“What about his mom?”
Marty frowned. “Like I said, he has a dark past.”
Those words alone broke my heart. I knew how much his mother meant to him, and the idea that she wasn’t around anymore was devastating.
Marty crossed his arms. “Between you and me, I think Jax is the nicest guy in this whole town.” He rolled up his shirt and showed me a scar on his skin. “A few years ago, I got jumped by Lars Parker and his group of jerks. They were coming out of a bar drunk when I was finishing setting up the diner for the next day. They started harassing me about making them some free food, and well, long story short, they jumped me.
“News traveled fast about the incident, and a few days later, Lars and his buddies had their own battle wounds, black eyes and all. I came into work after that, and there Jax was, sitting at his regular booth, reading his paper with both hands bandaged up. He said he had an accident while chopping wood in his back yard. To this day he swears he had nothing to do with kicking Lars’ ass, but I have a feeling he had plenty to do with it. Afterward, he told me to let him know if anyone bothered me. I still thank him for it often, and he always tells me to piss off and bring him his order to go.”
Lars Parker.
The same jerk from when we were kids. Of course it was that same monster who’d come on to me. I knew I had a strange feeling when I met the guy. I wasn’t surprised to see he’d turned out to be the exact jerk he had been on the path to becoming.
Marty headed back to work, and I looked back over at Jax. He shifted around in his booth, and when his head rose up, he turned in my direction. Our eyes locked, and my heart began repeatedly pounding in my chest.
Before I could say anything, Marty brought Jax his to-go bag then he was on his way out of the café, leaving his baseball cap on the table.
I scrambled to leave my money for my bill on the table, and then I hurried over to pick up Jax’s baseball cap.
I dashed out of the café to find Jax and give him his hat, and to…I don’t know…hug him? Cry? Ask him where he’d been all these years? Yet before I could do any of that, my feet froze in place as I stared forward at a little girl standing in front of the ice cream parlor with her mother. She held a cone filled with a double scoop of mint chocolate chip, and she couldn’t seem to lick fast enough to keep it from melting. His mother was rummaging in her purse in search of napkins to help clean up the mess.
I couldn’t look away.
The girl looked to be around five years old, maybe six.
All I knew was that she was young, adorable, and alive.
So very much alive.
I can’t be here, I thought to myself as my chest began to tighten. I wanted to turn on my heels and go the other direction. I wanted to run. I wanted to run so far away, back to the house, and bury myself in a place where the reminder of my loss wouldn’t be presented to me in every way, shape, and form.
Her favorite ice cream was mint chocolate chip.
She’d be talking so much the ice cream would melt down her fingers and make a massive mess no matter how often I tried to clean it up. I’d always have napkins in my purse because I was her mother, and mothers always have napkins in their purse, and…
Stop it, Kennedy. Go home.
But I couldn’t move. I was frozen in place as a panic attack began to sweep across my soul. I couldn’t look away from the child and the mother who was wiping the mess from her chin. I couldn’t turn away. I couldn’t breathe.
“What’s wrong with you?” a voice asked, snapping me out of my thoughts.
I turned to see Jax standing there with a perplexed look in his eyes. My body was trembling as my hands shook with his hat in my grip, and I parted my lips to speak, but no words left my throat.
I saw it in his eyes, too—the way he looked at me as if I were insane, the same way Penn had stared my way for the past year. He was judging me. He was baffled by my moment of unexplainable fear. He was…
Helping me?
“Walk,” he ordered, nodding once.
“I…I-I can’t,” I pushed out, still trembling. The little girl and her mother were no longer in front of me, but the shadows of their moment of love intermixed with the shadows of my own past in my mind. I was overthinking, overdoing, and over-feeling every single emotion that was hammering at my heart.
I couldn’t stop it, though. It was why I did my best to unplug from society. It held too many reminders of all the joy I’d lost.
“You can,” he disagreed. “You can walk.”
He didn’t understand.
No one understood.
His arm slid under mine, and he looped it with his own.
“Wh-what are you do-doing?” I stuttered, my voice hoarse.
“This,” he explained, stepping forward and taking me with him. “Now you do it.”
“Please, no, I ca—”
“Stop it. Stop saying what you can’t do when you can do it. Mind over matter. Come on, Sun…” His voice was low but nowhere near as cold as it’d been before. The nickname I hadn’t heard in so long hit me like a freight train. He knew. He knew it was me. He remembered. “Walk with me,” he begged.
One step.
Then another.
I was moving. That, or he was lifting me up and making me float down the sidewalk. Either way, he walked me all the way back to my house in complete silence as my heartbeats began to come down to a much tamer speed. I felt everyone’s eyes on Jax and me as we walked, and I hated it. I hated the embarrassment that came with the panic attacks, the way people stared as if I were a nutjob.
I remembered my first panic attack in a public place. It was at Penn’s real estate agency’s annual Christmas party. I had a full-blown meltdown while the speakers blasted my baby girl’s favorite holiday song, “This Christmas” by Donny Hathaway. I was mid-conversation with his boss when my knees buckled from beneath me and I hit the ground in a warp of panic.
He was humiliated to call me his wife after that.
I could only imagine how Jax felt walking me home in this moment. What was worse was he wasn’t even married to me. He was a complete and utter stranger dealing with the looks of the whole town. He didn’t seem bothered by it at all, though. He just kept walking with his arm linked with mine.
When we arrived at the house, I thanked him, and he shushed me and told me to sit down on the front step.
“I’m really okay,” I said, still feeling a bit shaky and lightheaded.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes before releasing his sigh. “Please,” he urged. “Sit down.”
Even though I wanted to argue, I decided to pick my battles. I sat, and to my surprise, he took a seat beside me. I didn’t know what to say to him, but thankfully, Jax wasn’t looking for words. He simply sat next to me in a complete silence that felt…comforting? Yes. I felt so much more comfortable than I had when I was walking into town, all because Jax was on that front porch step.
It turned out you didn’t need words to bring you comfort. Sometimes, all you needed was for someone to sit beside you in the middle of your panicked storms.
When the time came for him to leave, he rose to his feet and glanced down at me. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I am. Thank you for helping me.” I paused. “How long? How long did you know I was…me?”