Things were going good—scarily so.
It only made sense that there was something on the horizon just waiting to fuck it up.
I just never realized that the problem I'd been looking over my shoulder for...never came.
The past few days with Gracie were a dream—something I'd concocted in between the raging nightmares of my father when I was a child, his hands on the plug of my mother's life support machine.
Instead, it was nothing but bright sunny days with syrupy pancakes and the soft strands of her hair falling between the gaps of my fingers like sand in an hourglass.
It was laughing while she rambled on and on about conspiracy theories only being a distraction created by the government, then fending off a pillow attack when I pointed out that her theory was, in fact, a conspiracy theory in itself.
It was catching sight of her profile in the morning light while holding her so tightly to my chest it was a wonder she hadn't woken up just to shove me off of her instead.
I kept waiting for it, too.
For her to push me away, to realize this wasn't what she wanted in the slightest.
Waiting, waiting, waiting.
Because, surely, I was going to fuck this up somehow, it was only a matter of time.
But maybe she was wanting to revel in this privacy, in this tiny slice of freedom we'd been given for the holidays. Maybe she was giving this so much of a chance because of the anonymity of it all.
Maybe it was all situational, after all.
And maybe I should just take what I can get when it comes to her—take it and soak in as much as she'd be willing to give me.
At the moment, she was looking over at me in the car as I sang along to the radio, a look of wry amusement on her face.
"What?"
"You never told me you were good at singing, too. Leave some talent for the rest of us, why don't you?"
"What, you aren't a good singer too? I bet you have a beautiful voice."
A wicked smile that could've been right at home in the middle of a more charged moment fell upon her lips and she turned the volume up on the radio, clearing her throat dramatically as the sun came streaming in through the windshield to light her up in pure clarity, my heart catching slightly at the sight.
And then she opened her mouth and proceeded to screech along at the top of her lungs to the song while I choked on a laugh.
"You can't be serious right now," I tried to yell out over the music but she kept on going, screaming out the lyrics like a banshee and I couldn't honestly recall a time that I'd laughed as carefree as I had in that moment.
Maybe it was somewhere in between the syrup fight or her struggling to find a place where I was ticklish, or maybe it was somewhere in the middle of ribbing her for her extremist views when it came to the colors navy and brown together, but the smallest moments all combined into something so extreme and tangible the breath caught in my throat just like the beats in my heart had earlier.
I didn't just want moments with her.
I wanted memories and hours and days and weeks and months with her—I wanted fucking years with her.
Reaching over the console I gripped her hand in mine so tight she stopped her loud scream-singing for a moment, but at the mischief I knew was dancing in my eyes she kept on, and I joined right in there with her.
After a while an ad started playing and I released her hand to turn the volume down as curiosity peaked in her eyes.
"So, where exactly is it that you're taking me?"
Pulling off the interstate, I could only throw her a quick wink.
"You'll see soon enough."
"You sure do love keeping a girl in suspense, don't you?"
"Only the ones I love."
Her mouth pulled ruefully into a smile seemingly before she could even stop it, but something at the blush lining the apples of her cheeks and the way she turned her face down so that I wouldn't see it made me glad that I hadn't held back and made it known how I felt about her.
The feelings had never changed, not once.
She hadn't said it back, but I wasn't expecting her to.
She'd said it before, but that was before, well, everything.
Pulling off to the trail that would lead to the foot of the smaller mountain, Gracie's eyes widened as she turned her attention to me.
"We're going hiking?"
"Only a little bit. There's a super easy trail that only takes about thirty minutes, but then we'll get to the place I really wanted to show you."
"I should be pissed you're making me do anything athletic at all. You should know by now how uncoordinated I am at pretty much anything."
It was true, unfortunately for her.
She tripped pretty much every time she walked up the stairs, she ran her elbows into doorframes, and almost always caught her finger in a door or stubbed her toe on something.
It would be adorable if it didn't have the opportunity to actually hurt her one day.
It was my mission to get her into the gym to start working on some balance building exercises to help her lose her clumsiness in her everyday life, at least when it came to walking up and down the stairs, but that was a story for another day when her pure hatred for exercise wasn't completely front and center.
"Oh, I'm aware, but you have to do it. For the view."
"Yeah, yeah. You're lucky I don't have anywhere else to be right now."
Even despite the fact that she was right—she did have nowhere else to go except to be there with me, I still smiled.
Hand in hand, we trekked up to the dirt trail and there was something about the simplicity of it all—how easily her dainty little fingers fit into mine, the softness of her skin a smooth balm to the fact that it wasn't all that simple, not really, but just this once maybe it could be.
Maybe we could pretend our parents hadn't sent us both on a wave of destruction before we could ever make our own executive decisions about our own lives.
Maybe I could even make her forget about my father and the treat he posed to her, if only for a little while.
It would always be there, though, lingering in the back of my mind like a malignant tumor writhing around in a major organ, just waiting to be operated on.
The crickets chirped in time to the beat of our footsteps on the ground, shoes crunching old leaves and rocks underfoot as the branches swayed and sang with the late Fall breeze.
A few orange and brown leaves came fluttering across our path like confetti and swirled around in the air before flying past and flitting back down to the ground.
Gracie squeezed my hand and pointed to our left.
"Look, a deer!"
In the national park, there was no hunting allowed so the deer population was rampant and, sure enough, a doe was staring straight at them, unmoving and paralyzed in fear.
"Come on, let's not scare her."
Slowly we passed by and Gracie grabbed more of my arm to her, clasping it in a way that had my stomach clenching and my mind thinking of some creative things we could get up to out in the wilderness, alone considering the holiday.
She held me to her like she was desperate for my touch, like she'd done it without thinking and it was as easy as breathing to her to pull me in tight.
I was definitely loving it, maybe even a little too much.
We still hadn't talked about what would happen when the holiday was over, when everyone came back and classes started up again as well as practice and games and her internship, not including her best friend and roommate and whatever the hell it was that was going on between them.
Cresting to the top of the mountain, the sun fell behind a cloud as a few rays came dappling through, painting the view beyond them like a watercolor painting done up in various shades of vibrants and pastels, Gracie's eyes going wide and misty at the sight before us.
"Damn. Well, you're right. It is a nice view. So, this is your favorite place, then?"
"It is. One of them, really. I think you can tell a theme here, and that's how much I love nature and getting away from it all—people, in general. It's been...hard for me to connect with people, to trust them, with the way I've grown up. My dad always pushed everything to be about business, and while that's worked for him, it kind of stunted me in the social department."
"But you're captain of your team. How can you not have a good rapport with your team?"
"It's different when it comes to the team. We struggle together, we win together, and we slick our sweat up and down that court day in and day out. Yeah, I might be a little cold toward them sometimes, but I think that helps me keep them scared of getting out of line. They need that sometimes, to make sure they're doing what needs to be done so that we win. It doesn't mean I'm any less their captain that I don't always go out for drinks with them after a loss, or if I don't stick around at the after party all night after a win."
"Isn't that kind of lonely, though? Being on the outside looking in?"
Turning to her profile, her cute button nose on display at the sun shone through the strands in her hair and the strawberry scent of her perfume wafted my way, I grabbed her hand and placed a kiss to the back of it.
"I don't know—you tell me. You're always in the library studying, or at your internship, or working your ass off as a TA for a professor who can barely figure out how to work his projector. What does it feel like to you? Because from how I see it, we both tend to work hard, play later. Sometimes, that later never comes, and it's always about work."
"It kind of has to be about work all the time, for me at least. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to afford anything, or be able to have a scholarship and be able to go to school in the first place. It's lonely, though. Isolating. Less, now, I think. Now that I know I'm not the only one who does it."
She smiled to herself at that, her brown eyes glinting off the sunlight peaking through the clouds once more, and the sight was too damn beautiful—I just couldn't tear my eyes away from her.
Tangling my hands in her hair, I reached for her and pulled her lips to mine.
Later—we would worry about the future later.
Now it was all about this moment, her lips on mine and her hands all over me.
It felt like the two of us at the end of the fucking world, and I knew for a fact I would do anything to keep her, to have her as mine.
I wasn't going to stop until I figured out a way to make damn sure she never had to leave.
***
Author's Note:
What did you think of this chapter?
What do you think will happen next?
What do you WANT to happen next?
Until next time my lovely readers,
Kristen :)