“Just to be clear, I’m not paying for you both, so you better start saving up. I want you there, but I’m not your meal ticket,” Connor joked before hurrying off to talk to other people.
Jax pulled me into a hug and held on tight. As we stared out into the crowd, my heart filled up with joy as I saw a little girl shoving her face full of cotton candy.
“Daisy,” I muttered to myself.
“What did you say?” Jax asked, smiling my way.
“Nothing.” I stood on my tiptoes and kissed his lips. “Just felt a wave of love, that’s all.”
Went spent the rest of the night losing our money at the carnival games and whirling around on the Tilt-A-Whirl. When I went home with Jax that night, I couldn’t help but feel grateful. So much had happened in my life, and even through it all, I was still able to smile. I was thankful for all the rainstorms that brought me back to him.
* * *
“Do you want to read them?” I asked Jax, after we made it home from the carnival. We sat on his bed with the shoebox of old letters that we’d sent each other. For the past few days, we’d been debating what to do with them.
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. When I wrote those letters, I was in a very dark place. I’ve relived that place for so many years of my life, and I’m tired of that story. I want to move on, and that means getting rid of those letters.” He pulled me in closer to his body. “We have the rest of forever to leave each other love notes.”
I kissed his lips when the doorbell rang. “Expecting someone?”
“Never,” he said as he stood to go answer it. I followed closely behind him to see who it could be.
When he opened the door, we were both surprised to see Amanda standing there with a box in her hands. Her eyes landed on me before she gave Jax a weak smile.
“Hey, sorry to interrupt your night. I figured it was about time I return your stuff you left at my place. I don’t know why I held on to it for so long, but here it is,” she said, passing it over to Jax.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Yeah. And I’m sorry about what happened at the bar. Lars was wrong for what he did. He’s a jerk sometimes. You didn’t deserve that.” She kept fidgeting with her fingers and avoiding eye contact. “You deserve to be happy.”
“You do, too, Amanda. You deserve more than Lars.”
“Maybe.” She nervously laughed. “Only time will tell.” She looked toward me and gave me a broken smile. “Take care of him, will you? This man doesn’t love easily. For a while, I thought he didn’t love at all, but I see it when he looks at you. You make him whole. You were his missing piece. So, can you do me a favor?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
She smiled to us both and released a weighted sigh. “Stay.”
39
Jax
Kennedy refused to leave my side throughout all of my hardships. She stayed during my darkest moments, and promised she wasn’t going to go anywhere without me. Day by day, she opened up my heart, and she didn’t seem afraid by what she saw.
When it came time for some deeper healing, I knew exactly where I had to go.
“Well, I’ll be. I’ll admit when I saw your name on my schedule, I thought it was a typo,” Eddie said as I walked into his office.
I snickered a little and took my very familiar seat across from his desk. “Yeah, well, what can I say? I like to keep people on their toes.” It had been a few weeks since Derek came into town and I was still trying to deal with the truths he revealed to me. Each day came with its own struggles and I had gone through every emotion out there, but I didn’t have to deal with them alone anymore. I didn’t have to feel what I felt in the dark, because Kennedy was there to be my light.
Truthfully, I had a whole team around me to help guide me home whenever I started to slip away, and that included my therapy appointments with Eddie. If anything, I learned what it meant to conquer ones demons. It wasn’t something you did, and then it magically disappeared forever. No, life was determined to throw shit your way, no matter how hard you tried to stay in the realm of happiness.
But I’d discovered quickly how important it was to learn to fight back.
That was the thing about storms. When you were in the middle of them, they felt so powerful. They felt as if they were driving your life, and you were left with no control over the way the winds blew you. That was why it was so important to have a core group of love surrounding you at all times. When you faced the storms together, when you held the hands of the ones you loved, and stood steady, the storms had a harder time pushing you over. The storms didn’t blow you away because you were linked to the world with love, the most powerful weapon that could be used during the mightiest of storms.