Page 89 of How to Say I Do
We probably could have stayed there forever, gazing all lovey-dovey into each other’s eyes, but Frank and Liam both came to us at the same time, each dusting off one of our fallen hats.
“Well,” Frank said. “I guess it’s time.” His eyes were gentle, but his smile was soft and sad.
Liam and I looked at each other. I didn’t want to. I powerfully, deeply, didn’t want to do this, and if Noël weren’t there, I might not have.
Noël already knew what was about to happen. We’d texted about it, the few times I’d been able to squeeze out some words between harvesting my grapes and collapsing for a few hours of shut-eye.
He walked with me to my truck. Liam disappeared around the passenger side as Noël and I stopped beneath the leaf-patterned sun fall of an old maple.
Noël’s eyes were so startlingly blue. His touch was soft and strong at once. He didn’t have to say anything at all for me to borrow from of his strength.
We stood there as long as I could get away with. Leaves rustled. A butterfly floated in, then danced away. Jason’s voice, filled with laughter, rose and fell. Savannah had gone down to the paddock, and Jason was showing off how he and Peanut could line dance together. I’d waited ten years for this afternoon, and now that it was here, I was desperate to stop time. I was too scared. I wasn’t ready. It was all happening too fast. I hung on to Noël’s waist and closed my eyes.
I felt impossibly small, and as fractured as I had been when I was seventeen and my world ended. That big sky the night after they’d died had seemed too infinite and too outrageous to have ever trusted, and far too hopeless to look up to again. Those stars I’d loved with my dad became nails driving down into my soul, each point of light a memory. I’d felt microscopic and alone and so staggeringly afraid of the future that I hadn’t known how I was going to make it through that night and all the way to dawn.
I had, though. And I'd gotten through the next night, somehow, and the next one, and all the others, each terrible, lonely, forlorn night, until the pain blunted and the broken edges of my world scarred over.
Eventually, my brother talked me into taking an early flight down to Mexico, and on the way, while I was hammering on my anxieties and worried about getting so far away from the place I’d pinned my soul to, I met Noël.
The passenger door of my truck closed. I flinched.
Noël squeezed my hands. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
Liam didn’t say anything for the first mile of our drive. Gravel crunched beneath my tires when I turned onto the dirt track, two worn ruts tamped into the earth, that headed deep into the ranch. Wild sunflowers dipped to wave hello as we trundled past.
We dropped into the bed of a long-dry creek and rumbled over river rocks and rotting deadwood. The light shifted, turning grave and fragile beneath the shadowing oaks, like this place was the consolidation of all the sorrow and glory and splendor and despair that had soaked into our land.
My mind was crawling the inside of my skull. I had to say something to break the silence between me and Liam. “Thank you for picking up Noël. That was kind of you to do.”
“You sure as hell wasn’t driving out there to go get him. You couldn’t even walk right when I put you to bed.”
“I appreciate it.” My eyes flicked to Liam. “Everything go okay?”
“Yeah. We talked.”
“Youtalked?”
“Italked. Noël listened. Now he knows what he has to do.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Noël could be as skittish as a colt sometimes, and if Liam had said anything that could put him off, or scare him—
“Noël knows what it’s going to take to love you the right way.” Liam held up his hands as he spoke like he was delivering some final statement on the matter. “That’s all.”
“Jesus, Liam, what the hell—”
“Didn’t Dad ever give you that talk? About how to love someone right? That you can’t love someone part way, that it’s all or nothing? And that’s what you gotta expect from someone who says they love you, too?”
“You gave Noël Dad’s talk?”
“Someone had to.”
We drove in a different kind of silence after that. I kept my eyes on the creek bed. Liam cracked his neck and looked out the side window. We passed a weeping willow whose branches swept the dust. Its roots were thick, and it took us a bumpy few minutes of careful maneuvering to traverse across the gnarls.
“Wyatt?” Liam spoke to the glass. He sounded, suddenly, like the same kid that I’d had to hold back from running into the flames that night, and who had screamed at the sky and collapsed to his knees when we were told that it was over, that our parents were gone, that there were bodies in that blaze. “What was it like working with Dad? Doing all this, ten years ago?”
“You never seemed interested back then.”
“I was fifteen at the time. I wasn’t into all that. A winery sounded about as boring as algebra.” The muscle in his jaw was firing like a cricket leaping off hot gravel.
