She picked up the lighter, smaller box, but her fingers were shaking.
“Help,” she whispered, and she realized her voice was shaking, too.
He leaned in and kissed her, softly, then covered her hands with his. “Here.”
Inside was a cassette tape box. Clear plastic, with paper covered in black marker writing.Owen’s Mix Tape for Kerry, it read in big letters in the middle. Song titles were written in smaller print around the title.
She picked it up, and it actually felt like there was something inside it.
It was an actual tape.
“What did you do?” Now her voice sounded full of wonder, and that was accurate.
She looked up at Owen, and he flexed one shoulder. A little shrug. “I made you this.”
“How?”
“I’ll tell you after.” He reached for his bag and pulled out an honest-to-God first generation Walkman. “I want you to listen to it first.”
He helped her put the tape in the deck, then he sat in the corner of the couch and pulled her into the crook of his arm. She held the headphones to her ear, angling them a bit so he could hear too, and she pushed the Playbutton in with a ka-chunk.
At first there was nothing but a crackle. Then she heard Owen’s voice from a bit of a distance. “This tape is a little bit of a love letter, and a lot of an explanation. It’s the story of falling in love with you, and that started from the very first moment I laid eyes on you. This one’s for you, Kerry Humphrey.”
It was a country song she recognized that was a few years old, but it had been in heavy rotation all summer on the local station. She looked at the handwritten playlist notes.Brett Eldredge, “Wanna Be That Song”. Owen held her as she listened to every word, and tears gathered in the corners of her eyes.
When the song faded out, Owen’s voiceover returned. “Did you know a cassette tape only holds thirty minutes of recorded material? I had forgotten that. So we’re going to have to zoom way back, to when I was taping songs off the radio the first time around. To when I found out my girlfriend was pregnant, and we decided we wanted a baby long before we were really ready. I feel like that’s been my entire life to this point, Kerry. Never quite ready for what life puts in front of me. I wasn’t ready for you, either. But I am now. So here’s an inside look into that eighteen-year-old boy’s heart.”
That did it. The tears slid down her face as his voice cracked in her ear, as his arms wrapped tighter around her body. She listened to “November Rain” by Guns and Roses and “My Favorite Mistake” by Sheryl Crow and tried to picture Owen—this mature, capable man—in Becca and Hayden’s shoes. She couldn’t quite picture it, but he would tell her more, over time.
When his voice came back on the recording, it was to introduce two country songs he listened to a lot when he was away from Becca.
She turned in his arms, and he relaxed his grip, but gestured for her to keep listening. Biting her lip, she nodded and sank onto her heels, kneeling beside him.
This was him. He was showing her his life through songs, and it wasn’t just angsty feelings. It was slices of fun, snuck in where he could. It was three lives in one. The father, the single guy, and the responsible firefighter and paramedic determined to have a respectable career. She’d seen all three of those men, and she’d seen them war against each other, too.
The final song was a Dire Straits song that had been his father’s favourite.
When the tape clicked to an end, Owen slid the headphones off and their hands stayed tangled around the Walkman. Neither of them spoke.
She looked at the box. There was no side B.
Owen followed her gaze. “I thought we could make that playlist together.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
On Christmas Eve,Becca and Charlie went to Hayden’s family get-together, so Owen and Kerry went to the Green Hedgehog with his brothers. They played darts, drank Lore’s dangerously good Egg Nog, and when they were dropped off at home, they had happy, laughing sex under the mistletoe.
Then they put on matching Christmas PJs, just in case Becca showed up at dawn. The last thing Owen did before bed was slide one more present for Kerry under the tree.
In the morning, it was Kerry who got up first. He felt her slide out of bed, and told himself he would get up, too, but he drifted off again.
The next thing he knew she was back with two foaming lattes—because she’d bought him an espresso machine, too. An early Christmas present, and smart planning ahead. She’d decided to give up her lease at the end of January, which would mean she was precariously far from the lattes in the clinic.
“What time is it?” he mumbled. Owen usually didn’t have any problem getting out of bed, but that egg nog had hit him like a ton of bricks.
“Just after eight.”
“I’m up.” He shoved himself out of bed. “Do you know where my phone is?”
