Sweet Cheeks(43)

Funnily enough, the entire time I’m on my walk, I’m thinking of him.





“This place is everything I’d imagined it would be,” I murmur more to myself than to Hayes.

“When you planned your wedding?”

I bristle, but deserve the straightforward question considering we are in the very hotel I had spent hours ruminating over for my wedding plans. I glance over to where he sits beside me at the hotel’s outdoor bar. The drinks are stiff and the food is westernized but it feels good to be out and about in the hotel. Especially because I can enjoy the resort without feeling like I’m being watched since the entire wedding party is supposedly playing golf or at the salon. At least they’re supposed to be according to the handy itinerary on the villa’s kitchen counter.

“Yeah, but there was more to my decision to come here than just wanting a destination wedding. This was one of my mom’s dream vacations. It was always their ‘next trip’ but it never happened. Money got tight. They had Ryder and me. Then came saving for college for us. They just kept putting it off and said they’d go after they retired. . .” My voice fades off, the memories so poignant and real all these years later.

“But they never made it to retirement.” Hayes’s voice is quiet, empathetic as he finishes the phrase for me. He places a hand on top of mine and squeezes it in support. “They were the best. Always fair. So full of love but also strict when they needed to be. Everything I wanted my parents to be like but weren’t. I think of them often.”

“They loved you, too, you know.” It’s important he knows that.

He nods his head as my heart hurts at the thought of them. I miss them every day but something about being here with Hayes—in the place they always wanted to visit—makes it a bit more poignant. And I think of how pleased they’d probably be, knowing I came here with Hayes. Especially since my mom used to always tell me one day I was going to marry that boy. Even after he left when she was nursing my broken heart, she was his biggest cheerleader telling me he was just off growing up but that he’d come back for me someday.

The smile is bittersweet. The memory even more so. The void in my heart from their absence a permanent fixture but feeling a little less empty when I look at Hayes.

I clear the emotion from my throat. “There were so many things they put off doing, waited for, or said they never had the chance to do once they had kids and I . . . shit, I don’t know, Hayes . . . I don’t want to be that way or feel like they did, and never fulfill the things I dream of doing. I don’t want to be in the car on the way to dinner and get hit by a drunk driver and as I die, realize I never knew what those things I wanted to do felt like.”

“I can understand that. Hell, anyone can, Saylor.”

It feels like emotion after emotion is being churned up today and my parents’ death is just the next thing to add to it. The memories hit me like photographs on a reel: the policemen at the door; my screams when I fought Ryder’s arms as he tried to comfort me, when really, he had no comfort to give; the two caskets side by side lowered slowly into the ground. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. The constant cloud of inconsolable grief.

And then, meeting Mitch at a mutual friend’s party seven months later. He was kind, paid attention to me, and took me places I’d never been before. Places that held no memories of my parents when everywhere else I went was flooded with them. Those things combined with the positive feelings he evoked in me slowly overshadowed the grief that had owned me.

Is that why I stayed with Mitch for so long? Because he took the pain away—more like put it on a backburner—and helped me slowly crawl out of the haze of grief? Did a part of me—the non-rational part of me—fear if there was no Mitch, that the pain might return?

Had he ever really known the real me? Was it once I felt more like myself—less meek and agreeable—that things started going downhill?

The thought is ludicrous, and yet it strikes me to the core. Love and obligation are two different things, Saylor. Not one and the same.

“Did I lose you?” Hayes’s voice breaks through the fog of my thoughts.

I shake my head, clear my mind. “I’m sorry. Just thinking about them. What were you saying?”

His smile is cautiously sympathetic while his eyes search mine to make sure I’m okay. “All I said was I can understand your need to actively chase your dreams.”

“No, I don’t think you can. It’s maddening.” It’s an unfair statement to make to him and yet I appreciate the fact he doesn’t argue it. “They were so young and had so much life left to live, and yet I feel like they partly gave up on their dreams and hopes when they married, and I don’t want to do that. Be that. Regret the chances I never took.” I recall my mom’s repeated comments about what she could have done—her dream career as a dancer on Broadway and how marriage and kids derailed that. A good derailment but a jump off the tracks nonetheless. I think of my dad and the baseball draft he missed out on because he thought the best thing to do for his family would be to be home and work a steady nine-to-five.

Missed opportunities. Dreams put on hold. Completely honorable decisions on their part. Ones that I benefitted from. A life still great by any standards lived in their perfect marriage but the theme of what-if always a constant undertone.