Page 95 of It's Always Sonny

She forgave me.

I didn’t know I could love her more than I already did, but understanding her better, seeing her has only strengthened my feelings.

I am so far in love, I can never come back.

She told off her parents for me.

She saved my life!

It’s all coming up Sonny.

But as elated as I am, there’s a weight to the emotion. The things she’s told me haven’t been easy or light. She was more isolated by her parents than I ever could have imagined. She grew up thinking that her parents’ love, like their approval, had to be earned and she wasn’t good enough to deserve it.

They.

Were.

Wrong.

The worst part—the part that cuts deepest—is that she thought I could ever feel the same way.

I want to dismiss it as her own insecurities, but thinking about it from her perspective, I can’t. I was too young, too immature, and too unaware to realize what I was doing. But I wish I could steal a time turner and go back and knock some sense into my younger self. I wish I’d known the beauty in give and take over action and reaction.

There’s a knot in my stomach as painful as any knee injury, but with a jagged edge of regret to it that could cut me from the inside out if I let it.

I don’t want to let it.

PJ’s right. We have to stop apologizing for our past. We have to stop dwelling on mistakes and what ifs. I can’t change how either of us acted then. I can only focus on the here and now.

We are here, now.

And by all accounts, we’re both happy about it.

I don’t know what’s going to happen between PJ and me, but I know one thing to the depths of my soul:

I am going to prove to PJ that my love isn’t conditional.

And I’m never going to stop.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Parker

Iwake up to find myself alone in the sleeping bag.

The sun is up, which tells me that it’s a real morning hour, but how long has Sonny been gone? And is he okay? It’s freezing outside!

I look at my phone, about to send out the Bat Signal, when I see that it’s 7:29 a.m. On a Thursday …

I pull up my radio app.

When the broadcast starts, I’m just in time to hear Bulldog introduce their next guest. And at the same time that their guest says hello, I hear Sonny just outside the tent.

My pulse spikes and a sob bubbles in my chest.

He’s still here.

He only got out of bed because he had to. He saw me at my lowest, my most pathetic. He saw me with no makeup, my hair wild. He saw me crying and snotty …

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