The Edge of Always 14 page

She squints, turning her eyes away from the sun. “Yeah, it is, but I want to be buried in it, too. Some believe that when you die, your afterlife is reliving the happiest moments of your life. One of mine will be the day I marry you. Might as well take the dress with me.”

I smile down at her.

I take the hat off and lie next to her, pressing my head close enough to hers that I can prop the hat over both of our heads to help keep the sun off. After I get it balanced I say, “Number six: if I die before you, make sure they play “Dust in the Wind” at my funeral.”

She glances over carefully so the hat doesn’t fall away. “Are we back to that again? You’re starting to make me hate a perfectly good classic, Andrew.”

I laugh lightly. “I know, but I saw an episode of Highlander when his wife Tessa died. They played that song in the background. I’ve never been able to get it out of my head since.”

She smiles and reaches up to wipe sweat from her brow.

“I promise,” she says. “But since we’re on the topic, I’d like to add number seven. Have you ever seen Ghost?”

I glance over briefly. “Well, yeah. I guess everybody’s seen that movie. Unless you’re sixteen. Shit, I’m surprised you’ve seen it.” I nudge her with my elbow.

She laughs. “That was my mom’s doing,” she admits. “Ghost and Dirty Dancing I’ve seen about a hundred times. She had a thing for Patrick Swayze, and I was the only girl around growing up she could talk to about how handsome he was. Anyway, so you’ve seen it. Number seven: if anyone ever kills you, you better come back like Sam and help me find your killer.”

I laugh and shake my head, accidently knocking the hat off momentarily. “What is it with you and movies? Never mind. Yeah, I promise I’ll come back and haunt your ass.”

“You better!” she laughs out loud. “Besides, I know I’ll be like those people who think their loved ones are still around after they’ve died. Might as well give me more reason to believe it.”

Not sure how I’ll pull that off, but whatever. Hell, I’ll try.

“I’ll promise, if you will,” I say.

“As always,” she says.

“Number eight,” I go on, “don’t bury me where it’s cold.”

“Fully agreed. Me either!”

She wipes more sweat from her face and I lift away from the hood, reaching out my hand to her. “Let’s sit inside, out of the sun.”

She takes my hand and I help her down.

Two hours later, the tow truck still hasn’t showed up and it’s starting to get dark. Looks like we’ll get to watch the sunset together over the barren Texas landscape.

“I knew it,” Camryn says. “What the hell is it with the tow trucks?”

And just when she says that, a set of blinding headlights comes down the highway toward us. Overly relieved, we get out to meet him and the first thing I notice is the same thing Camryn notices. The guy could be Billy Frank’s doppelgänger. She and I glance at each other, but we don’t comment out loud.

“You need a tow or a tire?” he asks, thumbing the straps of his denim overalls.

“Just the tire,” I say as I follow him around to the back of his truck.

“Well, I don’ have much time to stay here while ya change it,” he says and then spits chewing tobacco on the road. “You two’ll be all right?”

“Yeah, we’ll be fine,” I say. “But wait one second.” I hold up my finger and lean into the car to turn the key. When the engine starts without a problem, I shut it off and walk back over to him. “Just wanted to make sure it started.”

I pay the doppelgänger and watch his truck’s brake lights fade into the darkening horizon as he drives away. When I walk back to the car where I left the tire, I’m shocked as hell to see Camryn already lifting the car up with the jack.

“Hell yeah, that’s my girl!”

She smiles up at me, but keeps on working at it, that blonde braid draped over one shoulder.

“It’s not so difficult,” she says, now rolling the new tire over after managing to get the lug nuts off the old one by herself. I think I’m getting a hard-on. No, wait, I’ve definitely got a hard-on.

“No, it really isn’t,” I finally reply, my smile getting bigger.

Several minutes later, she’s letting the car back down and tossing the jack into the trunk. I lift the old tire for her and throw it back there, too.

We get inside and just sit here.

It’s so quiet. Enormous streaks of pinkish-purple and blue cirrus clouds are cluttered together in the sky, stretching far over the horizon. As the heat of the day wears off, the mild breeze of approaching nightfall funnels through the opened car windows. The sunset is beautiful. Honestly, I’ve never paid much attention to one before. Maybe it’s the company.

And I’m not sure what’s happening right now between us, but whatever it is, we’re so synced with each other that we both share it. I look at her. She looks at me.

“Are you ready to go back?” I ask.

“Yeah.” She pauses, looking toward the windshield, lost in thought. Then she turns back to me, more sure now than she was just seconds ago. “Yeah, I think I’m ready to go home.” She smiles.

And for the first time since I left Galveston on my own that day, or when Camryn boarded that bus in Raleigh that night, we finally feel… fulfilled.

Camryn

I guess we really did come full circle. But I have to say, now that we’re finally back in Galveston after seven months, it feels different this time. I’m not worried about being here, or afraid that mine and Andrew’s time together is going to end. I’m not waiting for a medical tragedy to rear its ugly head at any given moment. It feels good to be here. And as we pull into the parking area of his apartment complex, I feel a sense of satisfaction. I can even picture myself living here. But then again, I can also picture myself living in Raleigh, too. I guess what this means is that maybe we are ready to settle down. Just for a little while. Never forever, like I told Andrew before, but long enough that we can recuperate from being on the road.

Andrew agrees. “Yeah,” he says grabbing our bags from the backseat. “Y’know what?” He drops the bags back in the same place and looks over the top of the roof at me.

“What?” I ask curiously.

His eyes are smiling. “You’re right about not wanting to be on the road so long that we get tired of it, or staying fixed in one place for too long for the same reason.” He pauses and stretches his arms over the roof of the car. “Maybe if we only travel in the spring or summer, leave the fall and winter for living at home and doing the family thing during the holidays—my mom was pretty upset that we didn’t spend Christmas or Thanksgiving with her.”

I nod. “That’s a good idea. And since it sucks traveling when it’s cold, that makes total sense.”

We just stare at each other over the roof of the car for a long moment until I interrupt all of the gear-churning inside our heads and say, “Well, get the bags. We can talk about it inside. You need to check on Georgia.”

“Ah, Georgia’s fine,” he says, leaning over inside the backseat again. “My mom’s been watering her.”

I grab the guitars and my purse. When we enter Andrew’s apartment, it smells exactly like it did the first time I ever came here: vacant. And just like Andrew said, Georgia is alive and well.

I practically fall onto the couch, exhausted, hanging my legs over the arm at the knees.

“But the next place we go,” Andrew says as he passes the back of the couch, “will be far away from here.” I hear his keys hit the top of the counter in the kitchen.

I rise up and call out, “How far?”

“Europe, South America,” he says with a big grin as he reenters the living room. “You said you’d like to see Italy and Brazil and all of those places. I say we pick one and go there next.”

A shot of energy zips through my body. I stand up and look at him, so excited right now about the prospect that I can hardly contain it. “Seriously?”

He nods with a giant, close-lipped smile. “Hell, staying true to tradition, we could even write down all of the places we want to see on little strips of paper, drop them in a hat and pick one at random.”

I squeal. I actually squeal! My hands come up vertically against my chest. “That’s perfect, Andrew!”

He sits down on the couch now, propping both feet up on the coffee table, his knees bent. I can’t sit down. I stay right where I’m at and just stare down at his smiling face.

“Of course, we’ve got to keep the money flowing,” he says. “We’ve still got plenty in the bank, but traveling out of the country will definitely drain it quicker.”

“I can’t wait to get a job,” I say, and that comment stimulates my memory. “Andrew, you told me before to be completely honest with you about where I’d rather live.”

That gets his attention. “Where do you want to live?”

I contemplate it for a moment and answer, “For now, I think Raleigh, but only because I’d like to be where Natalie and my mom are, and because I know I can easily get a job where Natalie works. Her boss really seemed to like me and told me to fill out an application and—”

Andrew stops me. “You don’t have to explain your reasons.” He reaches out for me and I sit on his lap, facing him. I didn’t realize I was babbling nervously. I just don’t want him to feel obligated.

He smiles at me and locks his fingers together behind my waist. “My question,” he says, “is what exactly do you mean by ‘for now’?”

“Well… that’s the hard part,” I say.

He tilts his head slightly to one side, looking at me curiously, his dimples barely visible in his cheeks.

Eventually, I just come out with it, “I don’t think we should spend all of the money on a house because I don’t want to stay there forever. And besides, if we do that, we won’t have as much money to fall back on when we want to go to Europe or wherever, and working minimum-wage jobs won’t help us save much.”

He gives me a sidelong glance. “Wait. I hope you don’t want us to live in your mom’s house. We need our privacy. I want to be able to bend your sweet little ass over the coffee table whenever I want.”

I laugh and squeeze my thighs around his playfully. “You are so bad!” I say. “But no, I definitely don’t want to live with my mom.”

“Well, if you don’t want to buy a house and you don’t want to live with your mom, the only thing left is renting, and that drains a lot of money, too.”

I feel embarrassed, because it’s to the point where I have to talk about Andrew’s money as though it’s mine also, which I doubt I’ll ever get used to.

I look away from his eyes. “Remember when you said we could get a little house somewhere?”

“Yeah,” he says, and his eyes are getting brighter, as though he knows what I’m going to say already.

“Well, we could maybe pay cash for a very small house or a condo, just big enough for us… I don’t know, something cheap but decent, and still have a lot left over to keep in the bank for our trips. We won’t have rent, and all we’ll have to pay every month are utilities and things like that, which we can do from working and from playing gigs but never take from our savings.”

Why is he smiling like the Cheshire cat?!

I feel my head fall in between my shoulders, my face getting hot. “What’s so funny?!” I ask, pressing my palms against his chest and trying not to laugh.

“Nothing’s funny. I just like it that you’ve finally realized that what’s mine is yours.” He tightens his fingers around my waist.

“Whatever,” I say, trying to conceal the blush in my cheeks, pretending to be offended.

“Hey,” he says, shaking my hips, “don’t do that—just finish what you were saying.”

After a long pause, I say, “And when we leave to go wherever that piece of paper in the hat tells us to, we can get Natalie to housesit. Or!” I point upward. “When we finally find that peaceful place on the beach that you dreamed about and want to live there, we can either sell our house in Raleigh or rent it out to draw in extra income. Maybe even rent it to Natalie and Blake!”

I can tell there’s something going on inside his mind. His smile is still soft and he never takes his eyes off me. But he’s so quiet until finally he breaks the silence and says, “It sounds like you’ve put a lot of thought into this. How long did it take you to figure all of that out?”

Only right now do I realize that it’s been long enough. I think back to the day when I started trying to piece together our future, when I officially had it in my head that I did want to settle down and that I was tired of being on the road.

Andrew waits patiently for me to answer, always with soft and thoughtful eyes, his way of constantly reminding me that nothing I can say to him is going to create any negativity between us.

“It was on the highway after we left Mobile,” I say. “When I first told you that I wanted to see Italy and France and Brazil one day. When I said I never wanted to settle down forever. From that night on, I was determined to figure it out. How we would pull everything off.” My gaze strays. “I broke the rules and planned it all out.”

He leans forward and kisses my lips.

“Sometimes planning is necessary,” he says. “You did a good job. I think the whole plan is perfect.” And then he crushes me against him, kissing me passionately.

When the kiss breaks, I gaze at him for a moment, his face in my hands. “But I want to marry you here,” I say, and his eyes brighten. “I don’t want your mom to feel left out, y’know? She’s really the only reason I feel bad about wanting to move to Raleigh. And I feel even worse that she was planning that baby shower and we never got—”

“She’ll like that,” he says, stopping me before I start babbling again. “I definitely do.”

He kisses me again.

Andrew

I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day. The weather is perfect. The plans to get married that we didn’t make all fell perfectly into place. I called my mom up yesterday and told her meet us on the beach on Galveston Island. She made it on time, without having any idea why we asked her to be here.

I raise my hand above me when I see her, waving her toward us, and the second she sees us, she knows. Her face breaks out into the biggest smile, and it’s easily contagious.

“Oh, you two,” my mom says, stepping up to us, “I can’t believe you’re finally doing this. I’m just… I’m so…” Tears roll down her face and she reaches up to wipe them away, laughing and crying at the same time.

Camryn, barefoot and dressed in that ivory vintage gown she found at the flea market, wraps her arms around my mom and hugs her.

“Oh, Marna, please don’t cry,” she says, though I think it’s more of a plea because seeing my mom cry is choking Camryn up.

“Is anyone else coming?” my mom asks when she pulls away.

“You’re our exclusive guest of honor,” I say proudly.

“Yeah,” Camryn adds, “it’s just you and the reverend here.”

My mom moves around us to give Reverend Reed a hug, too. She has been attending his church for nine years—tried to get me to go a hundred times, but I’m just not the church type. But I thought who better to ask to marry us?

And while Reverend Reed is standing in front of us on the beach, holding his worn Bible in his hands and saying a few words, all I can see or hear is Camryn standing in front of me with her hands in mine. The breeze combs through her loose strands of hair, free from that golden braid over her shoulder that I love so much. I love her smile, her blue eyes, and her soft skin. I want to kiss her now and get it over with. I press my fingers gently against the tops of her hands and pull her a little closer. The wind whips through the long fabric of her dress, pushing it against her hourglass form. I hold in my smile when I notice a piece of hair fly into her mouth. She tries to covertly work it out with her tongue without drawing attention to herself.

Knowing she doesn’t want to create any kind of interruption, even for something as simple as this, I reach up and move the hair away for her.

I feel like we’re the only two people in the world.

When it’s time to say our vows, I know that neither one of us wrote anything down or had much time to think about what we wanted to say. And so pretty much the same way we tend to do everything, we just do it.

I grip her hands tighter between us and say, “Camryn, you are the other half of my soul, and I will love you today and every day for the rest of our lives. I promise that if you ever forget me, I’ll read to you like Noah read to Allie. I promise that when we get old and our bones hurt, that we’ll never sleep in separate rooms, and that if you die before me, I’ll make sure you’re buried in that dress. I promise to haunt you like Sam haunted Molly.” Her eyes are beginning to water. I caress the insides of her palms with my thumbs. “I promise that we’ll never wake up one day years from now wondering why we wasted our lives away by doing nothing, and that no matter what hardships befall us, I’ll always, always, be right here with you. I promise to be spontaneous, to always turn down the music when you’re asleep, and to sing about raisins when you’re sad. I promise to always love you no matter where we are in the world, or in our lives. Because you’re the other half of me that I know I can never live without.”

Tears pour from her eyes. It takes her a second to gather her composure.

And then she says, “Andrew, I promise never to leave you on life support and let you suffer when I know in my heart that your life is spent. I promise that if you’re ever lost or missing that I will… never stop looking for you. Ever.” This just makes me smile. “I promise that when you die, I’ll make sure that “Dust in the Wind” is played at your funeral and to never bury you where it’s cold. I promise to always tell you everything no matter how ashamed or guilty I feel, and to trust you when you ask me to do something because I know that everything you do has a purpose. I promise to be by your side always and to never let you face anything alone. I promise to love you forever in this life and wherever we go in the afterlife, because I know I can’t go on in any life unless you’re in it too.”

Pastor Reed says to me, “Do you, Andrew Parrish, take Camryn Bennett to be your wedded wife, to have and to hold, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, to love and to cherish, from this day forward?”

“I do,” I say and place the wedding ring I bought in Chicago on her finger. She gasps quietly.

Then he turns to Camryn and says, “Do you, Camryn Bennett, take Andrew Parrish to be your wedded husband, to have and to hold, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, to love and to cherish, from this day forward?”

“I do.”

Finally, I hand her my ring, because I’ve been hiding them both from her until this very moment, and she slides it on my finger. Pastor Reed finishes up, including those anticipated seven words—“I now pronounce you husband and wife”—and then he gives me permission to kiss my bride. It’s all we’ve wanted to do since the ceremony started, and now that we can, we find ourselves just staring at one another, lost in each other’s eyes, seeing each other in a different light, one so much brighter than we’ve seen it since the day we met in Kansas on that bus. I feel my eyes beginning to sting, and I scoop her up into my arms and crush my mouth over hers. She sobs into our kiss and I squeeze her around her back, lifting her bare feet completely from the sand and I spin her around. My mom is bawling like a baby. I feel like I might never stop smiling.

Camryn is my wife.

Camryn

I just became Camryn Parrish. I can’t wrap my head around the emotions that I feel. I’m crying, but kind of laughing inside at the same time. I feel excited, yet I feel anxious. I look down again at this ring he just slid on my finger, and I know he spent a lot of money on it. Then I glance at his ring, almost identical to mine though it’s a masculine version, and I just can’t be mad at him for them. I just can’t. I hear Marna sobbing behind me, and I can’t help but walk over and hug her again.

“Welcome to the family,” she says, her voice shuddering.

“Thank you.” I smile and wipe my tears away.

Andrew slips his arm around my waist, and the pastor joins us. Once he and Marna start talking and catching up, Andrew and I slip a few feet away from them, and he can’t stop looking at me. It makes me blush.

“What is it?” I ask.

He shakes his head, his smile glowing. “I love you,” he says, and it just makes me want to cry again, but I manage to keep it together.

“I love you, too.”

We spend our honeymoon at our apartment, very untraditionally. Because we want to wait until our first out-of-the-country trip to do a real honeymoon.

“Where do you think it’ll be?” he asks.

We’re sitting outside in two lawn chairs, having a beer and listening to the live music playing on the beach or in the park, in the distance somewhere.

“I don’t know,” I say and take a drink from the bottle. “Want to make a bet on it?”

Andrew rubs his bottom lip with the pad of his thumb. “Hmmm.” He contemplates it, takes another swig of his beer, and then says, “I think the first one we pull out of that hat will be…” he purses his lips “… Brazil.”

“Brazil, huh? Nice one. But I don’t know—I have this weird feeling it’ll be something more like Italy.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

We both take a swig at the same time.

“Maybe we should make some kind of bet,” he says, the dimple on the right side of his cheek deepening.

“A bet, huh? Sure, I’m in.”

“All right, if it’s Brazil, then you have to go with me to the beach, true Rio de Janeiro style.” His grin is wicked.

It takes me a minute to realize what he’s talking about, and when it dawns on me, I feel the night air hit my teeth as my mouth falls open. “No. Way!”

Andrew laughs.

“I’m not prancing around on a public beach topless!”

He throws his head back and laughs louder. “No, I don’t think they really do that over there, babe,” he says. “But I mean you have to wear one of those Brazilian bikinis. None of that I’m-self-conscious shit and cover up like you did in Florida. You’ve got a bangin’ body.” He takes another swig and sets the bottle down on the table in front of us.

I ponder it for a moment, chewing on the inside of my mouth. “Deal,” I say.

Looking a little surprised that I agreed to it so easily, he nods.

“And if it’s Italy,” I say with a smirk of my own, “you have to serenade me on the Spanish Steps… in the native language.” I cross one leg over the other. I knew that last part would trip his sexy ass up.

“You can’t be serious,” he argues. “How the hell am I gonna pull that off?”

“I dunno,” I say. “I guess if I win, you’ll have to figure it out.”

He shakes his head and presses one side of his mouth into a hard line. “Fine. It’s a deal.”

34

Raleigh, North Carolina—June

“Surprise!” several voices shout when I walk into my and Andrew’s new house.

Actually surprised, I gasp and my hand flies to my chest. Natalie is front and center, with Blake beside her. My friends from my favorite Starbucks and Blake’s sister, Sarah, who I met two weeks ago when Andrew and I arrived back in town, are all here.

“Wow, what’s the occasion?” I ask, still trying to catch my breath a little because they scared the crap out of me. I turn my head to look at Andrew. He’s grinning, so it’s obvious he had something to do with it.

Natalie, now with auburn highlights in her hair, pulls me into a hug. “It’s your official welcome-home party.” She smirks at me and glances at Andrew. “Why do you think I’ve been acting so who-the-hell-cares-she’s-back the past few days?”

“You haven’t been acting like that,” I say.

“OK, maybe not that noticeably,” she says, “but come on, Cam, couldn’t you tell I was holding something in?”

I guess she does have a point, now that I think about it. She has seemed happy that I’m home, but she hasn’t been overjoyed like she would normally be. I guess I’ve been assuming that maybe Blake had finally tamed her some.

I turn to Andrew again. “But we don’t even have any furniture.”

“Oh yes you do!” Natalie says, grabbing my wrist.

She drags me into the living room, where eight beanbag chairs are placed randomly on the floor. In the center of the room are four red milk crates pressed together with a flat piece of lumber on top, which I’m assuming is the coffee table. The electricity isn’t even on yet, but the “coffee table” holds three unlit candles sitting inside the lids from cookie tins, ready and waiting for when night falls several hours from now.

I just laugh. “I love this!” I say to Andrew. “I say we forget about the furniture altogether and stick with the retro beanbag theme!” I’m totally kidding, and Andrew knows it.

He plops down on the nearest beanbag and splays his legs out onto the floor, leaning back into the cushioning vinyl. “I can manage with these, but we’ll definitely need our bed.” I sit down in the one next to him and get comfortable. Everybody else follows suit as Natalie and Blake head into the kitchen area.

Andrew and I found this small house five days after we got here. Wanting out of my mom’s house as soon as humanly possible, he spent hours on the Internet and looked at real estate magazines even while I was slacking off and just relaxing after the long drive from Galveston. I pretty much just let Andrew take the house-hunting thing and run with it. He’d show me pictures, and I’d give my opinion. But this house was perfect. It was the third one we looked at physically (and I really don’t think his love for it had anything to do with accidently seeing my mom half-naked when she thought we’d left for the day). It was priced great because the sellers, who already moved out four months ago, wanted to sell it and get it over with. We ended up buying it for twenty thousand less than what it’s worth, and we agreed that the sellers didn’t need to make any repairs before closing. Since we were cash buyers, everything happened really fast.

Today is officially our first day as its new owners.

We brought a lot of things with us from Galveston, rented a small U-Haul trailer to tow behind us, which we stuffed full of whatever we could fit. But we’ll have to go back soon for the furniture. Unfortunately, Andrew is still adamant about keeping his dad’s old, smelly chair, but he promised to get it cleaned. And he’d better!

Natalie and Blake walk back into the room, each holding three beer bottles, which they start to pass out.

“Thanks, but none for me,” I say.

Natalie looks heartbroken, sticking out her bottom lip as she stares down at me. She’s wearing a tight white shirt that makes her boobs stand out.

“I’m played out on beer for at least a week, Nat,” I say.

She wrinkles her nose but then shrugs and says, “More for me!”

After Blake hands Andrew his beer, he goes to sit down on the only beanbag left, but Natalie races and beats him to it. So, he sits on top of her. While they’re playing around, Natalie lets out this weird peal of laughter, and I glance over to see the look on Andrew’s face.

“Shenzi,” he whispers and shakes his head with the beer bottle at his lips.

I laugh under my breath, knowing now what Andrew meant the first time he called her that. I googled the name shortly after and found out it refers to the mouthy hyena in The Lion King.

“Now, you promised to tell me about your road trip,” Natalie says, now sitting between Blake’s legs on the beanbag.

Everybody looks over at me and Andrew.

“I’ve told you stuff already, Nat.”

“Yeah, but you haven’t told us anything,” says Lea, my friend who works at Starbucks.

Alicia, who works with her, adds, “I went on a road trip with my mom and my brother once, but I’m sure it wasn’t anything like yours.”

“And you still haven’t filled me in on what happened in Florida,” Natalie says. She takes a drink of her beer and then sets it down beside her on the floor, afterward resting her arms over Blake’s legs. Blake kisses the side of her neck.

I cringe inside, just thinking about Florida, but I realize it’s because Andrew would really be the one of us who might be embarrassed about what happened. For a second, I can’t even make eye contact with him because I feel guilty for bringing it up to Natalie at all. I didn’t give her any details, just mentioned that something really messed up happened while we were there.

When I do meet Andrew’s eyes, I can tell he’s not mad at me. He winks and sets his beer on the floor beside him, too.

“Florida,” he says, to my surprise. “That was probably the worst part of our trip, if not also the strangest—and yet, somehow parts of it I didn’t mind so much.”

I have no idea where he’s going with this.

Everyone is looking right at Andrew now, especially Natalie, whose eyes are bugged out with anticipation.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 580