CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“What?” She had the grace to look embarrassed and shrugged self-consciously.
“It’s a gesture,” she admitted, her cheeks flushing. “Just, please . . . go with it, okay?”
Confused, Spencer peered at the boxes again. They weren’t taped shut; the flaps were just folded over.
“I’m supposed to open them?”
“Yeah, of course, Spencer,” she said, sounding a little exasperated. “Why else would I say they were for you?”
He lifted his hands, palms up, trying to placate her. She looked apprehensive and kept lifting her forefinger to her lips as if to chew before remembering that she had kicked that habit and lowering it again. The little display of nerves bolstered him a bit, and he warily sank to one knee in front of one of the boxes and opened it up.
He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it definitely wasn’t a stack of Miles Davis CDs.
“You like jazz?” he asked, confused.
“No,” she said, her voice soft as she sank back down onto the swing. “I hate it. But Jeremy Boothe loved it. I dated him for about two months five years ago. And during that time I absolutely loved jazz. Jeremy and I could talk about jazz for hours. He thought we had a real connection. We had so much in common.”
Spencer lifted the small stack of CDs and turned them over, staring at them for a long time before putting them aside. He sat down on the porch step and reached into the box again and withdrew a pair of binoculars. He looked at them curiously for a moment before turning to face her. Her eyes were shining with tears, but she forced a little smile.
“Peter Weyland, three years ago, also two months. He was an out-of-towner, a keen bird-watcher, and I took him to all the best bird-spotting sites in the Garden Route. I knew them all, you see, because I absolutely adored bird-watching.”
“I see,” he said, dropping the binoculars, uncaring where they landed. His eyes remained riveted to hers, and one of the tears that had been threatening slid down her cheek and hung from her trembling chin for a long moment before dropping to her fidgeting fingers. She seemed unaware of it and just kept watching him steadily.
“There’s more,” she prompted him, and he nodded without looking at the box again.
“I know.”
“It’s important,” she said, her voice quiet.
“It’s not.”
“I also have a guitar. I’m quite proficient at it. I learned to play when I was dating Aaron Marks. He was an aspiring musician.”
“I remember him,” Spencer said, keeping his voice carefully neutral even though his heart was breaking for this beautiful, intelligent woman who had felt the need to pretend—for fucking years—to be someone she was not. When she was amazing just the way she was.
“A-and I have a surfboard, cookbooks, all these really shitty black-and-white movies, a—”
“Daff,” he said, inserting just enough volume in his voice to halt the stumbling tide of—what she clearly considered—guilty admission. “Stop. I just want to know which one of those fuckers loved eggs.”
She made a wet, snorting giggling sound and covered her mouth and nose in horror. He dug into his sweatpants and dragged out a clean hankie and handed it to her. She accepted it gratefully and blew her nose before shaking her head ruefully.
“Nobody carries hankies anymore.”
“I do.” She nodded and twisted the handkerchief between her fingers.
“The eggs? That was Byron Blake, back in the sixth grade. He offered me an egg-mayo sandwich and I liked him, so I accepted it.”
“That far back, huh?”
“Told you I was messed up. To be fair, none of them really expected me to lie about my interests. That was all me, in my sad attempts to be interesting to them. This past year was the first time I found myself without a boyfriend of some kind, and I found it kind of liberating to just do what I wanted to do.”
He nodded, unable to take his eyes off her. The tip of her nose was pink, her cheeks were blotchy, and her eyes were red. She wasn’t a pretty crier, but he couldn’t remember her ever looking more beautiful.
She sniffed messily and reached for another box, a shoebox that had been tucked away out of sight beside her hip.
“Daff, I told you I don’t need to see—”
“This,” she interrupted firmly, “is who I always longed to be.”
He scrutinized the box for a couple of heartbeats before reaching for it. She seemed reluctant to relinquish it, and that raised his curiosity.
He opened the box and stared at the neatly folded slips of notepaper for a moment. They looked familiar. He lifted one and opened it and felt his face go bright red as he instantly recognized what it was.
“You kept them?” he asked hoarsely. Frankly, he was amazed his voice actually worked.
“Every single one of them.”
He cringed and opened the note again.
“God, this is awful,” he muttered.
“I love it. I loved all of them. I was such a bitch, Spencer. But I couldn’t bring myself to part with a single one of them. They were so sweet.”
“I was a horny, troubled teen.”
“Don’t you dare denigrate my love poems. I never understood why you kept giving them to me. I didn’t deserve them, not the way I behaved, reading them out loud and making fun of you in front of the other girls. I was horrible. Even now I can’t really explain why I did those things, except that I was really scared the other girls would think I liked you back and I’d never hear the end of it. Fitting in meant so much to me; I was so shallow. And every time I read one of your poems, I felt worse about myself, because I could never be the girl you seemed to see.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“I wanted to be this girl, Spencer. I really did.”
“I put a lot on you, Daff. My home life was shitty. You were this perfect and beautiful girl and I built this fake romance up in my head. You would make my life different and wonderful and worthwhile. It was unfair. I did to you what all those other assholes did—I placed my expectations on you. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“No, Spencer. You’re nothing like the rest of them. So many of your notes asked questions and showed interest in me. Did I take sugar in my coffee? What was my favorite movie? What was my opinion on”—she laughed softly—“on Hanson?”
“I hated those little assholes,” Spencer recalled, shaking his head. She giggled outright at that.
“Anyway, my point is, you were different. You cared. You wanted to know me. You didn’t expect me to like what you liked. And while none of the other guys expected me to like what they liked, either, in the end, none of them actually cared enough to ask me about any of my other interests. They just accepted that I was this perfect, feminine reflection of them. I liked what they liked, and that was it.”
She got up again and snatched her box of badly written poems back. She placed them carefully on the swing. He couldn’t believe she’d kept them—it made his heart feel so fucking huge in his chest, he thought it was about to burst.
She straightened and lifted her chin to look at him. He remained seated and perfectly still, curious to see what was next.
Daff sucked in a deep, shuddering breath and dropped the coat she’d been wearing. It was too damned hot to wear a coat in late October, but she was making a gesture and it required a reveal.
His eyes drank her in . . . okay, maybe they didn’t so much drink as kind of hop from place to place. He clearly hadn’t been expecting saggy sweatpants, flip-flops, and a ratty old T-shirt.
“Spencer, I can’t say I truly know who I am. Not just yet,” she admitted softly. “I think I’m kind of a work in progress. I hate eggs, I hate jazz, I fucking hate bird-watching—it’s boring as hell. I like slouching around in my oldest, comfiest clothing. Sometimes I don’t wash my hair for days, and in winter I wear long skirts and yoga pants, like, all the time because I’m too lazy to shave my legs. I have no idea what the hell I want to do with the rest of my life, but I think maybe I kind of liked managing that stupid boutique, so maybe I’ll go to business school and study marketing or something. I enjoyed coming up with creative ways of appealing to customers. Who knows? I’ll go to college and work it out from there. I’m not perfect; I get zits and bloated and cranky as hell when I have PMS, and sometimes I don’t shave my armpits. I—”
He got up so quickly, she didn’t have time to react, and he had his arms wrapped around her and his mouth on hers in two seconds flat. Daff sighed and leaned in to his kiss, feeling like she’d just come home.
“You’re so fucking beautiful, Daff. And when you turn into a hairy yeti in winter, I’ll still think you’re gorgeous. Maybe—but probably not—I’ll pop your zits for you.” He grimaced comically. “Yeah, probably not, but I’ll yell my support from the other room if you feel the need to pop them yourself.”
“Spencer,” she whispered, snuggling her face into his neck. “My gesture. You’re ruining it.”
“Sorry. But not really sorry.”
She sighed.
“That’s supposed to be ‘sorry not sorry.’ I have much to teach you, grasshopper,” she intoned gravely, and he grinned. “Anyway, I was going to say, I can’t say I truly know who I am . . . but I do know that I like myself when I’m with you. And I think that’s because I’m not trying to be this perfect woman around you.”
“I don’t want a perfect woman, Daff, I want you—” He paused and then grimaced. “That sounded so much better in my head.”
“Spencer,” she said, grabbing his head in her hands and holding it steady so that she could look into his eyes. “I’ve been so miserable without you. I love you and I don’t really think I can live without you. So I want those strings.”
“Daff, we don’t have to rush into—”
“Strings, Spencer! They’re important, because I would prefer not to have to peel more skanks off you in the future. I want them to know you’re off-limits. That you’re mine and I’m yours.”
“Fine . . . but you’re going to have to allow me time to work on my own grand gesture, because I want to marry you, Daff, but I’m not fucking proposing to you on a porch full of your ex-boyfriends.”
She giggled.
“This shit is all headed for the charity shop tomorrow, you know that, right?” he warned her, and she nodded, finding herself quite unable to stop smiling. He caught her eyes and smiled back.
“I’ve been miserable without you, too, darling,” he said, and she melted at the sound of the endearment. “I never want to be without you again. So please. You have to be sure this is what you really want, Daff.”
“No take-backsies, Spencer. My life is too damned desolate without you.”
“Daff, it’s not just me, it’s also—”
“Charlie. I know, Spence,” she reassured, reaching up to cup the side of his face with her palm. She loved the feel of his stubble abrading her skin. “You guys are a package deal. As long as she’s clear that there’s going to be a lot of embarrassing kissing and stuff in her immediate vicinity.”
He grinned.
“I’ll make sure she understands that some things are just as inevitable as the tides.”
“Why are we still talking?” Daff asked, going onto her toes to steal a kiss. “I want to ravish your gorgeous bod, Carlisle. Stop delaying the inevitable.”
He growled and grabbed her ass and hauled her up against him. Confident in his strength, she hooked her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist while he supported her butt in his palms and ate her mouth.
“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Spencer,” she breathed when they came up for air moments later. “And I’ve decided that I deserve you.”
He grinned shyly, that sweet smile that had so ensnared her heart, and anointed her lips with the gentlest of kisses.
“That’s my girl.”