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It reminded me of the letter. Because I was a chump, I’d pulled it from my bag and shoved it in the console of my work truck. Carefully, I pulled it out and held it in my hands. The edges of the envelope were battered and bent from all the times I’d clutched it just like this.
What if I’d just sent it from Spain? Not knowing what waswaiting for me when I came back. If she’d known that my feelings had changed.
That they’d shifted into something else.
Something bigger.
The first time in my life when I waited—when I curbed an impulse brewing under my skin—and it seemed now like I’d waited too long.
Fucking figured.
The man I was when I scrawled my thoughts out onto paper wasn’t even recognizable anymore. It was almost impossible to stay the same when the landscape of your life shifted so quickly. But the thoughts I’d put on paper, the feelings that plagued me every single day we were apart, those were still just as true.
Dear Poppy,
I’m not good with words, so forgive me for how this might come out. I can’t stop thinking about you...
“Enough,” I said in a harsh whisper, smacking the back of my head against the seat rest.
We were friends now.
I didn’t know how to be friends with Poppy any more than she knew how to be friends with me, which was really fucking clear in our interaction on her parents’ porch. We had no basis for this. No foundation to build on.
I didn’t know her favorite food or if she was a morning person or not.
I didn’t know if she took naps during the day or if she was craving weird foods.
God, how I wanted to know all those things. Not because we were friends, but because being around her set me on edge in a way that felt amazing and uncomfortable. Still didn’t know how to label it, if I were being honest.
There were people in the world who balanced multiple friendships with ease, juggling them without breaking a sweat.Good friends and work acquaintances and neighbors, all whipping through the air flawlessly.
For me though, each single relationship in my life was like the concrete footings we built houses on. You couldn’t move them quickly, couldn’t demolish them easily, and you only needed a few strategically placed to keep everything standing.
But I wasn’t juggling shit.
I had Cameron. And now, I thought with a deep sigh, I had Poppy. Not in the way she’d always wanted me but in a way that was far more vulnerable. Because now, I was the one sitting back in the stands, watching her live her life, fighting against a burgeoning sense of longing that threatened to take me over.
Because that longing was futile. It was energy crawling through my body with nowhere to go.
The telltale signs of an anxiety attack crawled quick and lethal through my veins, and I ran my hands up and down the tops of my thighs. It was so much simpler when I didn’t notice her. When I forced myself not to see.
Things that were easy for other people weren’t easy for me, and instead of easily being able to shift things aside to makesomeroom for Poppy, to be thankful that we had this tentative truce between us, there was this screaming instinct to swipe everything off the table until she was the only thing there.
I didn’t want to just make room. I wanted to give her every fucking inch of my life, and I didn’t know how to do less. When the baby came, maybe this wouldn’t seem so complicated, but for right now, all I could hear were her family’s justifiable threats ringing in my ear, and all I could see were her big brown eyes staring up at me when I asked her to marry me. When she told me she had a boyfriend.
A knock on my passenger side window had my eyes flying open, and Poppy’s smiling face had my heart thudding uncomfortably. I leaned over, unlocking the door, and sheleaned her shoulder against the doorframe after wrenching it open.
“You stalking me, Cartwright?”
“No,” I growled. “I just … saw you go in, and thought …” I wiped a hand over my face when my cheeks felt suspiciously warm. “I don’t fucking know what I thought, Poppy.”
Her teeth dug into her bottom lip while she studied me, and after only a moment of hesitation, she climbed into the truck and closed us in together with a slam of the door.
That smell.
Damn, that smell. That would be the thing haunting me for the rest of my natural born life.
She situated herself in the corner of the truck so she could properly stare me down.
