A defeated sound fled him. “Seems the same old, same old, but I didn’t care. I just wanted this. I’d kept it tucked beneath some loose floorboards in my room and thought you might, um…”
“Look at it with you?” I suggested when his hands shook.
“Please.”
Fire licked at my chest as I absorbed his determined expression, which was fixed on the album. His brows puckered, and he sucked his lips between his teeth. “Here,” I said, patting the spot next to me and gently taking the album from him.
He scooted closer, and I laid it over our legs, my heart racing as I opened the front cover and found a picture of Everett in dirty overalls, aged two, on the first page. “You adorable thing, you.” I scratched at some dust covering the picture so I could see his golden blond hair and carefree smile.
Everett was silent as I kept turning the pages until, eventually, I came across a photo of a newborn baby snuggled next to him on a threadbare couch.
“Mason,” I breathed, my finger caressing where his head lay tucked next to Everett’s leg. He had no hair, but as I turned page after page, Everett deathly still beside me, I saw him morph from a helpless newborn, into a crawling baby, a toddler, and then into a little boy.
He had the blondest hair I’d ever seen, almost white, and the same color eyes as his big brother. “So much like you.”
Everett was a silent force, and when I glanced at him, I discovered he couldn’t speak. His eyes were wet, his face pale, and I shut the album, then put it on the nightstand beside my phone.
“Come,” I said, lying down and smacking the pillow beside mine.
After blowing out a wet sounding breath, he pinched the bridge of his nose with a groan, then joined me.
I stared into his eyes, willing away the sheen to them that stabbed at my heart. “Did your therapist ask you to do that?”
“Yeah.” A dry, vacant word, his eyes someplace he’d probably rather not be. One step at a time, I surmised. He’d endured enough over the past ten minutes.
“Kiss me.”
The present snapped back into his face and transformed it into a perplexed frown. “Clover.”
“Kiss me,” I repeated, my fingers gliding over and up his arm, causing a shiver to follow.
“I can’t,” he said.
My racing heart skidded to a brutal halt. “Why not?”
“Because,” he said with a glimmer of a smile. “I need to know you forgive me before I take anything else from you.”
My eyes stayed on his for an interminable amount of time, and each pound of my heart became louder the longer I replayed all he’d done. And then the gentle, earnest adoration in those green orbs had me checking myself. Severely.
“I find myself doing this thing,” I said, needing to be honest, my heart bleeding and waiting for someone to staunch it.
“Oh yeah?” The raspy timbre ignited goose bumps.
“Yeah.” I shifted closer, my huge belly touching his. “I don’t know when exactly it happened, but somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing the good. Or maybe I blocked it out in order to hold onto my bruised feelings to better protect them next time. Either way, it’s time to admit I’ve been shortsighted.” My hand reached his face, my fingers ghosting over the harsh rise of his cheekbone and feathering over the hair lining his jaw. “You’ve got so much good in you, Everett Taylor. So fucking much. But the things you’ve done to hurt me… they outweighed the good. Or so I thought.”
He kissed my fingers when they reached his lips, and I smiled, sniffing as I let it all tumble to the surface. The tummy flutters, the secretive smiles, the afternoons spent pretending to do his homework, the jumping through my window, and the unbending way he looked at me when no one else was around, and filled my every waking thought. He’d been my dream since I’d first laid eyes on him, and I gave up on him when he’d turned into a nightmare.
“They don’t outweigh it. Your heart is too big, your soul too magnetic. And I guess what I’m trying to say is that I believe in you. I always have, and I probably always will. Not just because I love you, but because you’re worth believing in.”