Infinite Us(93)

Later, Willow lay on my chest, our bodies sweaty and slick, our heartbeats slowing as we lay naked, sated in my bed. There were boxes and bags all over my floors. Her toothbrush had been unpacked and we shared a pillow. I thought the jasmine scent would never leave my sheets, in the same thought I realized I didn't want it to.

"A hundred lifetimes, I bet," Willow said, staring up at the ceiling with her fingers moving over my arm.

"What?"

"A hundred. All those people, moving together. All the lifetimes spent searching, wanting to come together. We can't be the first, Nash." She lifted on her elbow, resting her palm against my chest as she watched me. "How sad would it be if after all those lifetimes it's you and me who get our happy ending and no one else." She laid back down, turning to rest her chin on my chest. "Doesn't seem fair."

"No," I said, pulling her closer. "I don't think it's fair at all."

"Why us, do you think? After all this time … why is it us?"

I'd thought of nothing else on the taxi ride home. We'd splurged, celebrating Roan's departure with a cab ride back to Brooklyn and a pizza delivered ten minutes after we'd lugged Willow's suitcases back into the building. 

"Maybe it's because no one learned." I felt her move her head, her hair rustling against my shoulder. "It's like this country and all the people who are still clueless. We kill each other, we fight and fuss and we forget that there was a time, not that long ago, where we were even more divided. It's two hundred years and we're still divided. Maybe all those people in our families, maybe they were divided too. Maybe because the world was, they couldn't get past that to someplace where they could be happy."

"And we can?"

I nodded, a non-answer that gave her pause. She was warm against me, a solid weight that was soft, and sweet and so new and exciting. Her life and mine were moving together, real and honestly, closing the gap on the distance that seemed to have always divided our families.

"Sometime, next year, I need to go to California."

"To see your sister?" She was curious, and I tugged her further up my chest. I'd been thinking about Nat since we read Roan's letter. How family and blood cross tides of time. How there had been so much anger, so much loss and nothing ever got settled from holding onto it. I didn't want that for me. I didn't want it for Natalie, either.

"Yes," I told her, swallowing as the words came. "To see Nat and … to see my father. It's been a long time." I exhaled when Willow relaxed against me. "I've hated him for a long time, Will. But... I don't want to anymore. It's time to start healing." She nodded, I felt the movement of her chin. "Will you go with me?"

"Of course," she said, kissing my chest. "I'll go anywhere with you."

She hummed when I kissed her, holding her face between my hands, feeling our bodies twining together. "We can have our happy, Will," I whispered to her, "the two of us. I know we can. I know it with everything I am."





Roan



The Nation farm was a sprawling place well appointed with a small cottage off to the side of the main property and a larger woodframe home in the center. I watched it all, leaning on a tree that years before, lifetimes before, Sookie and Dempsey had hid beneath, holed up in the tree house that had long since fallen to shreads and ruin.

They could not see me, watching, the children running around, their laughter loud and sweet against the slow wind that blew the scent of honeysuckle and the tease of sugarcane into the air.

"Riley, you want to bring the baby inside?" Willow called and I watched her, the slim waist only marginally rounder than it had been when she was young. There were small strands of gray coloring her chestnut hair, but she wore hardly any wrinkles at all, despite her years. Those years, it seemed, had been very kind to her.

Around the end of the porch, Nash manned the grill, a beer in one hand and his grandson at his hip, nodding toward the surface that sizzled and burned with steaks and burgers. "No," he told the boy, "not yet. You have to wait til just before they're ready to add the sauce."

Nash, too, had grown a little rounded about his middle, his hair still full, but duller, his eyes now covered with glasses that he rarely took off.

The farmhouse had once been a tiny, two room shack built by hands who'd seen too much work and not much care. The years came fast and with them the broken walls that were mended and the structure that grew wide, larger to accomodate children and grandchildren and then cousins when they came, when old granny Bastien had seen her children scatter to the wind, to death and travel, and her granddaughter fall to her reward, taken much too soon by smoke and fire.