Page 71 of The Rest is History
“How did that make you feel?”
“Are you asking if I felt like a second option?”
“Yes.”
“No. Never. Asher’s life before me meant a lot to him. I could never judge what we have by what he had before me. Even now, Reece, I know he loves you. I could never think of that kind of love as something to forget. I would never do that to him.”
“What if you hadn’t felt any attraction to me?”
“The fact would’ve still remained. Asher would still always love you, and it would still have been okay. The only difference is that he would’ve respected our love and the life that we share enough to remain in the present with me.”
“None of this is believable,” Reece says. “I mean, are you saying people can just go around getting married and still be hung up on their exes?”
“People leave old lives behind. Sometimes, because they have to. That doesn’t mean that the life they build afterward is any less valid.”
Reece nods. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. For me it was different. I got married too, but my heart was always with Asher.”
“Life is complicated. Love is complicated. We can all just do our best to make sense of it. This – the way things played out with us – is our complicated. We don’t have to compare it to anyone else’s. Nobody starts out having all the answers. We’ll figure it out as we go along. But for me it’s also simple. I met the love of my life when I was twenty-one. Married him and lived happily ever after. Then, I looked at his ex-boyfriend one day, and I was fucked. And I guess the rest is history.”
He laughs. “You were fucked?”
“So fucked, Reece,” I murmur. “You’re so lovely it makes my heart ache with happiness to think that we have a shot at making something as crazy as this work.”
“You’re amazing, Sawyer,” he says.
I laugh. “Let’s hear you say that after you’ve lived with me for a month.”
He’s so curious. His questions keep coming. “What do you guys fight about?”
I laugh. “Not much. Maybe when I watch an episode of a series we started before him.”
“So, like no actual fights? Like you don’t get mad and not talk to each other for days?”
I shake my head. “No. I love him. I don’t want to fight with him. And I think he feels the same. It’s not that hard, you know.”
He nods. “We never fought, too, when we were together. You know, before.”
I almost kiss him for how free he seems, talking about all of this. “Yeah. So, you know how easy it is to live with Ash.”
Chapter 32
Asher
I’m visiting my mother today.
As I drive, I consider how lucky I am to be given a chance to love the two people who mean the most to me in the world. Those are not opportunities people get in life. But who am I to complain when I get to potentially have the very best happily-ever-after, and one I never, ever considered.
My mother’s home is just outside Linksfield. She refuses to leave. She’s too old to be moving around, she says every single time I beg her to move closer to town. “At least so you're closer to the hospital if anything happens in the middle of the night,” I’ve said on several occasions.
I pull up to her quaint little house, with the white picket fence and a well-maintained garden in front. The walkway to the front door is covered in cobblestone and as I swing open the small white gate at the beginning of the path, my mother’s curtain moves. Her sweet face peeks through the curtain, and I have to laugh at the glee in her face when she spots me.
Her door swings open even before I reach the steps. Her thin frame almost glides down the steps and when she takes me in her arms, you’d never guess she weighs just a little more than a hundred pounds. My mother’s hugs are iron and love and an untouchable joy. In the old days, Reece got many more hugs than me. She said he needed them, and she was right, and Reece never declined a single one.
“Ohhhh, I’ve been waiting all month to see you.” She pinches my cheeks, and then kisses the spot that is now likely red from her affection.
I laugh. “Good to see you, Mom.”
She takes my hand in hers and leads me up to the house. Inside, she immediately whips up a cup of coffee, a piece of cake, some of her famous homemade pecan pie and a bowl of spaghetti.
