I couldn't blink.
I couldn't even fucking think for a few seconds.
It was her.
It was Lacey.
Ten years had stripped away any remaining girlish features and replaced them with a beautiful, womanly figure. Her face was as pretty as I remembered, her hair a little different, probably from dying it different colors or something. Her eyes were the same. Exactly the damn same. The eyes that could rip into my hard chest, find my heart, and tear it up in a way a fire could tear through the woods all around me.
I stepped forward, my brain screaming that Lacey was here.
She'd finally come!
"Lacey," I called out. "You're here … "
Lacey just stared back at me. She was in as much shock as me. She probably figured I would never be here. Oh, but she had no idea. No fucking idea what I'd done year after year for her.
"River," she said.
Her voice was soft, shaky, but it was her voice. Her angelic voice, something so unique that I could pick up on it if I were blind.
I hurried toward the car.
I had thought about this moment for years. Ten years, to be exact. Ten years I waited for her to come to this spot and meet me. And in all that time, I never really thought about what would happen. At some times, I pictured myself just dropping to one knee and showing her the ring in my pocket. Other times, I pictured her getting out of her car, jumping into my arms, and then the years would all be erased.
Never did I imagine what would happen next.
Before I could get around the car to the driver's side door, the car started to back up.
Then the car picked up speed.
Lacey was trying to leave me again.
Lacey
PRESENT DAY
When I made the turn off the main road to the dirt, I stopped. I couldn't believe that I remembered where to go. Like it was engraved in my memory. All the nights I'd been with River as he'd drive his beat-up pickup truck along that dirt road. Most of the times, it had been night. The truck would bounce over every rock and into every divot in the road. He'd speed up, scare me so I'd reach for him. He'd pull me across the seat and hold me tight as we drove.
There were even a few times when I was too busy doing something else, and the last thing I was worried about was the road.
We were always going to the abandoned house first, then the rock. The night I left, he was hammered drunk. The last moments of us together … his hands were all over me. Our bodies together one more time. Probably the last time I felt real pleasure. The kind that I could just enjoy without forcing it. Something real and raw.
That's exactly what River was.
Real and raw.
I started to drive again and really didn't think my car was going to make it. The car bounced and bumped everywhere. But I had come so far already that there was no stopping me then.
I saw a small clearing and the outline of a cabin through the trees. Then I saw the giant rock. There was no mistaking that rock. I started to cut the wheel to the right, and a figure popped up out of nowhere. It scared me, and I stopped. I shook my head and stared.
Honestly, I wasn't a gambling person, but the odds of River actually showing up seemed to be slim to none. So when I saw River standing at the rock, I didn't know what to do. I honestly thought I'd go there, be alone, cry longer than I needed to do so, and then go back home.
Instead, I put the passenger window down as though that would erase the image of River standing there.
It didn't work.
He was really there.
It was really River.
My eyes walked down and back up his body, seeing him as the man he had always been. There was never a boyish thing about him. Even if I tried to convince myself for years that River was just a boy I used to love. It's what attracted me to him so instantly all those years ago. His face had aged a little, but he managed to age with perfection. That cut jaw, complete with scruff. The shape of his face. His eyes, those beautiful brown eyes that could take my pulse from resting to panic in a second.
"Lacey," he called to me. "You're here."
His voice trailed off as he approached the car.
I figured he would stick his head into the passenger window.
Then what? What are you going to do, Lacey? What are you going to say to him? It's been ten years. How hard did you really try to find him? How hard did he really try to find you? Why now? Why …
"River," I managed to say, just needing to get his name off my chest.
River started to walk around the front of the car.
I gripped the steering wheel. Suddenly, our entire past flashed through my mind. From the wild beginning to the heartbreaking end. Everything my parents said and did. Being whisked away to another state, across the country, forced into a new college, a new life. Trying to manage. Thinking I found love twice. Wearing an engagement ring for a little while. Almost wearing another one.