"You are my dearest friend, my deepest love. You are the very best of me."
-The Best of Me, coming to theaters on October 17
***
I have been here before—amidst a bustling crowd, kissed by snowflakes, and struck with a fierce sense of destiny as powerful as the dark brown gaze that once gripped my soul and reached right into it, finding a home in the empty space I could never fill.
“We’re closed in five!” he said without even glancing up from the bar counter he was furiously wiping. He looked so serious, as he usually did to everyone else, one might think he was plotting murder as he polished the counter clean. But that was Adam Bishop for you—somber, seemingly sinister, sexy as hell even with a scowl.
I wondered if those dark brows would lift and the corners of that full mouth would tip up in a rusty smile once he caught sight of me. He used to do more than just smile when he saw me. There would be a twinkle in his eye, a cheeky grin on his face and a low, gruff laugh rumbling from him in those moments we spent together, being as foolish and reckless as our youth afforded us.
There had much of other things between us since those days, and much of nothing but the silence that followed chaos once there wasn’t anything left to destroy. I knew, from the sharp angles of his cheeks and the stern line of his mouth, that he no longer smiled and laughed often, that his capacity for them rather than his actual skill had been fading over the years much like the shiny gloss on old pictures that once made everything seem brighter and better. Time was to blame for the inevitable deterioration of memories on print and while time was indeed a factor in Adam’s case, both he and I would agree in a heartbeat that the rest of it could be laid at my feet—the same ones that turned around and walked away from him many years ago.
A happily gurgling group stumbled past me on their way out and I quickly stepped aside and held the door open for them. I remembered how it once felt to have the memories of living a little for a few hours warm your soul, as if the few drinks you had that now warmed your belly could reach into the other parts of you and chase away the chill.
A swirl of snowflakes blew into the foyer of the famous town bar and grill, stirring around me as I stepped back inside and closed the door behind me.
Even with five minutes before the official closing, Old Country Grill was still busy as the last of the customers finished their drinks and the staff started the clean up. It looked very much the same as it did years ago—rustic, cozy and comfortable. Most faces were still familiar as some of the employees glanced my way, registering surprise after the few seconds it took to remember me.
The chimes above my head—a cluster of colorful metal bird shapes—trailed off in their soft tinkling melody. At the near-silence that ensued, Adam halted in wiping the counter, the muscles on his arm flexing with the tension of his paused reach. His head swept up and from behind a lock of brown hair that had fallen over his forehead, I could see his dark, inscrutable gaze as he mentally dug through memories he’d put away a long time ago to find the name of the ghost that stood in front of him tonight.
The past was hardly welcome when it represented pain and I could hardly blame Adam if he’d chosen to forget forever. His eyes though flickered ever so slightly with recognition. They shuttered in pretty much the next breath, his stony profile schooled into showing no emotion. A pity, really, because once upon a time, Adam’s face was an open book to me with his tender gazes and soft, happy smiles.
“Lily.”
The sound of my name rang hollow—like the emptiness of the last few years.
It grated because his voice only ever used to say my name like it was a sweetly whispered secret—warm and intimate. Like any abandoned space, cold had settled in. The chill of the two syllables seeped into my bones and I struggled with the visceral urge to tremble even as I stood there in the warm flood of incandescent light.
“Adam.”
It would seem, despite his frosty greeting, that mine breathed with the undeniable longing of the years, as if I’d murmured his name in the dark, in those moments before sleep for so many nights, when I allowed myself to think of what I’d given up.
Whatever he heard there turned out to be enough to soften his hostile reception. I watched him exhale a little, his shoulders loosening, his clenched jaw easing.
He wasn’t going to run or chase me out.
The pounding of my heart picked up speed.
I had time and tonight, while I wanted more, it was all that I had any right to ask him for.
“You’re here. This is Westfall.”
I smiled broadly. I might have shocked him a little, and for a moment, it amused me. Then the weight of the truth sank in like a rock in my gut.
Adam had known me for years and knew that I’d spent a good portion of my life—eighteen years, give or take—growing up in Westfall. Now, the association confused him.
I couldn’t really blame him. I had consciously put those literal miles between the life I always had and the life I mapped out for myself. If anything, I should be satisfied that I’d succeeded. If only success hadn’t recently been translating into all symptoms of sadness and regret, when I finally tallied everything I’d achieved for myself against everything I’d lost.
My hands clenched into fists on my sides as I resisted the urge to run up to him and shake him a little until he lost that wariness in his eyes and finally grinned at me, telling me it was about damned time I came home. It would never be that easy to write off the years I knew he’d spent suffering. Despite my diplomas and degrees, he’d been the real smarter one between us, knowing well ahead of me that the price my dreams demanded from the both of us was too high.
I could tell him I made a mistake—that the only thing I probably ever did right was him—but Adam’s worn too many scars from mistakes I insisted were smart decisions back then, when I thought I knew better. He wasn’t going to be eager to put himself within striking distance of me again—he was probably still bleeding in some parts. The problem with an all-consuming love is that it burns and chafes from within—that no matter how cold and alone you are, the fire still burns inside, only able to put itself out once there’s nothing left but ashes.
“I know it’s been six years but I still remember the way back,” I said in a voice steadier than I though I could manage. “There are some things you never forget, Adam.”
Like you. Like the only real happy memories of my life.
“And there are some things I wish to God I could forget,” was his low mutter as he threw the rag into the sink on the side. He turned away, twisting the faucet on until the sound of the gushing water became the only sound between us for a few seconds. He turned the water off and wiped his hands on a towel before turning back to me, his eyes conducting a quick inspection of me from head to toe.
I was in black leather boots, leggings and a cashmere sweater dress with a luxurious hunter green wool coat. It was a comfortable outfit but it was still very much the urban sophistication the old Lily would have had none of. The old Lily wore peasant dresses and braids in her hair in the summer and jeans and a sweater in the winter.
I wanted to tell him that despite the different packaging, I was still the same girl he knew and loved a long time ago–I knew this because I still loved him as much as I did, didn’t I? If I weren’t the same person, chances were I wouldn’t feel the same way. And God, did I ever try to be a different person. First, because that was the whole point of my life and later, because I thought it was the only way to be rid of the silent suffering only the old Lily would feel having lost Adam.
He swept a quick glance around the room, effectively warning everyone who had been staring to mind their own business. He sighed, knowing the reprieve wouldn’t last long, and motioned to a stool by the bar right across from him.
“I’m not sure what you’re in town for but if you want a drink, I’ll make you one,” he said. He raised a brow at me. “Do you want anything fancy? We don’t have that many options here.”
I slid up on the stool, smiling bravely even as the pounding of my heart intensified at the fact that he was now only maybe two feet away. I could see the gold flecks in his dark eyes and in this distance, I could feel his warmth. He still smelled of clean soap and faint mint and his hands still looked tanned and rough from working in the family farm when he wasn’t running this place.
“I still like a Jack and Coke,” I told him, clasping my hands together on top of the counter and realizing the same second that I didn’t have my purse with me. “I, uh, don’t have money with me right now though. I forgot my purse.”
My cheeks heated, even more so when he smiled for the first time tonight.
“Let’s just tally this one up along with the countless other drinks you’ve had from this bar, why don’t we?” He reached for a glass and filled it with ice before splashing it with some spiced rum and Coke. He picked up a wedge of lime and propped it on the brim of glass. He moved the glass toward me but paused as he reached back into bar fridge behind him. Turning back with a small clump of mint leaves, he dropped them into my glass and pushed it the rest of the way to me.
“Just the way I like it,” I murmured with a smile, squeezing the lime into the glass before taking a small sip. When he didn’t say anything, I looked up and found his dark eyes gazing at me intensely. Anyone else would be intimidated but Adam’s fierce gazes were usually a telltale sign of his unraveling emotions. Tonight, I needed him to pop the lid open because we were done sealing this off in the past. “Thank you for the drink, as always.”
“You’re a long way from home, Lil,” he said.
I shook my head gently. “That couldn’t be farther from the truth.”
The light shifted in his eyes but he looked away before I could figure it out. When his eyes returned to my face, his emotions were under wraps again.
“Why are you in Westfall?” he asked bluntly. “You haven’t had any reason to come visit in the last six years.”
Since my mother died in the summer before my third year in college, I had no family left in Westfall. It was what made staying away easier after I lost every person in this town that I had deeply loved.
“You’re the only one I’d ever return to Westfall for.”
I let the statement hang in the air for a bit, letting each word sink into Adam until it told him everything else that I didn’t say out loud.
I didn’t look away though. I held his gaze steadily, watching silently as his eyes burned with a confusion of feelings he battled to contain.
Don’t fight it, Adam. Six years of fighting it is long enough.
“I’m going to need a drink of my own, I think,” he muttered under his breath before marching out of the bar and heading straight for Anna-Lynne, the Grill’s manager for probably two decades now. Her gaze darted in my direction as Adam talked to her and her expression wasn’t friendly.
It was as I expected although it hit a sad note because Anna-Lynne used fuss over me as much as my mother did. They’d worked together for years as waitresses here, and when Adam and I started dating, she was a giddy fan, always gushing that she’d always known that the two of us would end up together one day.
Adam’s family owned Old Country Grill. Eileen, perhaps one of the most well-loved matriarchs of the oldest, most prominent family in Westfall, started it as a small restaurant sixty years ago, primarily as an extension of the food that the Bishop farm harvested. It fed everyone, from locals to tourists and even to those simply passing by, and it wasn’t long before the great food and the Bishops themselves who were in one way or another part of the staff, made the place into a county icon. Twenty-five years ago, a separate bar was attached to it, featuring a dance floor and a small stage area where local musicians from within a hundred-mile radius came to perform every weekend all year round.
As young as six, I’d started to linger in either the kitchen or the staff room, sitting unobtrusively in a corner, studying or doing my homework whenever my mother had to work a shift. We had no other family left and baby-sitters were extra cash we didn’t have to spend. Since I was content to stay out of people’s way, Beth Bishop, Adam’s mother who was managing the place then, didn’t have an issue with me tagging along. When I was twelve, Beth offered me the small, part-time job of tidying up her office in the attic of the restaurant, occasionally filing even some of the mail and invoices when she couldn’t get around to them. I was young but she’d always praised me for being an intelligent, highly competent girl who would do well in anything I did. She paid me twenty dollars a week and allowed me to use the office typewriter for any of my homework or paper that could benefit from being submitted in a smarter-looking format. It was a good system—and I could never refuse the money since I was saving every penny I could—and since I was spending most of my time in the office upstairs, I still got enough quiet time to study as soon as I was done my tasks.
One night, several months later, Adam showed up with his father, Edward, who gave him a tour around while explaining the many different elements of the restaurant’s operations. I knew who he was because we went to the same school, and I’d seen him before when he would come in occasionally with his parents and two younger brothers to eat but they hardly spent time in the back with the staff.
He was surprised to see me in the office but he said nothing, just studied me with that quiet intensity of his as I sat there, curled up in a spare dining chair Beth used for any visitors, reading a book and making notes. I didn’t say anything to him, even as Edward introduced us, but I didn’t look away from his bold, assessing gaze either. Adam, even as a young boy, had an unforgettable face. His features were perfectly proportioned that to many he would be handsome. He was so much more than that, though. His dark eyes, once trained on you, made the rest of the world fade. His brooding nature made you want to get close enough so you could glimpse, even if just a little, the kind of man he was inside. His surprising capacity for tenderness, in those rare moments he stepped outside of his usual reserve, assured you that the man you’d seen inside was worth everything you stood to lose for a shot to be with him.
An hour later, I looked up to stretch the kink in my neck and nearly fell out of my seat when I realized Adam was standing right there in front of me. I didn’t hear or notice him come up. If it bothered him that he’d startled me, he didn’t show. He simply asked me what I was reading and I held up my battered history textbook. He grunted at the book, as if that articulated his opinion on it, and sat down with me.
Since that evening, he would show up at the Grill almost every afternoon in his bike straight from school. He would spend some time alongside his mother as she supervised the dinner rush and went over some of the paperwork with him so he could learn some of the basics of running a restaurant he would later own and operate. After that, he was free to do whatever he liked and as it turned out, he liked spending time with me. We would mostly study but sometimes we would just sit there and talk conversations that were sometimes too serious for a couple of twelve-year-olds.
On weekends and most of the summer, Adam would invite me over to their farmhouse where we did more things together—study, play, run around the rolling meadows and watch the cows, teach me how to ride a horse, or frolic by the creek with a small picnic in the guise of fishing when we hardly ever caught anything. Sometimes, we’d just hang out in the loft in the old barn which he declared to be his favorite place on earth although it still reeked lightly of horse dung and fertilizer even after having been abandoned for a new one years earlier. It was the first time that I didn’t feel lonely, or in the way as I often did with my perpetually harassed and exhausted mother, or as pressured by the checkboxes I’d plotted the rest of my life with. I threw myself headlong into the first and only real friendship of my life.
And Adam and I were no more than best friends for a long time until the summer before our junior year. We just leaned in toward each other, still drenched from our swim in a remote lake on the outskirts of town, and kissed like it was the most natural thing in the world for best friends to do. And maybe it was, because it didn’t take long since that first kiss before I realized that I had really loved Adam all those years as we were growing up. And he loved me the same way, and just about as long. People were less surprised than we were and that may be because it had been there between us the whole time. The fact that he was Adam Bishop—heir to Westfall’s royal family, star quarterback and town heartthrob—and I was just Lily Matheson—poor, bookish and in line to follow in the steps of the last three generations of Matheson women who lost their hearts and gained fatherless children in return—didn’t seem to matter.
And despite my practical nature, I gloried in that.
Who wouldn’t want to be loved intensely and desperately?
“I’ll help round up everyone so they can go while you finish your drink,” Adam said when he walked back to the bar. He opened up a bottle of beer and took a long swig.
I wasn’t the only one who needed some liquid courage tonight.
“Go do what you need to do,” I reassured him with a smile. “I’ll wait.”
His dark eyes bore into me as his question drove straight into my heart. “Will you?”
Tears pricked my eyes and my smile wobbled a little but I kept it on for him. “I don’t have all the time in the world but tonight, I’ll be here. I’ll wait, Adam, because I know you’ll keep your word and come back.”
His hand tightened around the beer bottle and for a moment, I thought he was about to yank me into his arms. But he didn’t. He drew in a deep breath and nodded before turning away.
It was ten minutes—maybe forever—but I stayed where he’d left me, sipping my drink and watching him help the staff close up. Despite his gruff exterior, Adam was a kind man who did his best with people and it showed even in those few minutes he helped Marty, one of the older kitchen hands, carry dirty dishes into the back. He told an old regular to go home to his lovely wife and pat him on the back on his way out. He smiled politely at the outrageous flirting of an older lady who kept squeezing his bicep and told her that she was too much of a lady for an ordinary fellow like him but that he was nevertheless honored.
I smiled and wondered, what if?
What if I’d chosen this life the first time?
Would Adam and I be closing this place up until there was no one left but the two of us? We’d make ourselves a drink, play an old James Taylor record and dance until we were so tired we’d collapse back on the bar stools and talk until sunrise, just like we used to. Then maybe we’d take ourselves home after and make love just as pink and gold streaked the skies. We’d get no more than a couple of hours of sleep but we’d be sleeping with smiles on our faces knowing that our day together would start all over again soon enough.
“See ya tomorrow, Adam! Stay warm, a’right? Tonight’s as cold as bitch.” Anna-Lynne’s tone was sharp and succinct and I tried my best not to flinch.
Adam just got back to the bar and picked up his beer. He must’ve noticed my tight expression as I stared a hole in my glass. He sighed and briefly waved goodbye to the woman.
“I can take care of myself just fine, Lynnie.”
The woman scoffed and I could just imagine the look on her face. “Yeah, you’ve said that before when you didn’t look like you were taking care just fine then. Just looking out for ya, sweetie.”
“Good night and drive safe,” Adam said a little more firmly this time, in a tone that brook no further argument or provocation. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
As the door creaked shut after Anna-Lynne headed out, it was suddenly just the two of us.
There was some indistinct country song still playing in the background but other than that, Old House Grill was finally quiet.
Adam finished the rest of his beer and set the bottle down. “She’s just protective, Lil. She didn’t mean that.”
I finally looked up. I couldn’t help the bitter curl of my lip. “She did and I don’t blame her. It’s too bad because I cared about Anna-Lynne and she cared about me. But it’s not her forgiveness I need.”
Adam’s mouth tipped up in a humorless smile of his own. “You came all the way from New York in the dead of winter for my forgiveness. Why now?”
Yes, why now?
I’d asked myself the same question as I sat there in the opulence of the posh Manhattan restaurant in an enchanting ruby red dress, sipping wine and smiling my surprise when Barry got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.
Eight months of dating—perhaps my most atrocious attempt at making my life seem better, more complete—and he was ready to pledge himself to me. He didn’t even know me—not who I truly was, anyway. It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t know what I held back.
Saying yes made sense. Everyone was watching excitedly—friends and other co-workers who came to the party I’d organized to celebrate his official rise in the ranks as a partner in the law firm we both worked in. Barry was a nice guy—good-looking, smart, from a good upperclass family—and he was good to me. He would make a good husband—if he were the one I wanted.
But he isn’t. You want the one who showed up at your dorm one night, six years ago, rambling on happily about how he had everything important he owned in the back of his pick-up truck, dangling the engagement ring he’d bought you two years earlier when you turned him down, and the key to the new apartment he got for the two of you in New York because he was finally ready to turn his back on the only life he’s ever known just to make you happy.
I could still remember Adam’s face when I opened the door. He was grinning broadly, dark brown eyes sparkling, before he cupped my face and kissed me hard. As soon as he pulled away, he fumbled with the ring he gave me when I came home for Christmas during my second year in college. He’d proposed then, while we sat by the fireplace at his parents’ house, and I said no, like the foolish young woman I’d been. Foolish because the only reason I ever gave him—the least legitimate one of them all—was that I couldn’t marry him if it meant turning my back on New York and settling in the one town I’d wanted to leave for as long as I could remember. My life was going to be in New York and if he wanted to be part of it, he couldn’t be in Westfall. It was a very childish ultimatum, the critical mistake of someone naive and selfish enough to think that she might just have it all. I headed back to campus the next day, so sure in my heart that Adam would be at my doorstep by nightfall. But he didn’t come. I felt betrayed, misunderstood. So I pushed Adam out of my life in the several months that followed, granting him exactly what he’d wished for in not so many words that night when he asked me for everything yet gave up nothing for me.
My mother died early in the summer from a kidney complication I didn’t know she had. Sally Matheson had made many mistakes in her life—me, being one of them when at sixteen, she fell in love with a man passing by Westfall and made a spectacle of herself with her broken heart and swollen belly—but she had done her best by me. Despite the legacy of foolish, romantic mistakes she was passing on to me, and which I’d done my best to avoid, I couldn’t hate her. So I came home.
Devoid of emotion, I’d stood there by the grave long after the funeral party had gone, wondering why I didn’t feel as severed as I expected. I’d lost Adam only months before—and had probably already been in the process of doing so in those two intervening years between when I left for college and that disastrous Christmas proposal—and my mother was gone then, too. There was no one left in Westfall for me. No one who mattered as much anyway.
But Adam was there when I finally turned around to leave. Even more somber in a black suit, his eyes anguished and brimming with pain I couldn’t even feel in the icy emptiness in my chest, he straightened away from under the oak tree he’d been leaning on and strode to me. Without a word, he pulled me into his arms, his fingers sifting through my hair as he murmured my name against my cold cheek. He told me he was sorry—about my mother, about our awful break-up, about all the things he couldn’t fix for me. He pulled away just far enough to look into my eyes, his hands cradling my face like they always did when we kissed, and asked me to let him try to make me happy again, this time for the rest of our lives.
I told him it was too late, and that at the end of the day, it was only up to me to be happy.
I couldn’t remember much of the couple of days that followed after my mother’s funeral, when I packed up the small but comfortable mobile home we’d lived in all our lives and put what I couldn’t give away in storage. I went through all the paperwork with a realtor to put the place up on sale as fast as she could and bound the bus back to New York where I promised nothing of Westfall would ever follow me.
It wasn’t until two years later, a few nights before graduation, that a knock came to my door just as I was finally getting up the courage to sleep with this guy, Anthony, whom I’d been on a dozen dates with in the past year in an effort to keep the loneliness at bay. I answered the door barefoot but still in the dress I wore to a fancy dinner earlier that evening.
Adam had been the last person I expected to see that night.
The fact that he’d finally told his parents he was following me to New York, leaving behind the life he’d been trained to lead, and that he’d gotten us a new place with money he’d saved up from his salary working multiple jobs in both the farm and the Grill, weren’t what I expected after nearly two years of cold, quiet distance between us since my mother’s funeral.
He had the simple, small diamond ring and the keys on his hand, held out to me as he waited for my answer, his gaze open and hopeful. That was when Anthony called my name and crept up behind me, the hands he’d settled on my shoulders appearing intimate and possessive to anyone looking.
In the next instant, faster than the beat my heart skipped, Adam’s face turned flinty cold, his hand curling around all the symbols of his sacrifice and devotion to me as he withdrew a step. He muttered a low apology for the intrusion, turned around and walked away.
By the time I made it downstairs, bolting out to the sidewalk with my feet bare and my heart in my throat, he was already gone. I went back up to my unit, telling myself it was for the better because I knew, deep inside, that Adam had loved the life he had in Westfall. He would eventually hate me for making him give it up, the same way I knew I would feel if he’d asked me to come home to Westfall with him instead.
My life after that unfolded like clockwork—matching every mark in my long-term plans.
I earned myself a scholarship to Yale for my law degree, finished at the top of my class and secured a spot in a law firm back in New York. At twenty-eight, despite the empty echoes of the life that felt more and more like a stranger to me in the years since it drastically changed, my future was still very bright with my path paved for a partnership.
My engagement to Barry would’ve been icing on the current cake I had but as he waited there on one knee, holding an elaborate diamond ring, I only saw one face.
It was one I hadn’t forgotten. One I realized I didn’t want to forget.
If I’d said yes a long time ago when Adam asked a second time, maybe I wouldn’t have known the gnawing pain of the last six years. But then, how could one know what they were missing until it was gone?
So I said no to Barry right in front of our audience who were all stunned into horrified silence and flagged a cab home. I changed, packed a couple of suitcases, and drove down a road I didn’t know I would ever be taking back again.
At the intersection of the past and the present, I knew my life had changed in an instant.
The future was tonight, and perhaps, tomorrow.
“If you had one chance to take back something you had lost, even if for the briefest time, wouldn’t you take it?” I asked Adam.
His throat worked as he regarded me with troubled eyes—eyes that widened for an instant when I reached forward and placed my hand over his. His skin felt warm and rugged from hard work, very much like the man himself, and the contact seared itself into my memory even though I had never really forgotten how it felt to touch him like this.
“I can’t take back what doesn’t belong to me anymore,” he said in a rough voice, his hand trembling ever so slightly under mine. “I’ve learned that the hard way.”
A tear rolled down my cheek and I dashed it back with my free hand, gasping out a small laugh in embarrassment.
“I know you think you lost me that day, Adam.” My voice trailed off to a whisper as I looked away, not wanting to gaze into the same eyes I’d seen sad too many times because of me. “But really, I lost you. I found the version of me I’d always wanted to be—successful, urbane—but it didn’t take long before I realized that the version of me I liked best was the one I was with you. But you were gone from me.”
“There were days when I really wished that I were gone from you completely, Lil,” Adam said in a dry voice. “Days when I wished I never knew you because while you were the happiest part of my life, you were also the most painful.”
I looked up and caught the faint smile on his lips. “Do you wish the same right now?”
I had to ask because no matter how much I wanted to stay and make it right, I was out of privileges. I’ve already hurt him more than I could ever forgive myself for. If he wanted me to go, if it were the only way to keep the pain at bay from him, I would turn around and leave.
It was what you did when you loved someone. It was the same thing Adam did for me years ago, when he let me go because it was what I thought I wanted.
He surprised me when I felt his hand shift under mine. He’d moved his palm up until he was cradling my hand, his fingers finding the grooves between my own with certainty that spoke of the countless times they’ve intertwined in the past.
“No, I don’t,” he said softly, his smile deepening that he almost looked like he did when we were eighteen and blissfully in love. “If you can take that chance, Lil, I can, too.”
I broke into a grin and a heartbeat later, Adam grinned back.
A chance.
Tonight, I thought fate was being its usual coy, cruel self but it’s giving me exactly what I asked for—a chance—and whether it’s fleeting or forever, we’re going to take it like we should’ve many years ago.
***
Hi everyone!
This is a short story that will probably stay with me forever.
Stories about first love—both its magic and tragedy—tend to never leave us even once we're done the book. I hope this stays with you too.
Coming back to writing, I'm very thrilled to start with this story and I hope you will stick around to see the rest of this through.
For move love stories that celebrate first love, don't forget to check out the profile page for The Best of Me where you can find this story as well.
Vote and comment in both if you like it!
XOXO!
Ninya