Page 110 of Came the Closest

One I get to experience fully tonight.

The thought makes me shiver. Colton smooths a thumb down my arm. “Let me guess,” he teases softly. “I gave you goosebumps again.”

I tuck my lips between my teeth and nod. I don’t have to tell him; he knows he affects me. It’s times like these when I wonder how I went so long without this connection.

Because this Colton and that Colton weren’t the same.

I sit back down at the table and I watch Colton help our brothers get the fire going. I wasn’t the same me back then, either. Painful as the last few years were, they shaped us into who we are now. We have more scars, visible and nonvisible, but we are also stronger, independently and together.

For the first time this summer, I know why we aren’t those bookstore meet-cute strangers. If we were, we wouldn’t know how much we’ve both grown. I wouldn’t know that Colton only likes grape Tootsie-Pops, and he wouldn’t know that I fold towels differently than he does.

We’ve ebbed and flowed with the current until it finally brought us here, which is truly just the beginning.

Colton shifts my dad’s baby blue ’85 Bronco into park. Its headlights flash across the cedar shake siding of the lake house, but they may as well shine directly on me. In the silence, my tumultuous thoughts feel deafeningly loud.

My husband knows it.

He gets out and opens my door because he knows I won’t move on my own. He steps close and lifts both of his hands, waiting until I take them to speak. “Talk to me, Fini.” He reaches up and catches an errant tear on the pad of his thumb. “Tell me what’s going on in that beautiful head of yours, sweetheart.”

Looking into the unwavering blue eyes of my best friend, my husband, I take a shuddering breath. “I don’t want to…disappoint you. You’re not Stephen, and I don’t want to think about him on our wedding night. I don’t. But now I am thinking about him, and I’m trying not to think, and it’s not going very well.”

“Fini, you will never disappoint me. Not tonight, and not any other time.” He squeezes my hands. “But don’t stop the thoughts, honey. It’s okay. I will never, not ever treat you as anything less than someone to cherish, but he did. It’s okay to feel the emotions surrounding what he did to you, and to tell me how it made you feel. Did he…” He pauses and looks away. He runs his teeth along his lower lip before he meets my eyes. “Cheyenne, tell me something. Did he hurt you?”

“No,” I say quickly. “I mean, not physically, if that’s what you’re asking. He just didn’t respect me very much. If that makes sense. I guess what I mean is that I never felt safe with him.”

By the last word, my voice is a quivering whisper. I don’t let myself look away from Colton, even though it takes everything in me not to hide. I feel exposed emotionally, and I can’t stand it. I want to face my husband without fear of being disrespected, because I know Colton isn’t him. Even on Colton’s worst days, he was never him.

“Cheyenne.” With a gentle hand under my chin, he dips his head to catch my eyes. I had looked down without even realizing it. “What do you need from me to make you feel safe?”

The question instantly quiets the demons inside me. I don’t know how to explain it and I’m not sure I fully understand it. But it does. It quiets the voice that has governed me for too long. The voice that is just as false as my anxiety around summer storms, one that never deserved to have influence over me to begin with.

Communicating that to Colton verbally, however, seems too difficult. I don’t even try. Inhaling the campfire smoke on his skin, I scoot forward on the leather seat until I can take his face in my hands. I close my eyes and I press my mouth to his. My lips tremble, and he softens to my mouth, but he gives me every ounce of control. He’s waiting for me to fully answer his question before he’ll touch me of his own volition, no matter how hard it is for him to wait.

“I know I’m safe with you, Collie,” I whisper. “I trust you.”

It’s the only thing he needs. He slides one arm behind my back, and the other under my knees. I squeal when he lifts me effortlessly from the seat. He pushes the car door closed with his shoulder, his long strides quickly closing the distance to the front door.

My laughter warms the night air as he struggles with the doorknob, and Colton shoots me a heatless glare. When we make it over the threshold, bridal style, we’re both laughing so hard he has to lean back against the door for support.

My nerves fizzle out. We will never be those bookstore strangers, but we will always be best friends. Instead of one date becoming twenty, and twenty becoming a lifetime, this one summer became that lifetime before we’d even realized it.

Colton slowly lowers my feet to the floor, and that’s when I realize something is different in the house. I feel something velvety under my toes, and I look over my shoulder. Colton notices at the same time, because I feel his body still.

A banner across the kitchen entryway reads Welcome Home! Underneath, sitting on a tall white table surrounded by flower petals, the house key rests beside an envelope. I look up at Colton, and he looks at me. His palm drifts up and down my spine as I pull out a piece of my grandmother’s blue and white linen stationery.

“‘From that very first day, when your lives became irrevocably tangled,’” I read aloud, tears standing in my eyes, “‘this house has been part of both of you. It’s time for you to be a part of it. Welcome home, newlyweds. We hope you’ll love the lake house as deeply as we always will. Love, Warren and Clara Kolter.”

We both read it silently no less than three times over. Later, we’ll have thoughts about being gifted our favorite place, but right now, Colton sets the note back down. The gesture from my grandparents gives him the boldness he’s been holding back, and my body shudders when he steps closer.

Warm amber light spills from surroundings lamps, softening the edges of his face. He lifts a hand to push my windblown hair behind my ear. My inhale shakes, but this time when he leans down to kiss me, I meet him halfway. My palms rest on his chest, his heart pounds in a rapid staccato, and his fingertips press into the bare skin of my lower back. The cotton of my clothes caresses the linen of his, and the only sounds are those of the lake house and of us.

Walls settling. Inhaling and exhaling. Wind pressing at the rafters. Soft whimpers in my throat and a low groan in his chest. Cool sheets rustling. Skin touching.

A careful exploration blooms into something otherworldly when we lower our guards fully. Something deep, and powerful, and electrifying. Something only the two of us can ever, and will ever, share.

The way Colton kisses me is achingly tender and endlessly patient. The words we whisper into the space of eternity are vows that are incapable of being broken. The understanding we have of one another is reverent and resounding.

And when he murmurs the word infinity into my collarbone, I know I’ve found what I’ve always dreamed of.

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