A knock on the door startled her out of her deep thoughts as she arose to answer it.
“Ugh, Brooklyn,” she groaned to herself. “You know I hate random visits.”
She opened the front door only to be greeted by Hayden Goodwin, head held low and an armful of flowers.
What the hell does he want? She thought to herself.
“Hayden,” she said, showing an obvious lack of any kind of emotion.
“Hi, Stormy,” he said. He held out a bouquet of gorgeous and simple, white calla lilies. “I just wanted to stop by and offer my condolences. We didn’t really get to talk much last week at the restaurant.”
“Oh,” she said, taken aback. Maybe he was simply just doing the right thing. The son of a local doctor, he was always more of a proper sort of guy; except when he was crushing her heart into a million pieces. “You can come in if you want.”
She widened the door and Hayden walked in, immediately removing his shoes. She motioned towards the living room, and he took a seat on the edge of the couch. He was clearly uncomfortable in her house, the house she shared with her late husband, the man she loved more than any other in the world, and the man who had dethroned Hayden in Stormy’s heart.
“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for everything,” he said. His immense, sapphire blue eyes stared straight into hers. “Everything I did to you. All the ways I hurt you. It was wrong. I was young and immature and only thinking of myself.”
Stormy was speechless. She perched herself on the couch arm and continued to let him speak.
“You were the best girlfriend a guy could ever want,” he said. “I threw it all away because I thought I could do better. And then I realized, there’s no one better than you.”
She was melting on the inside, but she refused to let him see it. She bit her lip as she waited to hear more. Her feelings for him had faded into oblivion months ago, but everything he was saying was everything she had waited years to hear him say.
“When I heard you were getting married last year,” he said as he swallowed the lump in his throat. “It changed everything for me. It put everything into perspective. I saw my entire future go down the drain, just like that. After everything we’d been through, I always thought you and I would end up together one way or another.”
Stormy slid down off the couch arm and onto the couch cushion next to him. He reached out and took her soft hand into his and squeezed it.
“I was such an idiot,” he said as he ran his fingers through his wavy auburn hair. “I’ve been kicking myself for months.”
Stormy sat in pure bewilderment at Hayden’s revelations. She was shocked to hear what he was saying, but even more shocked that he had the guts to say it so soon after Jett’s passing. She didn’t know whether to kiss him, hug him, or punch him after everything he’d put her through.
“I have a bit of a confession to make,” he said. His eyes shifted nervously from hers to the floor and back. “I sort of purposely got expelled from Vanderbilt. I wanted to come back here. I wanted to be around you. I wanted to see if it could work.”
“But you knew I was with Jett,” Stormy said, confused. “Married.”
“By the time my grades had slipped, it was too late,” he said. “But when I heard about Jett’s passing, I thought maybe there was a chance. And when I saw you at the bar a couple weeks ago and at the restaurant last week, I knew there was a reason we kept crossing paths.”
“You’re just reading into things,” Stormy insisted. “Coleville is a small town.”
“I get it,” he said. “I hurt you pretty bad. I don’t expect you to forgive me. I just want you to know that I’m sorry. And I want you to know that I still love you more than anything.”
Hayden appeared to be teary eyed, but Stormy couldn’t quite tell for sure because he got up quickly and trampled to the door to put his shoes back on.
“Hayden,” she called out. “Wait.”
He turned back towards her, and he was definitely teary eyed. In all their years together, she had never seen him cry about anything, ever. She had never heard him open up. She had never seen him so vulnerable.
“Don’t go yet,” she said. “Come back here.”
He came back and took a seat next to her on the couch, only this time he was even closer to her.
“I’ve missed you so much, Stormy,” he said as he buried his face in her chest and sobbed.
This is a first, she thought to herself as she reluctantly put her arms around him. She ran her fingers through his thick, messy, auburn hair and tried to calm him down and comfort him.