I’d fallen in love with Connor the same way I’d fallen into friendship with him. Like an airplane landing on a runway. Going a million miles an hour at first before settling into a slow glide, and finally, eventually, reaching the right place at the right time and just being there. Grounded, steady, homebound.
I got that now, I really and truly did, but what I didn’t understand was the way he looked at me on the beach.
One minute it was like all that love I feared was going to break us was filling me up instead. Making me bold and helping me to see clearly. And the next, Con was telling me he was leaving. I hardly had time to process what I was feeling before it was all being ripped away from me like some kind of gotcha prank and I still couldn’t see why. Had he really gotten tired of me directly after he had his hands down my pants? And did I really have to ask that question? I knew Con, and that couldn’t be the case. But then again I knew nothing for sure that he wouldn’t tell me.
Right now the only thing I had to go off were the last words he’d said to me on the beach. The last words that mattered at least.
I can’t fucking take this anymore.
I’m leaving.
Not to mention, don't call, don't text, don’t visit in so many unsaid words. So no matter how true his declarations of me being his person or being everything to him were at one time, the same could be said about those last words at the beach. And I would never know for sure unless he told me.
So I had to bring him home.
Once a lover of a full ten hours of sleep, lately I was lucky if I was getting four. It was about two in the morning when my spinning thoughts finally brought me to my decision to just go for it. I’d build my bridge, and if Connor wanted to cross it, it would be up to him. If he didn’t, then I guess…I guess I’d have to love him as unselfishly as he’d loved me for all this time. Either way, I was done with waiting around.
“Hello?” a groggy, confused voice said into the receiver from the other line.
“Are you sleeping?” I asked.
“Of course I’m sleeping, brat. It’s two in the morning,” Ferg grumbled.
“Aren’t you like an insomniac or something?”
“Why are you whispering?” she asked.
“Isn’t Ox sleeping?”
Shuffling from the other line indicated that she was getting up and moving to another room, the bathroom from the sounds of the fan. After the distinct sound of a door closing I heard her in my ear with a warning tone cutting through her sleepiness. “Yes, I have a form of insomnia and yes he’s sleeping. He doesn’t ever sleep until I do, so you better make this fast before he wakes up.”
“Okay,” I said, deciding not to get into the details. “Real quick. You know the big cliffs in North Seaside, the really popular ones?”
“Mhmm,” she groaned as if she wished she was doing anything else.
“What’s the name of them?”
“Um,” she thought about it for a second. “Froth’s Edge, I think.”
“Is that the big one or the little one?”
She paused, probably wondering for the first time why I knew about a cliff in her part of Seaside in the first place. “Big—Why do you need to know this all of a sudden, Ceci?”
“What’s the little one called, Ferg?” I asked, feeling this twinge of urgency prick me. Something about this just felt right.
“Spindrift,” she said after a while. “Spindrift Drop or something like that.”
“Thank you! You're the best, go back to sleep alright,” I said.
“Yeah, thanks,” she huffed a little humorlessly, but she didn’t hang up right away. “Hey, Ceci?”
“Yeah?”
“You get some sleep too, alright.”
“I’ll try,” I said, even though I knew how unlikely that was until a certain someone came home.
Chapter Forty-five
