The funny thing about life is that there’s a lot you don’t get to choose. You don’t get to choose whom you’re related to. You don’t get to choose your hair color, your height, or what natural talents you are given. You don’t get to choose where you are born, or who or what the world will see when they look at you.
But the best part of life is that in the end, none of that matters. You get to choose who you become. Who you love. You can change your hair color and, to an extent, you can even change your eye color and height. You can learn to be great at something.
There’s a whole lot you don’t get a choice in, but there’s a whole lot more you do.
And I knew right then what I would choose. What I would always choose.
The best decisions of my life had been those I’d jumped into terrified even though some part of me knew they were necessary.
In that moment, and for the rest of my life, I knew that nothing would ever be as necessary as this man in front of me, who would sabotage my dates and make me food because he knew I couldn’t cook and mostly because he saw me for who I wanted to be. For who I tried to be even when I did things that weren’t very nice. This man, Lucas Ripley, who was just as much of a taped together puzzle as I was.
Or as we all freaking were, I guess.
So I told him the only answer I would ever let myself live with.
I looked into those blue-green eyes and told him the truth. “I want to. I really want to.”
Epilogue
It was the dream that woke me.
That dream that had me waking up with a gasp.
It wasn’t real, I told myself as I blinked up at the darkened ceiling. It had been at least two or three months since the last time I’d dreamt about my dad and that house and the stupid-ass and the idiot that had my subconscious jerking awake to get out of it. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.
I was fine, I was safe, and I was loved.
I wasn’t seventeen years old, and I was fine.
But I didn’t have to roll over to know that it was after midnight now, so technically I was thirty-one now. Thirty-freaking-one. And it was that knowledge that had me smiling in my bedroom, that had my heart rate slowing back down, and that had the goose bumps I’d woken up with, retreating.
Of course I’d had a dream about my dad after one of the best nights of my life. That was how this stuff worked. Those dumb memories were spread out more and more as time went on, but they were still there in the those dark, little corners I didn’t go visit that often.
Reaching over to the other side of the bed, I found it empty but still warm, the covers thrown over partially on top of me. I glanced toward the bathroom to find the door closed and the light off, and I knew exactly where Rip was. I knew exactly what he was doing.
And that, even more than the reminder of my night before, calmed me down that last little bit.
Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I rolled up to sit on the edge, grabbing my half-full glass of water and chugging the rest of it down before standing up. The house was quiet, which honestly surprised me because according to my cell phone screen it was three in the morning. Rip and I had made it to midnight before we’d gone to our room to shower—together—and then gone to bed, leaving everyone else up and farting around the house.
Everyone else. That had me smiling even more and getting to my feet, still holding my empty glass.
Opening the door as quietly as I could, I listened down the hall but still couldn’t hear a peep.
And I already knew well enough not to screw up a bad thing, so I headed toward the living room as quietly as possible. It was then that I heard the noises. The freaking snores coming from it. Before we’d gone to bed, I’d told everyone that hadn’t gone home where the air mattresses were in case they wanted to stay over. Apparently, someone had.
I came up to the living room to find the seventy-five-inch television that Rip had insisted on buying two years ago on but muted, I had to stop there and look at the two air mattresses that had been blown up. On one was Lily and her boyfriend of the last two years, this really nice guy named Abner. On the other mattress was Kyra and her boyfriend, a guy I didn’t like anywhere near as much. They were fully clothed without a single blanket or pillow anywhere around, but totally passed out, one of the guys and Kyra snoring like chainsaws.
On the couch was the greatest surprise of my day, Thea.
To be fair, Thea and Kyra, both, coming to my birthday party in the first place had surprised the hell out of me.
Lily wasn’t surprising at all. In the year since she had finished her undergrad, she had gotten a job back in Houston but moved into her own place, even though she spent the night at our house more often than at her condo. Rip and I had assured her she could move back, but she had insisted she was fine on her own.
But Thea and Kyra? Some days I wanted to think that things between us were the same as they had been before, but they weren’t. I could accept that now. I could get through my life knowing that I loved the hell out of my sisters and that they loved me back, but that everything that had happened almost five years ago had changed those little ties between us.
It didn’t help that I could see it in their faces every time we talked. The hesitation. The worry that I would ask them something they didn’t want to answer. The worry that they would say something I didn’t want to hear.
Even though there was only one topic I didn’t want to hear and it started and ended with a “D.”
But I wasn’t going to think about that person tonight or tomorrow or any other night. The dream I’d just had had been enough. Plus, it was my freaking birthday now, and I’d had a great night, and nothing was going to get to me at this point. No, siree.
So I kept on creeping through the house, heading into the kitchen that we had never gotten around to opening because the wall there was structurally important, and I didn’t want to spend money redoing especially when I bought all my appliances and gotten granite countertops for the price it would have cost to put in a supporting beam. All thanks to the money Grandma Genie had left me in her will.
The door closed behind me quietly as I flicked on the lights and headed for the cake I’d put in the fridge hours ago.
The pretty, two-layer white frosting cake with blue glitter on it that Rip had made me that was halfway gone now.
Pulling it out, I sliced off a nice, big slice and set it on a plate, pulling out a fork before setting the cake back into the fridge.
I had barely sat down at one of the stools under the brand-new island we’d gotten installed two years ago when the door swung open again and a big, familiar body was there.
I smiled.
“Whatcha doing, baby?” the giant hunk of a man I could look at every minute for the rest of my life, asked, as he stood there in a tight, white undershirt that clung to every inch of that solid upper body. The cut-off navy blue sleeping pants he was wearing right then hadn’t been on his body before we’d gone to bed.
“Getting a piece of this awesome cake,” I answered him, sliding the plate toward him an inch and raising my eyebrows. “Come split it with me.”
Rip smiled that freaking smile that went straight to my heart before he came over, pulling out the stool beside mine with one hand while the other one slid through my hair to cup the back of my neck. I’d been letting it grow out lately, and the cotton candy pink and blue strands just barely grazed my shoulders now. I wasn’t even a little surprised when he leaned over and kissed my neck before scooting the stool even closer to me, one thigh straddling the back of mine while the other one grazed the knee closest to him.
“I wake you up?”