He’s so happy and excited it makes me feel like an asshole for how much my stomach dropped when I saw that email come through as I was warming up my shower water earlier. I should have screamed with happiness when I saw that someone was finally smart enough to realize the mistake they made by uninviting Palmer from so many tournaments. But I didn’t. My knees gave out, and I sat down on the edge of the bathtub, staring at that email until the bathroom filled up with steam and I couldn’t see the screen of my phone anymore. This is what we wanted. This is what I’ve been working my ass off for the last two weeks, and staying up late for, and researching everything there is to know about professional golf PR.
But all I could think of when I looked at that email was that I’m working my ass off just so he can leave me again. So he can walk away without even asking me to go with him.
I know it’s different this time, and I know we’re different this time compared to the last time he was on this island and walked away from me, but it doesn’t make me panic any less. It doesn’t make me stop worrying about the same thing I worried about back then and why I always stopped myself from telling him how I felt. Can I be enough for him? Does he even want more with me, or does he just want to keep what we have here on this island like a tropical fantasy, where it never leaves the shore or turns into something real, getting the best of both worlds while I continue to sit here and… wait?
I know he has to leave. I get it, and I want him to go and do what he’s so amazing and talented at, but am I enough for him to come back to when he’s done? Is this island enough? He’s been all over the world. Why in the hell would he want to stay here when he could go anywhere? I just got him, and now he’s going to be taken away from me. We talked about how the first tournament he was still on the schedule for wasn’t for another seven months just the other day. In the back of my mind, I had that number flashing around, telling me I had plenty of time to prove to him that I’m worth it, and that we’re worth it, and screw sitting around here waiting for him to come home to me; I would go anywhere with him, if he’d only ask. For fifteen years, every time he left this island, I just wanted him to beg me to come with him. Just once. For him to just stop and look at me and say, “Birdie, I need you there with me.”
But he never did. And now it looks like it’s happening all over again, him making plans to leave, while I sit around… waiting. Hoping I’m enough for him to come back to, hoping he doesn’t meet someone when he’s far away from me who’s there with him, in his world, rubbing elbows with his people, while small-town girl who’s never been anywhere or done anything significant with her life just… waits. This was always my relationship with Palmer for fifteen years, and of course I missed him, but it was fine, because it was all that we’d known.
But now? Now that I know why nothing in my life has ever made sense or felt right before until the moment he kissed me out in the rain, and now that I know what it feels like to have bruises on my hips from the dig of his fingers and a soreness between my legs reminding me how much he needed me…. It’s not fine, and I’m not okay with only getting the crumbs of his attention, sprinkled around me sporadically when his hectic schedule will allow.
“Just so you know, I’m going to expect a lot of sexual favors when you get that promotion.” He winks at me, scraping the bottom of his empty plastic bowl to get the last of the fudge, while my flurry remains half-eaten and melting in my hand, the few bites I already took starting to churn in my stomach.
“You know I’m not doing this for that stupid promotion,” I tell him, sucking it up so I can get the rest of my words out without crying like a baby. “I don’t care about any of that. All I care about is getting you back out there, traveling on the pro circuit where your super-talented self is supposed to be.”
Palmer sets his empty bowl on the picnic table then takes my flurry out of my hand and sets it next to the bowl. Scooting closer to me on the bench, he brings both his hands up to cup my face, leaning in to give me a gentle kiss before pulling back to rest his forehead against mine.