to it and plop down, pulling him down beside me. The tree is gorgeous, every branch laden with spectacular pink blossoms that smell heavenly. I sigh and lean against the thick trunk, inhaling the sweet scents floating around me.
“What’s with the tree?” Carter asks as he settles in beside me. I pop open an eye.
“Don’t you remember?”
He squints as though trying to think of what I could be remembering. I’m a little disappointed that he can’t immediately think of it. I guess it was a funny thing that seemed significant for one person and insignificant for others.
“On warm days at school, when you didn’t want to go to the cafeteria—”
“Which was every day,” he interrupts with a roll of his eyes.
“Yes, which was every day,” I comment dryly. “Anyways…on warm days, I would join you a couple of days a week under the tree on the back lawn of the school, and we would eat lunch and you would take pictures of the tree.”
Carter’s eyes crinkle up strangely as he glances at me. He rubs his chest, as if what I’d said physically hurt him. “And so that’s why you wanted to drink wine under a tree?” he asks, and his voice sounds strangely choked up.
I shrug shyly. “It was one of my favorite memories with you growing up,” I tell him softly as I open the wine and pour us both two big cups full. It feels freeing to just be able to day drink like this without anywhere to have to be.
There’s a long silence as we both sip the wine, which is delicious by the way.
“I wasn’t taking pictures of the tree,” Carter blurts out.
I looked at him quizzically. “What?”
“I wasn’t taking pictures of the tree,” he repeats, keeping his gaze averted from mine.
“What were you taking pictures of, then?” I ask, confused.
“You,” he says softly, finally turning those beautiful dark eyes towards me. A pink petal falls from the blossoms above us, settling into his hair, a vibrant pink against the sleek blackness of it.
“You were taking pictures of me?” I repeat, disbelievingly. We’d spent hours by that tree every fall and spring growing up. And he was always taking pictures.
“It’s always been you,” he admits hoarsely. “I have thousands of pictures of you. Every time I tried to take pictures of something else, it just felt off. Because there wasn’t anything as beautiful and interesting as you to take pictures of. You were all I saw.”
He takes a deep breath.
“You’re still all I see.”
I can’t help but cry at his words. I didn’t know how much I needed them until this moment. He pulls me close to him, and I snuggle into his chest. We sit there for a while, listening to the sounds of the park around us, his heartbeat a steady and calming drumbeat beneath my ear.
I finally pull back once I’m able to control my emotions and take a huge swallow of wine, while he watches me almost nervously.
“So you were kind of my stalker in high school,” I say with an impish grin.
He laughs and rolls his eyes, apparently relieved at my reaction.
“I always did love a good stalker romance. Wish I’d known that I’d been living out one while growing up.”
He lets out a shaky laugh and takes his own huge gulp of wine. This wine is the good kind, the kind you are supposed to elegantly sip, but we both guzzle it for liquid courage. My mother would have been disgusted.
“Well, that’s good to know. If I’d known that sooner, it would have saved me from feeling like a creep all growing up.”
“Do you still have the pictures?” I blurt out, the wine obviously going to my head because I do not want to know the answer to that question.
I don’t want to hear that he burned them in a fit of rage and betrayal after I left.
There’s another long silence. We never used to have those types of silences between the four of us. Or at least, they weren’t so heavy.
“I still have them all,” he says with a sigh. “I tried to get rid of them over and over again over the years. I think I intentionally stayed out on assignment just so I wouldn’t stay holed up in my apartment staring at them. They’re in a shoebox in the deep recesses of my closet. And I’ve resented you every day that I wasn’t able to throw them away.”
There’s a lot to unpack in that statement. “You