“Lia?” he asked sleepily. Now he sat up, too, rubbing his eyes. Then he kissed me and was smiling, and he looked so happy that I thought I should just let it go, play it as it came. But it was only delaying the inevitable. If I thought I loved him now, imagine after six months of dates and memories and future plans. But I think, ultimately, it was the way my heart was beating out of my chest in panic that made me say, “I can’t do this, Parker. I just can’t. I can’t be in her shadow. I can’t be second best.”
He sighed and kissed my bare shoulder. “I will always love her, Lia. Of course I will. Forever. But I love her like I love her. And I love you like I love you.”
I laughed out loud. “Parker Thaysden, you do not love me.” But I knew he did.
He nodded at me very seriously. “Oh yes, I do. Of course I do. I have for…” He looked up to the ceiling like he was calculating. “Seventeen years.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “That’s all?”
He nodded. “You remember that AP World History project we got assigned to do together? The one where we had to write the song?”
Parker had been so off-the-charts smart that he was in my history class his freshman year. (By his junior year, he was mainly in the library, racking up college credits in online courses.) We had written a rousing rendition of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” about Russian history.
I smirked. “Well, of course. I can see how you fell in love with me then. Stalin could make anyone hot.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t then. I mean, don’t get me wrong, sitting on the floor of your playroom getting to breathe your air for hours was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me. I told everyone I got to second base.”
I gasped in mock horror. “Do you have any idea how much that could have hurt my reputation? You were a freshman.”
He shrugged. “Yeah. But you got the last laugh. When Mason heard about it, he punched me in the face.”
I nodded knowingly. “I always wondered how someone as smart as you managed to open a door into your eye.”
“It was at that field party right after. Someone had set up that horrible karaoke machine, and when you got up there, you said, ‘I can’t sing this one without my buddy Parker.’ And we sang ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ and when you said, ‘I done told you once, you son of a bitch, I’m the best there’s ever been,’ you touched the tip of my nose with the tip of your finger. It was nothing, but I knew then that you would always be the one that got away.”
I remembered that night vaguely. The Smirnoff Ice and keg beer, and Parker, who didn’t even have his license, was the one to drive my car home, to get us in the house without a word of complaint. How many times had he come to my rescue, really?
God, that story was so sweet. It warmed all those soft spots around my heart and my belly. I smiled at him in the dark and then leaned my head over onto his shoulder. “The one that got away, huh? I didn’t get that far.”
He pulled me toward him and kissed one cheek and then the other. “I’ll give you time, Liabelle. I’ll let you think this through and get to a night when the moon isn’t so full and I’m not so damn handsome.” He paused to flash me a smile. “But these last few months with you, all of that has come flooding back. I’ve realized that I’ll be okay. I’ll be able to move on and have a life. With you.”
I flopped back dramatically onto the pillows and looked up at the ceiling. I couldn’t look him in the eye when I knew I was about to sound so childish. “That’s the thing, Park. How can I compete with your perfect, untainted memory of your one true love? How could anyone compete with that?”
Parker lay down next to me and pulled my arm so that I rolled over and was face-to-face with him. “It’s really hard,” he whispered, “because she’s gone. She isn’t here to defend herself. And it feels wrong on every level to say something negative about someone who died so tragically.” He bit his lip. “I loved her, Lia, don’t get me wrong. And I don’t fault her for it, but Greer was…” He paused as if afraid to say the word. “Well, she was selfish. I knew it about her, and that was fine. I loved her, and I was fine to move to her town and work for her company and live in her house. But she was the kind of woman who just chose where you went out to dinner and where you went on vacation and what you did with your future. She couldn’t help herself.” He stopped talking, and I could tell how hard this was for him. “ ‘Selfish’ isn’t even the right word, because she was so dedicated to helping people who needed it… but it was like, sometimes, with us, with the people who loved her most, she sort of forgot that we had needs, too.” He paused. “Please don’t think I’m a bad person.”
I kissed him and said, “Parker, I could never ever think that.”
“But when you offered to have a baby for me…” He trailed off, tears in his eyes. “Amelia, that was the most selfless thing I have ever seen one person do for another. You just wanted me to be happy. And I want the person I’m with to be happy, but it has occurred to me lately that maybe I deserve a partner who thinks about my happiness, too.”
I nodded as best I could with my head practically stuck to the pillow.
He squeezed my knee, then got up and headed to the bathroom. He turned back to me. “And I won’t tell you I love you again. That was a little much.”
I wanted to tell him I loved him, too, but instead, I said, “Do you still want them, Parker? The babies?”
“No,” he said quickly, too quickly.
I looked out my window, at the skyscraper across the way. That was the thing about New York. All these windows. All these people. Together, they seemed vast, infinite, maybe even unimportant. But inside each of those windows are families and lovers and friends and maybe even enemies, people falling together and falling apart. And, tonight, Parker and I, we were doing one of those things. I just wasn’t sure which one yet.
Parker
AS DANGEROUS AS THE TRUTH
SO, SURE, LYING TO AMELIA after I had sex with her for the first time probably wasn’t the best idea. But the part that was true, the part that was important, was that I loved her. But also, I did want the babies. And now I didn’t just want them because they were a part of Greer. I wanted to be a father. And Amelia and I both knew that wasn’t going to happen with just the two of us.
Now, twenty-two dates later, my lie seemed amplified. Twenty-two was exactly how many times I had seen Amelia in the past six weeks, how many times I had held her in my arms and kissed her lips and felt that we were going to be together forever. It was also how many times I hadn’t told her that I wanted children. It was also exactly the number of times we hadn’t told our parents we were dating.
This was as real as either of us had ever dreamed. It was everything. It was the kind of love that made your heart pound but that also made you feel safe and secure. And even though Amelia still swore she didn’t want to get married again, I think we both knew that it was time for us to take another step, whatever that was. We were old enough to know what we wanted. And what we wanted was to be together.