“So wait!” Cheyenne hiccupped. “Does this mean that Wayne is my dad?”
I wish I had the answer to that. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, who cares! I have you guys!” Now Cheyanne was hugging Reagan and Isabella, who both looked at each other.
“You know what sounds good? Coffee.” Isabella suggested.
“Hmm, coffee sounds great. Husband, do you want to go get coffee with us?” Reagan asked Billy as she and Isabella guided Cheyenne back to the tent.
Billy followed behind and Jimmy rushed in front of him. It would always be a competition between those two. Some things never changed.
Just as I thought that, Skylar slipped out of the back sliding door and shut it quietly behind her.
And some things do.
“Hey.” She smiled as she wrapped her arms around me.
She’d gone inside to check on Luna who had crashed out after the first dance. I’d wanted to take them home but Skylar insisted that we stay. And Mrs. Birch insisted that she would sit with Luna in the house so that Skylar could enjoy the reception.
“Is she still…”
“Yeah, and so is Mrs. Birch. The two of them are sacked out on the couch.”
“Well, I’m only carrying one of them to the car,” I teased as I wrapped my arms tighter around her.
She grinned as she looked up at me. “How did it go?”
“Okay. I think Cheyenne will have more questions when she’s sober.”
“What about your brothers? How did they take it?”
“Good.” Better than I could have expected. I think they actually did understand why I’d kept the information from them. Something I’d resigned myself to thinking would never happen.
“And what about you? How are you doing?”
“I’ve never been better.” I tugged her closer and pressed my lips to hers.
Our kiss was soft and sweet and over much too soon.
“Get a room!” Jimmy shouted out from across the yard.
Skylar giggled and pulled away.
She turned so her back was to me and we stood on the porch and looked out at all the people dancing inside the tent.
“It was a beautiful wedding,” I commented, wondering what our wedding would be like.
“Yeah, it was. I still feel so bad for delaying it.”
“You didn’t delay it. I did.” And I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
She spun in my arms and looked up at me with tears in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just…thank you.” She reached up and wiped beneath her eye.
“For what?”
She let out a small forced laugh. “Um, well, for the first day that Luna showed up on your door selling her junk. For telling me about Mrs. Birch. For all the renovations on the house. For the books. For the drive-in movie. For all the dinners. For all the bedtime stories. For taking care of Luna and me today. For saying that you’ll never leave us and meaning it. Take your pick.”
“I pick you. Always you.”
I leaned down and kissed her again. And I knew that for the rest of my life, that would be true. Skylar and Luna were where my heart had always belonged. They were the missing part of me. They were the blessing that broke my curse.
THE END
Afternoon Delight
Don’t Miss
Cheyenne and Cash’s story
In
Afternoon Delight
Coming May 2021
My First – Jason & Katie
Crossroads Book One
CHAPTER 1
Welcome home, Katie thought, sardonically, as she sat with her eyes closed, in her rental car on the side of Highway 90. She held a paper bag pressed tightly against her mouth with one hand, a picture in her other hand, and a mantra running through her brain on repeat.
You can breathe. Just breathe. Breathe in and out slowly. You can breathe.
Katie had been back in Illinois for less than an hour and here she was, smack dab in the middle of her first panic attack in years. Concentrating on the feeling of her thumb running across the smooth cool surface of the photo, she tried to soothe her racing heart, to anchor herself to reality. Her tongue was tingling as she forced the rapid movements of her chest to be slow and deliberate.
This seems to be working, albeit slowly, she assured herself.
When the overpriced therapist, who taught her the breathing exercise and mantra, had laid out his plan of connecting to an object or smell that calmed her, Katie wanted to roll her eyes. She wanted to tell him that he clearly had no flipping idea what a panic attack really felt like if he thought that repeating a little magic spell in her mind, while spraying a calming scent, was going to have any effect at all. She wanted to tell him that panic attacks didn’t feel like nervousness or butterflies you could just calm with the power of your mind. They felt like you were having a heart attack, like you were dying. Seriously, had anyone ever heard of someone having a heart attack and curing it by simply telling themselves to breathe while holding a knick-knack or sniffing some aroma therapy that miraculously calmed them?
Of course, Katie never said any of those things. She had just smiled politely and kept her judgment of his professional aptitude (i.e., that he was a total quack) entirely to herself. Then, like the good student she was, she went home and practiced with the bag and tried spraying a few scents, but found they never made her feel any sense of calm and happiness, like holding the picture she’d had since sixth grade did.
After that visit, the panic attacks stopped and so she never had the opportunity to test out the technique and prove his quackitude with rock-solid evidence. Now that she was in the middle of one, and the exercises actually seemed to be working…
Well, I’ll move his status down to ‘Jury’s Still Out on the Level of His Quackosity’ but I’m not nominating him for the Nobel Prize just yet, Katie thought. Of course, this wasn’t even close to a bad attack. This one was fairly mild.
But that’s exactly how they had started ten years ago. At first, they were just hyperventilating episodes, but over time, they developed into severe attacks resulting in her being rushed to the emergency room—twice—both times having truly believed she was having a heart attack.
The E.R. docs were the reason she had ended up lying on the overpriced therapist’s couch—metaphorically speaking; in reality she had sat in a plush leather chair in his office. Once the doctors at the hospital ruled out the possibility that anything was physically wrong with her, they strongly recommended that she delve into the possibility that it was her psyche, not her body, that needed medical attention.
Even now, as the panic attack was subsiding, Katie was still feeling some of the physical symptoms. Her head felt as if it were floating away, her fingers were tingling as if they were being stabbed by a thousand tiny needles, and she was being bombarded by an obnoxiously loud ringing sound. She forced herself to anchor to the sensation of the paper bag digging into her lips, and the glossy feeling of the photographic paper beneath her fingers, in order to ground herself back into reality. She looked down into the large brown eyes staring back at her from the picture and kept repeating the mantra—which, she had to admit, was kind of growing on her.