The room spins around me, the world stops turning, and my dick maintains it’s go time. I get lost in Willow’s big brown eyes, going down for another kiss.
“I think they left,” Griff says as his footsteps recede down the hallway.
“How is it that this thing you do with your hand on my chest turned me on even when we were faking it?” I whisper, kissing her forehead.
Willow’s eyes widen. “It’s never been fake for me.”
She says it under her breath, like a confession, an admission of guilt. And maybe it is, to her. I can see that.
Slowly, the implications of what she’s saying become clearer.
Holy fuck.
Willow married me for real when I was just… using her. Respectfully so, but still using her. Every time I’d jokingly suggest a reason for our future divorce and she brushed it off? That was why.
Her strangled “yes” at the river when I proposed with a stupid shoe? The way her voice betrayed her emotions? The beating inside her ribcage when she threw herself at me?
This was not a crush that had turned into something more.
This waseverything, and again I hadn’t seen it.
Pulling my wife close to me, I bury her face in my chest so she doesn’t see the tears threatening to spill from my soul. For years she’s loved me, and I didn’t know. She married me out of love, and I didn’t know.
She says it was a crush, but it wasn’t.
It was love, and it was given to me without hope, yet without restraint.
Now I understand why she turned me down at first. And why she changed her mind, and how much that must have cost her. And I’ve seen her with me: honest, brave, kind. Not trying to be more to me than what we had agreed upon.
She made the sacrifice of her heart to help me.
This woman is so much more than I deserve. I’d give up everything to keep her mine.
fifty-three
Willow
Noah twines our hands together as we walk the short distance to the store. Elm street is decorated in full fall glory now, with cornstalks on lampposts, autumn wreaths on front doors, porches overflowing with pumpkins, and window boxes brightened by mums.
“Busses already?” I mutter as I notice a group in front of the store.
“Nuh-huh,” Noah says. “That’s Nathaniel, and Cheryl, and Sophie, and even Louise. These are people from Emerald Creek.”
They’re talking among themselves and pointing at… “Ohmygod it’s the windows!” My heart flutters as we quicken our pace, emotion seizing me just by the looks on people’s faces.
We stand in the back of the small group, but they part ways to let us stand in front. “Ohmygod, Noah, look what they did!”
“That’s my momma when she worked here before she got married,” someone says, pointing at a photo.
For a moment I get lost in the contemplation of these long-gone times, the people in the pictures becoming alive to me. I recognize family names and buildings that have hardly changed over time. Here, men are cutting chunks of frozen ice at the lake. There, skinny children pose in ill-fitting one-piece bathing suits, girls and boys alike. I imagine this is what looking through a family album must feel like. A sense of familiarity yet difference, that awkward clash between past and present, the measure of time passing, yet so much being the same—emotions, hopes, dreams. All painted in the children’s timid smiles, the men and women’s stares as the camera captures their everyday lives. And all intertwined with newspaper articles about the store’s expansion and yellowed advertisements with prices in the cents.
“Oh that’s me!” I can’t help but shriek. At the very bottom right, a picture that’s been edited to old-timey sepia tones shows me opening the store, looking back on the street with a huge grin on my face.
In front of the pictures, as planned, local pottery, quilts, leather bags, mittens and more are artfully arranged on haystacks and apple crates. The names of the makers are inked on a hand-drawn map of Vermont pinned at the center of the photo display.
“I didn’t know Freya sold her candles here!” someone says. “She’s my second cousin.”
Noah kisses the top of my head and pulls me to the other window. There, meats and produce are advertised in chalk on slate signs, while Dutch ovens, table linen, and locally made plates and mugs yield an invitation for a laid back, comfortable dinner scene. Mini jack-o-lanterns, a doll-size scarecrow, a row of locally made barbecue sauces, jams and chutney complete the homey feel.
