Page 238 of One Wild Wish

“Then what? Tell me what you need, and it’s yours.”

She touched her belly briefly, as though cradling something precious, then she reached over and grazed her fingertips down my cheek. “Time. Our seconds, like you said. No talk of relationships or future yet. I’m not ready for that.”

I gathered her hand in mine and kissed each of her knuckles. “Then that’s what you’ll get.” Even though it wasn’t what I wanted. “But I have one demand.”

“Do you, now?”

“There will be more bikini posters.” I wasn’t sure where her code for sex had originated, but saying it restored her playfulness.

She shimmied her shoulders. “That, my fine sir, will not be a problem. There will be a whole Sports Illustrated issue of bikini posters. Before that, though”—she gripped my thigh, excitement in her wide green eyes—“we have more PI work.”

She went on about Uncle Rex’s clue to her father’s name. Tom or Ted. I did my best to show surprise, but the guilt over my lie thickened my throat, mixed with all the angst broiling inside me. The urge to confess what I knew rose, but I stomped it down. It was just another thing that could sink us. Another obstacle. Another reason we might fall apart.

Because of my idiocy.

But as she spoke about her mother’s favorite drink and how Mary had danced in the club and had wanted to be on Broadway and had eaten her first hotdog, my niggling remorse lessened. Gwen had wanted a hotdog because her mother had eaten one—maybe in this very spot. A day ago, she’d never have sought that connection with Mary. She actually smiled when gushing over her mother’s first kiss, made me read the passage. (After we’d wiped the grease from our hands.) This was the right thing, not telling her what I knew.

It also brought me back to the first time her mother had proved she’d loved her daughter.

The day of Gwen’s nineteenth birthday, I’d called Mary, desperate, asking for Gwen’s address. I’d denied my feelings for Gwen too long, had needed to speak with her and figure out if I was alone in my unshakable love. I’d been worried her mother would stonewall me, brush me off. She’d never liked me hanging around her daughter.

Mary Hamilton had surprised the hell out of me with two short sentences. “Gwen loves you, August. Don’t let her push you away.”

After picking my jaw up off the floor, I’d gone out that afternoon and had bought Gwen a birthday ring, to pledge my love. To fix whatever the hell I’d broken. If her mother was pushing us together, I’d figured Gwen must have told her something. Let it slip, how she’d felt.

That story may not have had a happy ending, and I was pretty sure Gwen had never opened up to her mother. Understanding what Gwen wanted had been a mother’s intuition alone.

As was Mary’s recent letter to me. Her final line—Remember what I told you on Gwen’s nineteenth birthday— had been a woman still looking out for her daughter, showing love in the only abstract way she knew how. She’d sent me the information about Gwen’s dad, not Gwen. She’d wanted us together. She’d known how unresolved our feelings had been. Without that push, I wouldn’t be here now, falling in love with Gwen all over again.

Fighting for her to give us a chance.

It didn’t absolve Mary of her abysmal parenting, but she’d wanted Gwen to find her father, and to find me.

I may have ruined the father part, but I owed it to Mary to let Gwen discover her mother. Learn to love a part of her, if possible.

This was the right thing to do, for Gwen, and for Mary.

* * *

Gwen

“Will you come to a lookout point with me?” I was too buzzed to quit following clues. I could barely sit still.

“You trying to take advantage of me, Possum?”

A tempting notion. One I would indulge in later. For now I couldn’t stop picturing a young Mary Hamilton eating hot dogs and having her first kiss. “My mother mentioned a place in her journal—a lookout called Tank Hill, which I’ve heard of but never visited. It just feels right, to keep following in her footsteps. It led us here, to Finch and you guys talking. And—”

“You covering me in mustard?”

“It really was tonight’s highlight.” Joking with August was the highlight. The lightness allowed me to live in the moment. The here and now. Keep my mind from running ten steps ahead.

He pinched his defiled black T-shirt and pulled it away from his chest. “Maybe we should change first.”

The stains on my tank top had begun drying, and I smelled like a hotdog, but tonight was all about momentum. We had twenty-four hours until my birthday was over. The deadline rolled closer, taunting me. “I don’t care if you don’t.”

He shrugged and released his shirt. “Then let’s move out.”

We bickered during the drive. I knew the fastest way to Twin Peaks Boulevard; he thought his way was better. Men were naïve like that, and I was verging on giddy. The hysterical kind of silly unleashed when a slew of untapped emotions engulfed you. It was an epidemic.