Her All Along

When had she become everything?

Our history blurred the lines, and our age difference even more so.

I heard the patio door slide open behind me, and Elise walked over and sat next to me.

“Hi.”

“Hey, you.” I took another swig from my beer before I set down the bottle on the deck. “Grace is asleep, I take it?”

She nodded and pulled up a knee to rest her chin on it.

That sight alone made me want to swoop her into my arms and protect her from whatever troubled her.

“When I visited Ryan and Angel in San Francisco, I told them about a plan I had.” She dipped her head farther and planted her forehead against her knee instead. “I was so nervous, but Angel promised to help me. Ryan was…supportive? Worried. He was worried. He told me some military quote about how no plans ever survive the initial contact with the enemy.”

Sounded like Ryan. And Darius, for that matter.

“But I interpreted him literally, of course. You weren’t my enemy, so I didn’t think it applied to my plan.” She cleared her throat and lowered her knee again. “He’s explained to me since then that all he meant was that we always forget something. We forget to consider the human factor,” she said. “We can strategize and devise a perfect thousand-step plan, but all it takes is one delayed shipment because someone had to go to the bathroom, or one pissed-off squadron leader who ordered two hundred sit-ups before sending his unit out, or one panic attack at the first sound of an explosion…and then all those following steps in the plan are useless.”

Ryan had a signature way of explaining things.

“So, here’s my stupid, childish plan,” she muttered. Then she grabbed something next to her and handed me a palm-sized little notepad. “I didn’t even get started on the first step because spending time with you like we have recently has changed everything.” She paused. “I was going to ask you to spend a day with me away from everyone when I felt confident that I’d completed step one, but since I failed miserably and only succeeded in screwing myself over…there you go.”

I frowned, having no clue what she could possibly be referring to, but I didn’t like her talking about failure regarding these past couple of weeks. They’d been the best of my life.

I flipped open the notepad and stifled a quick grin at her first task, though there was no stopping the elation that surged through me. Or the fact that she went from fucking adorable to whatever superlative multiplied adorable by ten.

1- Make Avery fall in love with me.

And she thought she’d failed miserably? Or that she hadn’t even begun?

The rest of the list was just so Pipsqueak.

2- Spend the rest of the summer together and make him understand that he has to wait for me.

3- Move to SF and work my ass off. Fly home as often as possible to remind Avery that I’m worth waiting for.

4- Move home, open my shop, wait for Avery to propose.

5- Convince Avery to have a baby with me.

I scrubbed a hand over my mouth and jaw to hide my amusement, and I had to look away. Fuck me, certain things hadn’t changed. And it made me so goddamn happy. She may be an adult now, but her perspective still came from an innocent point of view. I didn’t want that to go away completely—ever. Because it made the world a brighter place to me.

“I know it was naïve,” she said stiffly.

I shook my head and put my arm around her. “Do you even realize how brave you are for being this honest?”

She flushed and furrowed her brow. “But I don’t need any filters around you. You understand me.”

“It’s still brave, sweetheart.” I pressed a kiss to her temple and tried to gather my thoughts. I had drawn a million incomplete conclusions, and with her cards on the table, I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and hurt her. “First of all, this made my whole fucking year.” I placed the notepad on my leg. “I’m incredibly humbled by your showing it to me.”

“Fuck,” she whispered. “There’s gonna be a but. I’m ready for this.”

“No, no. No.” I smiled into another kiss to her hair. Christ, this girl. “Hear me out, okay?”

She nodded with a stiff jerk.

“It’s a complicated situation, but we have time, don’t we?” I murmured. “In a span of just a couple months, I’ve gone from loving you like a family member to craving you like air. And, in the interest of full disclosure, this has been building up for quite a while. I’ve grown more and more attached to you, and in retrospect, it’s been leading up to this—to what I feel now.”

Was I making a lick of sense? Earlier today, anxiety had seized my chest at the notion of her leaving soon; I’d almost been ready to beg her not to go. But now, this notepad had landed in my lap like the biggest insurance policy I could imagine, and it was allowing me to sit back and think things through properly. At the same time, Ryan wasn’t wrong. Two years was a long time, and most importantly, a long time during a crucial part of Pipsqueak growing up. So much could change.