime, I gathered, since I had a beanie pulled low on my forehead, and I was talking to Diane and rubbing at my injured shoulder. I looked tired as hell, and I was smiling without really smiling.
“When was this?” I asked, tapping the picture with the back of my finger. “Doesn’t look familiar.”
“Parade of Lights here in O’Leary. Nine years ago, now, I think? Ethan took it when he was home on break.” Parker took the picture from my hand and studied it, then bit the inside corner of his mouth. “He’d done a photography class the semester before, and he was all about taking candid shots on an old-school camera. When he came back to school, he insisted on developing them in our onetinybathroom, so I figured he deserved to have me steal it.” He traced the curve of my half smile in the picture. “I liked to imagine you were missing me.”
“I was,” I said thickly.
“Yeah? You think?” Parker smiled sadly. “I mean, not like you even remember this particular day or anything, but it’s nice to think maybe—”
“I can guarantee it. There wasn’t a day I didn’t. Even when I told myself not to think of you, it was like not thinking about elephants, babe. But at times like this? Festivals and stuff? Yeah. You can bet I was missing you.”
Parker leaned more heavily against me, like maybe he wanted to feel the solid weight of me as much as I needed to feel him. I ran a fingertip over the curl of his ear.
“I’ve got more stuff,” he said with a little sniff, getting back to business.
He took out a baseball—“From that no-hitter game you pitched, remember?”—and a sketch Molly had done of him. A bunch of Magic: The Gathering cards—“They don’t makeForcefieldcards anymore. That’s worth money.”—and a picture of baby Parker on his grandmother’s lap, all wrapped up in the blanket she’d made him. A quote from a Jane Austen book written on notebook paper. A recipe for his aunt’s cookies. An old business card of his father’s. A graduation card from his mom. AHarry Potterwand. A newspaper clipping of his birth announcement.
“And that’s it, really,” he said, piling his treasures back into the tin. “I try to keep it down to the most essential things. The things that mean the most. The things I never, never want to forget.” He shifted up on one hip so he could reach into his pocket and pulled out the cactus magnet. He carefully stuck it to the inside of the lid before putting the lid back on the tin. “Like people who understand that cactus-based puns are a thing and come to Arizona to fetch me, even when I’ve been an idiot.”
I swallowed past a lump in my throat.
“Do you see now? Do you get it?” Parker demanded, setting the box on the floor. His eyes were wide and earnest and maybe a little bit shiny.
“I get it,” I said softly.
“There’s hardly anything from Boston,” he said, like he needed tomake sureI understood, and I got that too. No more assumptions. “I’m not gonna tell you I cried every day, Jamie. I didn’t. Or that I never enjoyed myself in the city, because I definitely did. But the most important things? The things that touched my heart? They’re all from O’Leary. They’realmostall aboutyou. So it was a given that I was gonna end up back here…bothtimes I left.”
And that was when it clicked, when Ifinallyunderstood on a soul-deep level that Parker really was mine the same way I was his. We’d just been marking time in our lives while we were apart.
“Have I ever mentioned how glad I am that you came back to O’Leary, and how very glad I am that youstayed, even though I was an asshole?”
“You can always mention it again,” Parker teased. He drew his finger in a line across my stomach, just above my waistband, and then circled my navel.
“It kinda sucks, doesn’t it?” I said suddenly. “We could have been together all these years if I hadn’t—”
“Been the protective, loving person you are? Nah. I mean, you were totally misguided and wrong. Intensely wrong.Incrediblywrong.”
“Thank you.”
“But still. We had to change and grow and… maybe even lose each other so we could really appreciate how important it is to have each other. We had to have the big stupid misunderstanding so we could realize that for all that we know about one another, we’ve been shit at communicating.”
“We needed to mess up to figure out how to do it right?”
Parker nodded.
“And you think we’ve got it now?”
“I think I’m not letting you go again. Not for anyone or anything,” he said.
I pulled him down and rolled him underneath me. “That’s a pretty serious statement,” I warned, hovering over him. “You sure?”
Parker solemnly held up one crooked pinkie finger, and I burst out laughing before I captured his pinkie with my own and then kissed him with my heart on my lips.
There was nothing in the world but Parker and me. The rain beat insistently against the window, and the kitchen was an empty wreck just waiting for us to set it right, and O’Leary still needed a brand-new bar, but none of that felt important just then. A marching band could have tramped through the room, a dozen gutter salesmen or needy ex-boyfriends could have knocked on the door, and I wouldn’t have noticed. I was focused on the only thing in the world that really, truly mattered.
