Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,114
was so strange to do this day without Jacob. Even stranger was wishing that Adam was with her.
She felt like she was caught in the middle of conflicting desires. For the man that she had loved as a girl, and the man who was... She didn’t know. He was under her skin. The skin of the woman that she was now, who couldn’t quite remember what it was like to be the girl who had fallen in love with her husband.
Life had taken too much from her. Had worn her down.
She felt strong, because she had to be to weather life. But she felt fragile, too. And sometimes the temptation to just lean against Adam was so strong that she wanted to collapse with it.
She’d come to terms with wanting sex. With wanting to recapture part of who she was as a woman, those pieces that had been lost and worn away by grief.
But she didn’t know how to cope with these feelings that were rising up inside of her. With the fact that on the day of her daughter’s graduation, the daughter she shared with Jacob, she was thinking of him.
Wishing he was sitting beside her.
Anna was sitting beside her. Her mother was on the other side of her. That should be enough.
Well, not enough. Because not having Jacob left a hole there that wouldn’t be filled, she knew that.
But she wanted...
She wasn’t going to think about it. She wasn’t going to think about him.
She cried, though, when Emma accepted her diploma. And she wished that she could grab hold of Jacob’s hand. Congratulate him.
Because he was part of this. Part of her. This beautiful girl that they had raised to womanhood.
Smart and fierce. She loved the sea because of Jacob. And loving Jacob, losing him, hadn’t made her afraid to live her life. It had made her follow her dreams.
Rachel was afraid, though.
She had lost purpose in some ways when she had lost Jacob, because caring for him had been such a big part of her life. Loving him had.
And Emma... Getting her through school, seeing her through life, was a change in her role, too.
But she had Adam. And in his arms she wasn’t a caretaker or a widow. She was a woman.
When the graduation was over, she hugged Emma. And Emma ran to her friends, because, of course, they had places to be.
“We are going to bake dinner rolls,” Anna said, grabbing hold of Rachel’s hand. “Unless you want to go to dinner.”
“I...”
Anna looked at her meaningfully. “You can also go occupy yourself elsewhere. Since your daughter is leaving for the evening. And I can certainly make excuses for you.”
“If you would,” Rachel whispered.
She gave her mom a hug, and then she slipped away, giddy like she’d imagined she might have felt if she’d ever sneaked out of the house as a teenager.
Her phone buzzed, and she looked down, saw a text from him.
Dinner?
A smile curved her lips. On my way.
She wanted to keep this a secret, keep it between them.
When she’d been young she hadn’t minded talking about sex with her friends at all. She’d proudly told her high-school friends the first time she and Jacob had slept together and had given them details. Physical measurements. It had seemed exciting and fun.
As she’d gotten older, she hadn’t done that anymore. She might make general comments with very close friends, before the distance had settled between them.
But this was... Somehow the intimacy of what they shared felt so deep she could hardly stand to think of it in a room with other people, much less speak it out loud, or let anyone know what they did.
What he made her feel.
It was like that corner of the world they’d made for each other during Jacob’s illness had become larger. That space they had created while she was going through grieving the loss of Jacob—and if she was honest, she had been grieving him for years before his death—had grown to encompass not just that diner area, but his apartment, his bed.
What they had was so fierce inside of her. And she wanted so much to keep it just hers.
It wasn’t a date.
It was something she couldn’t explain.
And if no one knew, then she didn’t have to name it or figure it out. Because then she didn’t have to deal with the accompanying emotions that were beginning to grow inside of her chest.