Wallflower Ink

Chapter 40

· Jace ·

I hold her hand as the plane clears the runway then noses upward toward its destination of fourteen thousand feet. She's scared, her fingers gripping mine nearly as tightly as her other hand grips the bench we sit on. Even after everything she's told me, she's still the same Merri, it seems. When I cut away her terrible confession, she's still that boldly terrified woman who'd walked into my shop weeks ago and nearly taken my breath away.

As the plane continues to climb I wonder to myself: does all that other stuff really even matter? It's been here all along, I just hadn't know about it. What makes anything different now that I do?

The simple answer is: nothing.

Nothing has changed, except for my newly acquired knowledge of why she's tried to so hard push me away. And why she'd thought we couldn't be together. Isn't what I've wanted all along? To knock down the barrier she'd built between us?

I rub my thumb lightly along hers then meet her eyes when she looks up at me. This is Merri, I think as I watch the familiar shadows swim through those deep pools of green. This is the same woman who'd never done anything spontaneous. The same woman I'd played in the mud with like a little kid. The same woman who saved my sister, saved my business, and saved my heart when it had nearly been crushed by the weight of my own problems.

She is the woman who'd cried in my arms, who'd given me the most tender kiss I've ever known, who'd given with all her heart, despite the consequences to her own. This is Merri, and I want to be with her still.

I turn slightly toward her then cup her face in my free hand. When she closes her eyes, I bend down and kiss her tenderly then pull her against me.

"I don't want to be your friend," I repeat the words I'd said last night. Her arm slips around me then clutches at me tightly as I continue. "I still want more than that with you, if you'll have me."

As the plane levels out, I pull away and look down into her wide eyes. I smile at her as I speak over the droning of the engines.

"I am in love with you, Merri Lonán. I may have lost sight of that for just a little while today, but it never left."

Tears well up in her eyes and as she opens her mouth to speak, one of the instructors interrupts her. I turn to look at him and I know our tender moment is over. This is it. We are readying to jump.

My heart lurches in my chest. Have I done enough? Have I said the right things? I told her what's in my heart, the things that even the truths she'd confessed could not drive away. But is it enough to make her change her mind?

My first conversation with Daryl comes back to me in that moment, the conversation I'd had with him in the back yard when he and Mrs. Hallard had unintentionally met me for the first time. "You might change her mind about something if you work hard enough at it for a few years ..." he had said. But I hadn't had years, I'd only had a few brief moments. Will they be enough to sway her decision?

God, I hope so.

As the students all begin to rise and move toward their respective instructors, it physically pains me to let her hand go.

"Merri," I call out and when she looks back at me, I slowly lift my hand to my chest to cover the center buckle of my own harness. "If you fall, I fall."