Someone Else's Love Story (42 page)

Authors: Joshilyn Jackson

BOOK: Someone Else's Love Story

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Once I got back home, up on the mountain, I pacified Mimmy as much as was possible. I didn’t bother with my room. I went to Natty’s and wedged myself into my sleeping son’s twin bed. I fell to deep-down sleeping almost instantly, breathing in the smell of his apple-clean shampoo.

W
hen I wake up, it’s past nine.

I don’t call Walcott until after I have showered and dressed and eaten Mimmy’s fluffy, buttered pancakes with Natty while Mimmy ate some fruit. I wait until Natty has gone with Mimmy to the candy shop, to see the pretty girls in their sash dresses making fudge and dipping Oreos in chocolate like I used to do.

He answers his cell by saying my name, and his voice is very worried. “Shandi? Where have you been?”

“I’m home at Mimmy’s. It’s a long story,” I tell him. “Can you meet me at the halfway place?”

He knows right where I mean.

“Now?” he says.

“Yes,” I tell him. “Now.”

My hair is down, still damp around my shoulders. I haven’t bothered to put makeup on. My face is just my face.

I start walking through the woods to this grassy place we know, too big to be a clearing, but not quite a meadow, either. It lies between our house and his momses’ B and B. The path is sloped, but not too steep, winding me in
S
shapes up the mountain toward him. Blackberry brambles line this path, but most of the fruit is gone here at the end of summer. There are a few left, dull black and fat and almost, almost overripe. I pick and eat them as I walk, though I have no way to wash them. I let them stain my mouth with dirty sweetness.

When I break out of the woods, I see Walcott coming toward me.

I walk toward him across the gold late-summer grass, and my body is alive underneath me. Alive and wholly mine, with the heat of all the sun caught in my skin. I am as fat and ripe as one of those late-summer berries. I am juicy and bursting under all my skin. I go toward him slow; no need to hurry through this heat. No need to hurry toward knowing when my body feels as if it may have already decided. He is smiling, and as I come close he sees my face and his smile changes and his eyes change. He slows down, too. His spine straightens and he is Walcott, long and tall, coming toward me in a grassy place too small to be a meadow.

He knows me so well. I don’t have to say it. Not any of it. Not yet. There will be time for it later. For now, it is enough. It is enough and it is easy. Easy to walk the last few steps between us. Easy and so beautiful to step into his arms.

He kisses me. He kisses me.

I kiss him back.

About the Author

JOSHILYN JACKSON is the
New York Times
bestselling author of six novels, including
gods in Alabama
and
A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages. A former actor, Jackson is also an award-winning audiobook narrator. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband and their two children.

www.JoshilynJackson.com

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Credits

Jacket design and illustration by Mary Schuck

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

SOMEONE ELSE’S LOVE STORY.
Copyright © 2013 by Joshilyn Jackson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-210565-3

EPub Edition DECEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780062105677

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