Page 95 of Merry Me
“She told meyoudidn’t want to talk,” he said thickly. “But she asked if I would walk with her. Just for a bit.”
I could see it now—the dirt road that ran alongside the woods, the early morning light slanting through the trees. MeMaw marching down the road like she was headed to deliver a sermon the world didn’t know it needed.
“She asked me if I loved you,” Easton went on, his voice low. “And I told her I’d never loved anyone more.”
He paused, eyes on the fire, like the flames were reflections of that morning, of frost on car windows and the ache of goodbye that never got said out loud.
“She believed me. But she told me that wasn’t the question that mattered. Not really.”
I held my breath.
“She wanted to know whether I loved you enough to let you figure out who you are without me.”
My heart cracked clean in two. A slow, deep splintering I felt behind my ribs. The kind of ache that echoed.
“She said you had a fire in you,” he said, the ghost of a smile on his lips. “That if I tried to hold on too tight, I’d only smotherwhat I loved. That the girl I loved needed to fly. Even if it meant flying away from me.”
The tears came fast, unannounced, stinging in the corners of my eyes.
“I didn’t want to hear it,” Easton said, softer now. “Every part of me wanted to argue. But I looked at her, and I knew she was right. You needed to grow into yourself without me standing in the doorway.”
His voice faltered, then steadied again.
“I sat in my car for a long time afterward,” he said. “Just…sitting. Gripping the steering wheel like it could hold me together. Knowing I could walk up to your door and try to fight for you. That I could knock until you opened it, beg you to come with me. And maybe you would’ve. Maybe you’d have said yes. Maybe we would’ve packed your suitcase, and we’d be living in some shoebox apartment in L.A., trying to make sense of the rest of it.”
He paused, his thumb brushing slowly across the top of my hand. That’s when I realized—my fingers had found his. Sought him out without permission, without awareness. Just instinct.
“But if I had,” he whispered, “maybe you would’ve come with me. Maybe you would’ve stayed. But maybe you would’ve always wondered if you gave up a piece of yourself just to hold on to me.”
His words sank into me like soft rain into dry earth, like something my soul had been waiting to hear for years.
“I left,” he whispered. “But I didn’t stop loving you. Not for one day. And not because I wanted to let go. Because someone wise reminded me that real love isn’t a leash. It’s a lantern.”
My throat thickened.
“You needed space to find your own light,” he said, looking at me—not flinching, not looking away. “And I had to believe you’d find your way home.”
My heart splintered under the weight of it…because I remembered that version of myself. The girl who stood on the edge of everything, terrified that love would make her small. That it would claim too much. That she’d disappear into someone else’s story and forget how to write her own.
But this boy…this man, he hadn’t tried to pull me back. He’d stepped back instead. Lit the road behind me, not to lead me away from him, but to make sure I could see.
I opened my mouth to say something. Anything.
But then his phone buzzed.
It was soft. Just a quiet hum against the bench beside us. The kind of thing that would’ve been easy to ignore if we weren’t both sitting in the stillest, most suspended moment of the entire night.
Easton didn’t move.
He didn’t look at it. His eyes were still on me. Still holding my gaze like it mattered more than whatever name was lighting up that screen. Still holding my hand like it was a vow.
I might’ve pretended it hadn’t happened, might’ve written it off as nothing—if not for the second buzz.
Then the third.
His lips parted like he was about to apologize for the world intruding.
And then, without letting go of me, he finally picked it up.
