Page 45 of What August Heard
He was not holding himself together.
He was not managing this. He was just in it, kneeling in the mud in the rain, completely undone, with my hands in his.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you and I have been a coward about it for five years and I am asking you, right here, to let me be brave about it now. Starting today. Starting here.”
I looked at him for a long time.
I looked at his hands around mine. At his face, the open one, the real one — the one that was raw and vulnerable for the very first time. At the flowers he had cleaned and arranged behind him, standing in the bucket in the rain.
I was crying. Full, real sobs, the kind I hadn’t let myself have in front of anyone since I was young enough not to know how to stop them. I was holding his hands and I didn’t try to stop any of it.
“I love you too,” I said.
He went very still.
“I have loved you for as long as I can remember.” I shook my head. “I denied it to everyone. To Callie, to Poppy, to myself, every Tuesday morning for three years. But it was always true. It was always you.”
He moved.
He closed the space between us and his hands came up to my face and he kissed me in the rain in the mud at the empty farmer’s market and I kissed him back.
It was not a gentle kiss. It was five years of Tuesdays and the wave and the porch and the dahlias and everything I had been carrying folded up small, coming out all at once. His hands were in my hair and my hands were wrapped in his wet shirt and the rain kept coming and neither of us stopped.
When we finally did, I pulled back and looked at his face.
“Why did it take you so long,” I said.
He almost laughed. It came out rough. “Something horrible happened because of a decision I made seven years ago,” he said. “I did something I thought made me unworthy of you. Ofany of this.” He looked at me. “I never thought I deserved to be happy. Not after what happened. I’ve been punishing myself with distance and wrong choices and dark roads at midnight and I—” He stopped. “I didn’t think I could be this. For you. With you.”
I looked at him.
“Help me,” I said.
He blinked.
“Help me get these flowers in the van.” I stood up. I reached down and he took my hand and stood with me. “All of them. Every bucket.” I looked at Gerald, waiting under the oak tree. “Then we’re driving to the children’s hospital. They can have all of it.” I looked back at him. “And then you are going to tell me everything. All of it. From the beginning. And I’m going to listen to every word.”
“August—”
“And then we are going to figure out the rest of it together.” I held his eyes. “You don’t get to carry the dark alone anymore. That’s the deal.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
We picked up the buckets.
I pulled Gerald out of the parking lot and drove toward the hospital, Fletcher’s hand finding mine on the gear shift somewhere on the first block, and I let him hold it the whole way there.
***
Epilogue
Fletcher
One year later, I was leaning against Gerald when August came out of the shop.
