“In the best way, though.”
I thought for a few moments before I responded. “It doesn’t really matter, and you know that.” I jumped up onto the counter, just beside the cash register, and let my legs dangle below.
“Okay, let me ask you this. If Alexander had come home safely…would you still have this silly rule?”
Ouch. She hit me right where it hurt. I wasn’t like this before. I wasn’t so closed-off. Things were just different now. Everything was. My dad and his new family, my mom off tramping about the world with her boyfriend…Alex was gone, and then there was me. Just trying to get through each day.
“Your silence is an answer in itself. I just think that if you opened yourself up a little, you could be happy with a guy like Luke.”
“I don’t want a life with someone like Luke, JoJo. I don’t want the military life. I don’t want
to have something with Luke even if I did like him, because what happens if we get into a relationship, and he deploys and doesn’t come back? I won’t be able to move on. I won’t be able to live my life carrying such a big burden. It’s one thing losing Alex; it’s another thing losing someone I’m in love with. And to think that I would be carrying around both of those deaths? No, thanks.”
JoJo’s honey-like eyes softened. “You said you won’t be able to live your life carrying such a big burden, but are you even really living now, Cammie?”
It felt like I’d swallowed my own heart. My legs stopped kicking back and forth, and I knew my face was solemn by the way my muscles involuntarily formed into a frown.
“Do you think I like the military life? You know I’m not a fan of the long-distance shit, the worry that a deployment brings, no matter where it is in the world. But when you love someone, none of that matters, Cammie. None of it. Even if Ryan had died in Afghanistan on his last deployment, I wouldn’t do a damn thing different. His love and our life would be worth every single heartbreak that you’ve felt every day of your life since Alexander didn’t come home.”
The second the words left her mouth, I squeezed my eyes shut so the tears had nowhere to go. I wasn’t going to allow myself to cry, but her words, they spoke volumes to me.
Her warm hand landed on my forearm when she whispered, “I’m just saying, sometimes you have to take the big leap and fall, because you just might like the ground you land on.”
I only nodded my head, because my voice was nowhere to be found.
I was reading on my porch when the rumble of Luke’s Camaro sounded in the distance, igniting nervous jitters in my stomach. I wasn’t here this morning when he’d gone for his run; I was already down at JoJo’s shop, so I was dying to see what he had to say about my retaliation.
My eyes stayed glued to my paperback book, and I fought the urge to smile. I heard the slam of his car door and his footsteps clumping against the pavement. When I looked up, I saw him staring at me from the bottom of my concrete steps.
“Yes?” I asked harmlessly.
He didn’t say a thing, and the only thing I could think about was how his biceps were glistening in the early evening sun from below his rolled-up camouflage uniform. When he was right in front of me, I placed my bare feet down on my wooden porch and stopped the swing from hitting him in the knees. His smile was enigmatic, and I suddenly felt extremely worried about how he’d retaliate, because I knew he would.
“Smell me.” His voice was demanding, yet playful.
My heart picked up speed. “Excuse me?”
“Smell my arm, Cammie.”
A laugh bubbled up in my throat.
“I’m not smelling you, freak,” I quipped.
“Yes, you are. Smell me.”
He reached down and placed his bare forearm up to my nose. I tried to back away, but his smoldering look caused me to think twice. So I leaned in and grabbed his forearm with my hands, ignoring the tingly sensation his skin sent through me and I took a small, pitiful sniff of his arm.
“What do I smell like?” he asked, tilting his head to the left while peering down at me on the swing.
I crinkled my nose. “You smell like lemons.” Then I laughed. What the hell is this?
“That’s right. I smell lemony-fresh, just like the soap YOU left behind on the kitchen sink after taking all my shit.”
Ah, damn! The kitchen soap!
I giggled. Then my giggles turned into uncontrollable, stomach-hurting, knee-slapping laughter. When I looked back at him, through watery eyes, he only smiled and shook out his sandy blond hair.
“You just wait, Doc. You just wait!”