“Hey there, sweetheart. Could you come and help me for a minute? Your dad is trying to change a light bulb, and I don’t want him on the ladder.”
“Sure, Mom.” Thirty minutes and one vaulted ceiling light bulb changed, and I am back home, and no one is here.
I start to call his name.
Then freeze. I didn’t even realize I’d started crying.
When I bought the place, Mrs. Anderson had left most of her bigger items. When I’d toured the house after they found the keys to the basement, back in the corner under a sheet, in the basement was an old antique China hutch. It was still in okay condition and needed a little work, but I was too scared to touch it. It was like a relic from an ancient past.
But as I stand in the dining room hall, the hutch is against the corner wall. I take a few tentative steps toward it. It is like a dream. I’d wanted to fix it; it was the last piece for the dining room. The one piece that would make it finally complete. And here it is, perfect and fixed.
The wood has been cleaned and treated until it glows. The glass panels are clear, and the brass hardware has been polished to a soft shine. It is standing in exactly the right spot I’d only mentioned once, months ago, in passing, while we were doing something else entirely.
He remembered.
I press my hand to the side of the hutch and tears burn in my eyes.
On the shelves inside, nested carefully is the same China I found in the basement when I first went down there with a flashlight and a legalpad. The original China. Cream with a delicate blue border, each piece carefully washed and stacked as if it had always been there.
My throat tightens.
"The blue border matches the kitchen," Bo says from behind me.
"I know," I say, still looking at the hutch.
"Tyler helped me carry it up.”
I close my eyes.
"I've been trying to figure out how to tell you exactly how much you mean to me," Bo says. He's closer now.
I open my eyes and look at the hutch. At the China. In the room that's slowly becoming what I always saw when I bought this place, and couldn't quite imagine finished.
"I'm not sorry for loving you," he says. "That was what came after. In case you were wondering."
I turn around.
He's standing in the doorway, hat in his hands. He looks like the seventeen-year-old boy again. The man I love.
He looks like mine.
"I know what you're going to say," he says. "You're going to say you need more time. Or you're going to say you can't build on secrets, which is fair, and I'll wait. However long you need, Falon. I'm not going anywhere. I signed up with the reserves. I've got a meeting with Chief Briggs next week about the ARFF position." He stops. Takes a breath. "I'm choosing Everwood. I'm choosing you."
"Bo," I say.
"Yeah."
"Stop talking."
He stops.
I cross the dining room, and I take his face in my hands the same way he took mine on the dance floor, andI look at him for one long second. His hazel eyes, the two-day scruff, and I kiss him.
Our mouths move against each other, and this time I hold nothing back. I have waited for years for this man, and I was going to show him exactly what I wanted. Him. When I stop to catch my breath, he exhales against my lips, and I smile against his.
“Are you already giving up?” I tease, then squeal when his arms come around me, and I feel his whole frame encircle me. He picks me up and twirls me around.
“Not even close,” he says against my lips, and this time, the kiss is slow and deep.
