“Gabe, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone eat that much so quickly. Doesn’t your mother feed you?”
“That might have been the best meal I’ve had in months,” he groans, placing his hand flat against his stomach. “My mother’s not much of a cook, if you don’t remember. And besides, I don’t usually eat at my parents’ house. There’s a kitchen in my apartment.”
“Right, of course. I didn’t mean—”
“I’m a terrible cook.” He smirks and shakes his head. “I don’t normally sit down to homemade fried chicken and biscuits.”
“Oh.” I laugh softly.
“It was really good. Thank you for making it for me.”
“You’re welcome.”
He glances at the picnic basket behind me. “Now, didn’t you say something about cookies?”
“Chocolate chip,” I say, reaching for the canister that I stacked them in. I hand it to him and he grabs a few off the top, eating each cookie in two bites, moaning quietly over each mouthful.
When he finally seems to be full, he lies back on the blanket, laces his fingers over his chest, and looks up at the tree.
I stretch my legs out beside him and lean back on my hands. “Have you ever thought about selling your furniture?”
“The furniture in my garage?”
“Yeah. People would pay a lot of money for that kind of craftsmanship. Believe me. My girlfriend, Trisha, is an interior designer and her clients spend boatloads on custom-made furniture. And now that you have an in with my dad’s company...”
He turns his head and looks at me. “You mean the furniture I’m making for Southern Coastal?”
My dad’s company.
“Wait. What? That’s what you’ve been helping my dad with? He’s using your furniture in the new line he’s working on?”
The corners of his mouth turn up slightly and he exhales an amused breath through his nostrils. “I am the new line he’s been working on.”
“What?” I squeal, clasping my hand over my mouth. “Oh my God, Gabe. You have your own line?”
He laughs quietly at my excitement and nods, and I have to fight back tears when I think of how far he’s come.
“That’s really amazing.”
He looks up at the tree again. “I needed to earn a living somehow. No degree, remember?”
I sigh, because I know better than anyone how important school was to him before the accident. “No school could teach you how to do that, Gabe. That’s God-given talent.” I stare at him with complete and utter awe, but he doesn’t look at me. “Gabriel,” I say, demanding his attention. When he turns his head, I smile at him. “I’m really proud of you.”
He doesn’t smile, but I can see the pride in his eyes. “You know, no one really calls me Gabriel anymore. Except my mother.”
“Well, you’ll always be Gabriel to me. My Gabriel,” I say quietly, stripped of my defenses by the surge of joy flooding my brain. When it recedes, I avert my eyes from the pools of caramel gazing up at me, before I fall in and drown.
I lie back on the blanket and stare at the wide branches of the oak tree. I can see the blue sky beyond its dark green leaves and when the wind blows, the giant limbs sway and creak. “So, besides making remarkable pieces of furniture, what else have you been up to?” I ask carefully.
“Well, for the past few years, that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing.” He looks at me and asks, just as gently, “What about you? How was Raleigh?”
A wave of apprehension falls over me and I give a half-hearted smile. “Raleigh was...okay.”
“Must have been a little more than okay. You stayed there a while,” he says, and I wonder how much he really knows. I assumed his mother kept him abreast of my life in Raleigh, but now I wonder if she was protecting him from it, like my mother had been protecting me from his life.
Did he need protecting from it?
“Um, that’s not why I stayed,” I answer, still distracted by my own question.
He nods thoughtfully and the corners of his mouth turn down. “Well, did you like your job?”
I sigh quietly, thinking about a fair answer. It wasn’t a bad job. In fact, I beat out several qualified candidates for it. I was lucky to have it. The problem was likely me, not the job. “I liked it at first. But I didn’t love it.”
He stares at me for a few seconds, waiting for me to go on. “You want to tell me what you did?” He gives a small smirk that makes me laugh.
“I reviewed and edited marketing materials for restaurant chains. It wasn’t exactly my literary dream come true.” I shrug. “I guess life doesn’t always care about what we want, does it?”
He shakes his head subtly, then says softly, “Sounds like a good job, Liv.”
“It was. But I guess I wanted more than a job. I want more than a job. I want to do something I love. Like edit actual books.” I shrug and widen my eyes playfully. “Put my degree to good use and whatnot.”
He smiles openly and it makes my heart beat wildly. “I hope you do.”
We’re both quiet for a few seconds, gazing up at the giant tree branches above us, listening to them creak as they sway in the warm breeze. I close my eyes and listen to the quiet, low buzzing of the cicadas in the distance.
I love that sound.
“What was it like?” Gabe asks, and I open my eyes.
“What was what like?”
“Your last year at NC State. Finishing college. Graduating.” His voice is a mix of curiosity and pride, for me, and disappointment for him.
I’m quiet as my brain conjures up a flurry of painful memories that I’ve worked really hard to forget. “Um...”
“I’m sorry”—he shakes his head and looks up at the tree again—“that was a stupid question.”
“It’s okay,” I say quietly. “It was...hard.”
He looks at me again with knowing eyes, and I try to give a reassuring smile, but he just nods and says, “I guess it probably was.”
I look up at the patches of blue sky through the wide tree branches again. “I tried to make the best of it, after a while.”
“You deserved to go back and graduate, Liv.”
I drop my head to the side and say to him, “So did you.”
He gives me a disheartened look and says softly, “Not so sure about that.”
I stare at him for a few seconds, unsure what to say.
“Vehicular manslaughter comes with a heavy dose of karma.”
“It was not vehicular manslaughter. And is that really what you think? That what happened to you was karma getting back at you?”
“The accident was my fault, Liv. I should have never agreed to that stupid race.”
“No, you shouldn’t have. But that doesn’t make what happened your fault.”
He looks up at the tree pensively.
I sit up and pull him up with me, which is like tugging on a boulder. “Hey. It was an accident, which by definition is something that happens unintentionally.”
“It still doesn’t change the fact that if I didn’t race Jeremy, Brandon would still be here.”
“No, if Brandon was wearing his seatbelt, he’d still be here.” I shake my head and give him an impossible look.