Everlasting - Christine Michelle Page 0,7

I contemplated telling her ‘no’. She had been there through most of this stuff though, so I didn’t see the harm.

“Okay,” I announced before I flipped back to the first page and started to read CJ’s words to me.

Sweet Lucy,

I feel cheated.

Sure, we weren’t really going out or anything, but there was nothing I wanted more each day than to bump into you somewhere, sometimes not quite accidentally. I know everyone says I’m being stupid, but they don’t understand. I never believed in soul mates, love at first sight, or any of that other sappy shit. Oh, damn, sorry for the language.

…

Tiger Lily laughed out loud at that, interrupting me as I was reading. I just glanced up at her with a mock glare on my face to let her know she was annoying me. We’d been friends long enough though that she knew I wasn’t really disturbed by it. “The dumbass actually apologized in a letter, one he probably had no intention of you ever actually reading, for cussing.” She laughed again as she shook her head back and forth. “Yeah, he had it bad for you from the very first. I remember being jealous as all hell of the way he spoke about you the few times he came around to the house or I was at the clubhouse to hear him.”

“He talked about me back then?”

“Sure did. He even asked me if I knew you. I guess he thought since I was a woman, and we had attended the same school at some point, that we would have known one another.”

“But I’m a few years younger,” I mentioned.

“Well, yeah, we both know how these things works, but CJ apparently didn’t.”

It was my turn to laugh. “He was a hard-headed, oddly sentimental, tough guy. I don’t think he ever fit in any box that people tried to put him in.”

“You keep speaking of him in the past tense,” she mentioned.

“Do I?” I sat back for a minute and thought about it. I guess I had been.

“What’s up with that? Do you see the man who wrote these letters as someone else?”

“In a way, I guess he was someone else. At least someone different from the man I’m married to now. Time changes people. It’s not that though. I read his latest letter first the other day,” I admitted. “I just had this weird feeling after he left so I went out to the garage to see what he had been up to out there. Turns out, he had been leaving me another letter in one of those boxes.” I tipped my head toward the gorgeous, carved, walnut box that held some of the letters he had written me over the years. “His letter, he didn’t think he would be coming home from this thing. Trying to find Deck,” I explained further and watched as my best friend flinched at her son’s name.

“I’m so worried about him. What if,” she started to say and then shook off whatever the rest of it was. “You’ve lost a son. He was something precious to me too, but Toby was your boy and I just keep thinking, ‘How did she make it past that?’”

It was my turn to shake my head. “I still don’t know, to be honest. I had more people here who loved me and counted on me. I needed to get through it, for them.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Lily, I believe they’ll find him and bring him home. Alive,” I added at the end, because it was important for her to know I thought there was still a chance. Someone had to keep the faith and believe in his return.

“I hope you’re right. Now, enough morbid talk from all of us, including Double-D. Finish reading me that letter instead,” she commanded with a wobbly smile on her face.

“Your wish is my command.”

…

That first day, when I saw you with your cute little grease-stained button nose, and a blush so fierce on your cheeks that I could damn near feel the heat of them, I knew. I knew that I wanted the girl who wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty on a man’s bike. I knew I wanted the girl that would defy a damn motorcycle club to work on those bikes, and I for sure knew that no matter what, I was going to make her mine. With each encounter we had after that, it just made me believe that much more. You were meant for me and I was