Page 69 of The Intimacy of Finding You

“Thinking about you almost wasn’t enough.”

“It’s okay, baby doll.”

I swallowed past the sob in my throat begging to come out. “I want to drink so fucking bad. I want to go back in time and tell my mom what happened. I want to change the past.”

Callum swung his legs over my hips, sitting on top of me. He stared down at me again, holding my face with both hands. “I wish we could. I wish we could change the past, but we can’t. What can we do? We can be here. Together. With each other. You’re safe with me, Tobes. You’re safe with my heart.”

My breath got caught in my throat as I looked up at him. He was telling the truth. Nothing but the truth. He loved me then. He loved me now. He loved me still. “I want to drink so bad, and I’m so fucking scared.”

“Then kiss me instead. If drinking helps with the past, kiss me in the present.”

I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, pulling him to me. His lips tasted sweeter than alcohol ever could. There was no burn. There was no bite. There was no sting. It was numbing, but in a soul kind of way. A weightless way. Like a feather in the wind, I drifted to him.

I kissed him until he was the only thing I wanted instead of vodka. I kissed him until my chin hurt from his beard rubbing against it. I kissed him until I could remember where I was and why I was there.

When I pulled away, I didn’t leave much room between us. I whispered so as to not disrupt the wind carrying my feather. “I want to see my mom. I think I want to tell her. I think I want to show her that I’m sober.”

“I think that’s a great idea, baby doll. I think that’s a really great idea.”

I kissed him again, this time not to curb a craving for alcohol, but to curb my desperate need to feel him. To feel the proof that he existed in my world. Just as I was his everything, he was mine. And as long as I had everything, there was nothing else to lose.

chapter thirty-three

Holy fuck.

It still looked the same. Everything looked the exact same, down to the welcome mat that said something about Christmas she’d never put back into storage because it was just too cute to hide away.

Well, there was one difference. There weren’t any chickens anymore. No sign of fleeting balls of energy and spite running around like they owned the place, dropping perfect, innocent white feathers. They were gone. Just gone, like I’d been all this time.

Callum had helped me with looking her name up. He’d found out that she was still listed as an employee at the same job with the same title. No obituaries. No tragedy for me to find out too late. It should’ve been a relief. At least, I thought it was supposed to be, but it wasn’t. Did that make me a bad person? I wanted to ask Callum, but I knew what his response would be.

Now that I knew she was alive, and I’d decided to finally face it—face this part of my life—it suddenly became a thousand times heavier. A million quadrillion times fucking scarier. There were what-ifs and what-abouts and possibilities I wasn’t ready to face, though I wasn’t ready not to, either. I just missed my mom. That was it. I missed her, and it was eating me up inside.

I owed her an explanation. I owed her a reason. I owed her the truth after she’d fought so hard for me my whole life. She wasn’t perfect. I dared to think that not even God himself was actually perfect.

Callum reached across the center console, taking my hand in his. “You doing okay?”

I took a deep breath in through my nose and let it out of my mouth. “No. I’m not. I don’t know if being okay is even an option with something like this.”

“I think it makes complete sense to be so scared. You haven’t been back to Tiger Falls since you started working at The Arch, have you?”

“No.”

“How does it feel?”

The population hadn’t changed. The single gas station at the edge of town still had the same faded red roof and cut-up concrete parking lot, serving as the only building in city limits that wasn’t a house. Every road had a view of someone’s cattle farm, fields stretching as far as the eye could see. Just before turning down the road of what used to be my home, there were three abandoned cars that’d sat there since I was a kid. They were still there, though a few more pieces of them had been taken.

I hadn’t missed it one bit. The loneliness it all facilitated, with the empty streets and cluttered woods that somehow made it all seem so desolate. I could remember running into our neighbor’s field with Mason, giggling and giddy because I’d thought it was so fucking awesome to be playing with someone as cool as him.

I didn’t have time to go down memory lane. At least not this kind of memory lane. “I don’t know. I have no idea.” It all felt too vague and too much for me to pinpoint a single overall emotion. I simply didn’t have an answer, and maybe that was answer enough.

Callum turned the key, shutting the car off. I watched the front door, not really sure what I was waiting for. Maybe for Mom to come to us instead of me going to her? Maybe I was waiting for her to find me, like when we’d played hide-and-seek when I was a kid.

Instead of waiting any longer, I pulled on the door handle and finally stepped foot outside. We’d slept in a hotel last night in the city after our flight. The drive from there to here had proven exhausting, my legs weak like jelly.

Callum held my hand as we walked up the creaky, decrepit porch steps together. They squeaked and echoed behind us, each moment passing us by so quickly, yet not quickly enough. The universe had paused, but the earth kept moving. My heart was hammering, but the throbbing in my head didn’t match my pulse. I’d forgotten how humid it was here, finding myself dripping in sweat even though I wasn’t particularly hot.

After treating the front door like an enemy, I finally stepped forward and knocked. It was so loud among the quiet rush of the wind. There were no birds to sing songs to us, despite having seen so many on our drive over here. We even saw a bald eagle—Callum’s first introduction to them.