Page 16 of One Vow

After a minute, she pulled away, hard, and sat up. I moved beside her.

“But there’s one thing I have to know now.” There was a short pause and I nodded. “Seriously, Finn. Why would you do this?”

I had no answer. No clue. “I don’t know.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Come on now, Finn. That’s not good enough. You videoed me, us together. And let your friend put it online.”

She closed her eyes, hung her head, and laid her hand over her chest. “And my dad’s going to see it because the authorities, and the school’s senior staff, has to go through and figure out who the girls are so they can be contacted. He has to tell them so that they can press charges against you if they want.”

She sniffed and her eyes pooled with tears. “Did you know he was making those videos? Of us? Of you?”

“Kind of.” The story was way bigger than what she knew. Way bigger than I could tell her. “I knew he was making videos but not of us. Not of me or Keaton or Jameson. Sometimes, he would make the younger guys, the pledges, take a girl to the boat and…the video would stream at the house. We’d rate them on their…it was stupid, okay? And I wish…” Oh fuck, did I wish. “But I didn’t know he was…that we were…or that he’d put them online.”

“So, your friends were… watching…rating…fuck.” She hiccupped and cried some more. And for about ten minutes, she sobbed her heart out, trembled, sniffed, then stopped like she’d flipped a switch. Toughest chick I’d ever met. “Okay, so I was just thinking of all the reasons to break up with you.”

I knew it, but how did I stop it? I could deal with anything, even this shit, anything but losing her. “And?”

“And I’ve decided, I love you too much.” She shook her head. “And don’t you dare act smug right now because I just don’t think I could take that. So, no smiling. No gloating that I love you too much to hate you.”

But she was wrong. I wasn’t smug. I was grateful. Determined to make this up to her. No matter what it took.

“Whatever you did with anyone else, I can’t help you with, but…my dad said you could end up…in trouble with the law.” Yeah. They’d told me that, too. “But if we’re married, they can’t make me testify against you.”

She chuckled. “So, what do you say? I know it’s not the most romantic proposal, but Finn Makenzie, will you be my husband?”

If that was her plan to save me, I was more than willing. “Lis…”

But married. To her. It wouldn’t solve the problem with school…or with anything else, but I’d have Felicity. And nothing meant more to me than that. “Yes.”

6

Felicity

We weren’t holding hands. We weren’t even brushing shoulders. But I couldn’t have been more aware of Finn’s presence had I been riding on his back. Or his front.

I was aware of him. Definitely. Hyper aware. Stupid aware and trying to walk with such…awareness was apparently more difficult than I could manage gracefully. Instead, I stumbled over imaginary cracks in the sidewalk. Tripped over my perfectly tied and nearer my calves than my feet shoelaces.

“Are you happy, Lis?” His voice rasped, husky and rugged. Serious.

As if walking next to him wasn’t enough to throw me off balance, random, out-of-the-blue questions would do it. I staggered a step, caught myself, and managed to look up at him without face-planting on the sidewalk. “Define happy.”

“You know…dance in the rain, have a snowball fight, laugh until you pee happy. Are you?”

Since my answer made me sound like a candidate for Prozac, I smiled at him. “Are you?”

“I have my moments.” He smiled, and for a second, I wondered if he was thinking about another woman. But since that did nothing to make me walk straighter or be happier, I ignored what he could have been thinking about in favor of what we needed to be thinking about. “I’m pretty happy right now.”

“Good.” I cleared my throat. What the hell was I supposed to do with happy right now? What the hell was that supposed to mean. Happy to be getting a divorce? Happy to be engaged to someone else? Or happy to be here with me? I shoved the dangerous thought to the side. “So the divorce shouldn’t take long. Marty,” the only attorney I knew and certainly the only one willing to draw up papers at 6 o’clock in the morning on the Monday before Christmas, “said once we sign, we can go before the judge, and he’ll explain what happened to the other papers. Then as soon as the judge signs off, probably Wednesday if we can get on the docket, then you’ll be all free to get married.”

Those words tasted bitter. Or maybe it wasn’t the words themselves, but the picture they inspired. Finn waiting at the end of an aisle, smiling as some nameless, faceless woman walked toward him.

“Oh, okay.” He frowned. “That’s good.”

He nodded and watched his feet as we walked toward Marty’s office for our appointment. Not the one we’d missed to hang the lights, but one Marty had grumbled would keep him from a meatloaf dinner at his mom’s. I owed him big for that one.

We walked past the square where the Christmas festival was gearing up for tonight’s festivities. The week before Christmas was always a big deal in Glouster. And tonight, we had a snowman-making contest with fake snow, caroling on the square, and hot cinnamon apple cider while Mrs. Oberneuf led the Glouster ballet troop’s version of the Nutcracker. And every night, Joe Langdon offered carriage rides that zipped through town for the Christmas light tour. Hence the reason I had to risk life and limb to frostbite to hang lights.

There were a thousand things I wanted to know about Finn. What happened after he left? Where had he ended up? If he made it to medical school after all? Why he left me? But in lieu of saying anything with substance, I smiled up at him. “You’ll like Marty. He isn’t a typical lawyer.”