gripping me like he could keep me there. The air in the great room filling with suffocating dread in an instant.
“What?” he asked, voice soft, dark.
“Please don’t let your mind go there,” I begged, heart wrenching because I could feel the way he was at once terrified that I was leaving him and accepting it because he thought it was best for me. “You know I would never willingly leave you.”
He didn’t respond.
Just stayed there, partially laying on me, still as stone.
“My dad said something tonight when they came to check on me, and I—” My throat tightened as that deep worry rose and bloomed in my chest. “What he said, I just know—I could feel it—they’re going to do something.”
A slow sigh sounded from him before he rolled away, his deep voice echoing in the room. “Your grandparents’?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
His hand slowly curled around mine in response.
“I’ll always come back to you, no matter what happens,” I repeated. When the responding silence got to be too much, I said, “I need to know where your head’s at.”
“Trying to figure out what to do,” he said softly. “If following their rules around them will be enough, or if . . .” Beau cleared his throat, his voice twisting with sorrow when he continued. “If I really do need to let you go for—”
“No.”
“Savannah—”
“No,” I said quickly and scrambled to sitting, grabbing at the closest thing to me to cover my bare chest. “Just no.”
He sat up with me, anguish and denial ripping across his fierce expression. “Savannah, if I need to let you go for the next year and a half so I can at least have you near me? I’ll do it.”
“I can’t,” I said, choking over the emotion tightening my throat.
“So, you’d rather spend the next year and a half with states between us?”
“No, I just—” My chest shook from my trembling breaths. “I can’t pretend that I don’t love you. That I don’t need you.”
“I wouldn’t be pretending shit,” he ground out. “I’d make sure the entire town, including your parents, knew what we were sacrificing to keep the peace. Knew that every day was a day closer to when we got to be together again.”
My head shook wildly as he spoke. “I can’t, I won’t. Beau, I’m not going to let them push us apart just to keep them happy for any length of time. I just needed you to know that I think it might be coming, and if it does, I will do whatever it takes to get back to you.”
He dragged his palm across his jaw, dipping his head in acceptance as he did.
“And I think . . . I think maybe we should consider some of those things we were talking about earlier.” I curled my fingers into what I was clutching to my chest—Beau’s jersey. My heart racing with anticipation and maybe breaking a little at the same time as I erased a seven-year dream. “I can’t tell you what it does to me that you remember the things I say and that you want to make them all come true. But I just want a life with you. And with our situation—with my parents—we have to take control of it so it can’t be taken from us. We have to do whatever we can.”
Beau’s dark brows slowly pulled together as I rambled.
Watching. Studying. Listening.
“And that fake Elvis or the courthouse is what I want. With you. The day I turn eighteen, or the day after. I don’t care. Whatever it takes because they won’t be able to do anything once we’re married, and then it’ll just be us the way it’s supposed to be.”
Long, torturous seconds passed before he uttered a single word: “No.”
My shoulders shook with the force of my exhale. “What?”
Beau’s eyes drifted down, lingering on my chest for a while before he reached out. His fingers grazing my arm before touching the jersey. “That name on you, Savannah . . . it’s right, and it’ll be right one day. But not like that.” His darkened stare flashed back up to mine, intense and somber. “Your dream for how we get married changes, then it changes for me too. Whatever it is, I’m there. But we’re not sneaking off to try to end this war with your parents. It’ll just make everything worse.”
“Any added time of having to live with them doing this, of them treating you the way they do, will be worse than the fallout