Page 121 of Happy After All

When the kids are finished, the tree is like a great glowing horror, and they are overjoyed. They circle around the tree in excitement until their parents come to get them, and then Nathan carries it to my room for safekeeping until we can move it out to the auction site this weekend.

“That’s not a Charlie Brown Christmas tree,” he says. “That is something else entirely.”

“It’s joy,” I say.

He looks at me, his eyes grave. And then he grips my chin and kisses me. “I think you might be right.”

Joy. He feels it too. This big, beautiful, incredible thing. I want to tell him what I’m feeling. I want to tell him how much I like him.

Instead I kiss him. Instead, I let him take my clothes off. I say with my body what feels difficult to put into words.

We’ll have time for that.

I have to believe we will.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Knowing nothing is happening Thursday and Friday makes me feel like I’m on vacation. Yes, I have my usual motel duties, and we have the dive-in movies. I’m not driving to Bakersfield, and I’m not confronting my old wounds and slaying dragons, so it feels nearly peaceful.

Nathan and I hole up in his room, unusual because I still feel weird about being in a guest’s room, but here we are.

“This feels naughty,” I say, stretching out on the end of his bed while he sits at his desk, typing and looking furious at the world.

He just looks that way sometimes. It’s intensity. It’s caring. It’s part of who he is.

I’ve inhaled two of his thrillers, even with everything that’s going on. They’re like the man himself. Sharp, insightful, hard in some ways. His main protagonists are so emotionally invulnerable, I want to punch them in their rock-hard stomachs. There are no romances in his books. Sex, liaisons, but nothing I’d call a real romance.

Typical, and he isn’t typical in so many other ways.

He turns and looks at me. “I’d report you to HR, but I think that’s ... you.”

“Maybe.” I roll over onto my stomach. “I ship Tanner with Monica, by the way.” His main military man and his friend slash colleague are,in my opinion, crying out for some bedpost-rattling sex and a happy ending.

“Nope,” he says.

“You can’t tell me what I ship, Nathan.”

He looks at me. “I can tell you what I don’t intend to write.”

“Boring!”

“Why is that boring?”

I throw my hands into the air. “Like, goddamn, Nathan, he’s always saving the world, and she’s there for him. Don’t they deserve some happiness?”

“Some people can’t be happy. They have missions.” He turns back to his computer, and I wonder if he means him. I also wonder if he’s working on Sarah’s book.

I stand up and move behind him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders. He doesn’t pull away or hide the screen from me.

“How is the mission?” I ask.

“I’m . . . done,” he says.

It’s so final and so strange, even to me. “Oh. Nathan, I’m ...” I don’t know if I’m supposed to be happy for him or if this is another form of losing her.

Writing about her, pulling her words from her journals and turning them into a story, would have kept her close to him. Now it’s just done.

I take a breath. “Can I read it?”

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