One corner of his mouth twitched in a the faintest semblance of a smile in response to the apparent non sequitur. “I know.”
“No matter what they’ve told you all your life, there is no shame in expressing your sadness about losing your cousin. Nor in turning to someone else for comfort in that grief. Maybe they’ve coming around to that realization by offering their home to your aunt at this time. Or maybe not, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep pretending that nothing in life affects you on more than an intellectual level. It isn’t a sign of weakness to admit that you have feelings. That you have needs.”
After what might have been a brief, internal struggle, he said in a low voice, “I need you, Shannon. More than my next breath. I haven’t felt really alive since you sent me away. I kept trying to convince myself that you were better off without me—and vice versa, perhaps—but I never stopped missing you and wanting to be with you.”
“I was an idiot,” she admitted, her heart clenching in both nerves and joy. “I panicked after that stilted brunch with your brilliant, reserved parents. I was afraid you’d start expecting me to be like them—and I knew I just couldn’t.”
“I don?
?t even want to be like them,” he said forcefully. “I love them—they’re my parents, Shannon. My family. But I don’t want to be them. I thought you sent me away because you’d grown bored with me. Because my family and I were too dull and uninteresting in comparison to your colorful family.”
She nearly choked. “Bored? With you? I can’t see that ever happening, James. It would take a lifetime just to get to know everything there is to learn about you.”
“I feel the same way about you,” he said, pulling her toward him again. “And I’ve always enjoyed the learning process,” he added in an attempt at a joke.
She held him off for a moment. “I’m crazy about you,” she said candidly. “I have been from the start, as terrifying and ill-fated as it seemed. But—”
“But you want to be your own person. To run your own life. To make your own decisions.”
“Well, yes, but—”
“You don’t want to change who you are for me or anyone else.”
“Right. But—”
“You need—”
“James. Let me talk. You sound like a Gambill.”
He looked rather pleased by the comparison, even though she had not meant it entirely as a compliment. “What do you want to say?”
“I was just going to say, I don’t want to rush into anything,” she replied somberly. “I’m crazy about you—but I want to take it slowly and make sure we do this right. I’ve failed at relationships before. I can’t bear the thought of failing with you.”
“We’ll take it slowly,” he promised, his lips hovering over hers. “I can already predict it’s going to get complicated. Just promise me you won’t give up on me again.”
She locked her arms around his neck, pressing full length against him as she rose on tiptoe to close the slight gap between them. “I won’t give up on us,” she whispered against his lips.
He expressed his satisfaction with a long, thorough kiss.
For once, he was almost completely open to her. She felt the sadness in him. The uncertainty and the fears. The relief, the hopeful joy. He would lock those emotions away again soon. That was just who he was, she thought, and she didn’t want to change him, really, any more than she could change to please him. But perhaps he had just given her the key to unlocking his feelings when she needed him to share.
It seemed that the key had been hidden all this time in his heart.
Epilogue
Graduation was held the second weekend in May in an arena at the local fairgrounds, one of the few places in the area big enough to seat all the graduates and their families and guests. Physicians, nurses, pharmacists, technicians, researchers and other graduates in the medical sciences sat in folding chairs on the arena floor dressed in black caps and gowns with hoods and tassels color-coded to match their individual disciplines.
Medical students wore green velvet hoods hanging down the back of their gowns. They’d received those hoods at the honors convocation the night before. Sitting in the bleachers with her family on her right and James’s parents and aunt Beverly on her left, Shannon kept an eye on James as he sat in his folding chair waiting for his name to be called.
“I’ve lost James again,” her mother, who sat at Shannon’s right side, complained. “They all look just alike sitting out there in those caps and gowns. Which one is he again?”
While Stu pointed out James to their mother, Shannon turned her attention to James’s mother, who sat at her left. Melissa fanned her face with a thick program. “It’s warm in here. Bruce and I should have skipped this event. The hooding ceremony last night was the more important program. And it isn’t as if we haven’t watched James receive three other diplomas before this one.”
The crowd milled and talked in the bleachers, making it hard at times to hear the names being droned from the stage. After several speakers and more than a hundred names that had already been called for various degree presentations, the audience was growing restless.
Last night’s hooding ceremony for the M.D. graduates had been solemn and formal, but it turned out that medical-school graduations were as cheerfully disorganized as any high-school ceremony Shannon had ever attended. Hoots and cheers and the occasional blast of an air horn from various family groups in attendance caused James’s father to scowl and mutter about “rowdy yokels.”
“I think he would have been disappointed if you weren’t here,” Shannon confided quietly to Melissa. “He has said many times that he credits you and his father for setting such a good academic example for him to follow.”