His gaze seemed to be focused on the past or maybe whatever was still in the box. “Who would have ever imagined that a girl … a young woman ten years younger than me would breeze into my life. Beautiful? Yes. Quirky? Absolutely. Innocent? Painfully so. But also a cruciverbalist.” Shaking his head, gazing in the box, and irony curling his lips, he pulled out tablets and notebooks, tossing them at my feet with the spelling bee awards.
I bent down and picked one up. Inside, it was filled with hand drawn crossword puzzles.
“Cruciferous …” I whispered, easing my head side to side. He pretended to not know what a cruciverbalist was. Fisher did play me, just not in the way I thought.
“An eighteen-year-old cruciverbalist. Really, what were the chances?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I glanced up at him.
He ran a hand through his hair and exhaled. “I don’t know. I think I was in shock. And maybe a little awe was involved. A suffocating dose of confusion. A little anger at the timing, at your age. At the fact that you’re Rory’s daughter.”
I thumbed through more pages of his notebook. “Do you love me, Fisher?” My gaze remained on the notebook, my voice steady, almost passive as if I was asking him about the weather or his day.
“Reese, it doesn’t matter.”
My head inched side to side. “You mean it doesn’t change anything. And maybe you’re right. But …” I lifted my gaze. “It matters.”
He climbed to his feet and drifted to the windows overlooking the backyard. Hands in the front pockets of his jeans. “I think I loved you before I met you. But we don’t always get what we want. I let go of my crossword puzzles and word obsession because it didn’t fit into my life any longer. The thing is … I don’t know where you fit into my life. And I know, I know you don’t like your age to matter, but it does. I won’t be the reason you don’t take chances in life. Don’t make marriage and sex your life’s goals. If Rory found out, she’d want to know why. Why I would get involved with an eighteen-year-old girl? And I don’t think cruciverbalist would work. Maybe if our ten-year-age gap was more like twenty-five and thirty-five, I could make a case for word geeks and kismet.”
He turned to face me, every ounce of his vulnerability on full display. No walls. No lies. Just the hard truth. “Loving you is my favorite thing to do. It’s automatic and effortless. And you’re right, that matters. But …”
“It changes nothing,” I whispered, setting the notebook on the sofa and pressing my hands to my legs as I stood. Gazing up at the ceiling, I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and blew it out in one big whoosh. “Naked fisherman, you are incorrigible. Moody. Bold. Unpredictable. Brash … and a million other things that are bad for me. Yet it felt like you were the first person in my life who just … fit. The version of myself I dreaded … the version I blamed on your bad behavior, I came to love it. It started to feel like my true skin. It felt good to smile without something in my brain telling me I should smile. You gave my days this vibrant color, and I don’t know what I will see when you’re not…” I drew in a shaky breath as emotions stung my eyes “…when you’re not mine.”
His arms slid around my waist, his chest to my back, his face bowed to my shoulder. And I shook as emotion took my body like an earthquake. Unsettling emotions needed to be released. Grief suffocated my lungs. Reality tore at my heart.
Fisher turned me in his arms and pressed my cheek to his chest. He soothed me with soft kisses to the top of my head and gentle strokes from his other hand down my back.
I was so tired of the unfairness in my life. The unanswered prayers. The testing of my faith.
My dad died, and it made no sense. And I didn’t want anyone, not even God himself, trying to convince me otherwise.
Rory’s decisions made no sense to me either. It was like one day she was my mom, my world, and the next day she was this stranger being sentenced to five years.
Did I have an unnatural fear of failure? Yes. Success felt like a myth. Happiness … an unreachable destination.
And love … well, it was something blurry and always changing forms in my life. I chased love.
Love for my father.
Love for God.
Love for Rory.
But it always felt just out of reach. Until Fisher. With him, I touched love. I held it in my hands, like reaching the end of a rainbow or lassoing the moon.