Summer (Four Seasons #2) (33 page)

It’s really late when I hear a key turning in the door. Electricity sparks through me, snapping at my nerve endings, and I consider ducking and hiding. That would be the most ridiculous thing ever, though, so I simply stand and clasp my hands in front of me, paralyzed by fear. The door swings open and there he is, the shape of his silhouette framed in the doorway, frozen in place as he sees me. I can’t make out the expression on his face; I wish I could. I want to know if he’s happy, or angry, or indifferent altogether, but all I can see is the stillness of his body, the way his shoulders aren’t moving with his breath. The way his hands are motionless by his sides.
 

“
Avery
?” he whispers.
 

I give him a small wave. “Hi.”

I’ve run through this in my head so many times for the past few hours. The past few days, if I’m honest. Ever since I sat down and listened to his sessions on that thumb drive. He’s been wary in some scenarios I’ve imagined. I’ve been angry in the rest. What actually plays out is completely different to anything I’ve imagined, though. Luke drops his jacket on the floor and literally charges into the apartment, sweeping me up in his arms. His mouth comes crashing down onto mine, his hands holding my face while he kisses me with an intensity that threatens to set my whole world on fire.
 

“Don’t say it,” he tells me. “Don’t say a word. I’m not going to let you tell me you don’t want me. I’m a selfish bastard. I’m stupid and I’m broken, but I’m
yours
and you’re
mine
, and I was a fucking fool to ever let you go. So don’t say it. I can’t bear to hear it.” He kisses me again, his eyes full of unshed tears. I’ve never seen him this caught up and fierce about anything before. It makes my throat feel like it’s closing shut. “I love you, Avery. God, I’m so sorry.” He crushes me to him then, holding on to me for dear life, and I can feel his heart tripping like a jackhammer underneath his ribcage. Five minutes must pass before the fire of the moment subsides and it’s replaced by a strange sense of calm. Luke leans back a little, holding my face in his hands so he can study me. “You’re really here? In my apartment?”

 
“I am.”

“You broke in?”

“Kind of.” I shift from one foot to another awkwardly. “Cole picked the lock for me earlier this afternoon.”

Anger flashes across his face. “Cole knew you were here? Cole’s known you were here all…
all fucking night
?”

I nod. “Don’t be mad at him. I asked him not to tell you.”

Luke stares at me for another second, obviously thinking very hard, not sure what to make of me being here all of a sudden. He lets me go—he doesn’t seem to want to—and returns to the entrance of the apartment so he can kick the door closed. He picks up his jacket and then stops three feet in front of me, wringing the leather in his hands. “Why? Why didn’t you come to the concert?”

“I’m sorry, I wanted to, but I…I don’t know. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing you up there on the stage while I was surrounded by all of those people. I wanted to talk to you, and I didn’t want to share you with anyone else when I did. Does that make sense?”

He clenches his jaw. “I don’t know. Maybe. I guess that depends on what you want to talk to me about.”

I reach into my pocket and I take out the thumb drive he gave to me in Breakwater, holding it up for him to see. Luke eyes it nervously for a second, and then looks away, slowly hanging his jacket up on the back of one of the chairs at his small dining table. “You listened to it, then?” he asks.
 

“I did. I listened to all of it.”

“And now you think I’m a psycho, and you’ve come here to personally tell me never to contact you again.”

“No,” I whisper. “I don’t think that. And that’s not why I’m here.”

Luke turns away, placing his hands on the back of the chair, leaning against it. Every single muscle in his body is stiff. “Then what? Why did you come?”

I take a deep breath. “To tell you that I think you’re a fool.”

He nods slowly, sighing. “I know that now.”

“And to tell you that I love you. And to tell you that I hate the fact that you were hurting that much and you felt like you couldn’t tell me.”

He goes still all over again. “You’re…not angry with me?” he says carefully.

“Fuck, yes, I’m angry with you! I’m
so
angry. You should have trusted me. You should have
known
I would have stood by you and done everything I could to try and help you.” I expect him to try and defend himself but instead his shoulders sag.
 

“I know. I fucked up. Big time,” he whispers. He seems completely exhausted. I want to run to him, to let him hold me already—it’s been so long—but first I need him to hear me out.
 

“You
did
fuck up. And you can never do it again. You can never shut me out like that again. Do you have any idea how badly you hurt me?”

“Yes.” He’s gone gray, and his hands are shaking. “And I’ll never be able to forgive myself for it.”

“You can be broken, Luke. You’re allowed to
not
be okay.
I’m
not okay. I’m still so fucked up from what happened with Chloe and my dad, but you taught me to lean on you. You showed me I could rely on you to help me when I needed to. And then when you needed someone, you just fucking left!”

“This was different, Ave,” he says. “This put you in danger. I just…in my head I couldn’t risk it.”

“I think I understand that now, too.”

We both stand in silence for while, staring at each other. He looks afraid, like he’s just waiting for me to tell him that while I do get what he was trying to do, he ended up hurting me too much for me to forgive him anyway. Eventually he speaks. “Cole tell you we were coming back to New York?”

I nod. “He did.”

“So…do you think we might…
fuck
.” He rubs his hands over his face. “Do you think you might want to see me sometime when I’m back there?”

“
Yes
, I want to see you. Damn it, Luke, why do you think I came all the way out here. I fucking love you. I never stopped wanting to see you. It was you who cut me out of your life.”

Surprise washes over his face. “Does that mean…
wait
, does that mean you’re going to give me another shot?”

I kick the toe of my sneaker against the bare floorboards, my cheeks suddenly too hot and prickling. “Well…yeah. I love you. And you love me, despite how backwards you may have things some times.”

“Fuck, Avery.” Luke’s apprehension seems to drop away, falling from him like a weight that was pressing him down into the ground. His back straightens, his shoulders shifting back, and then he’s closing the space between us all over again, except this time he’s not rushing. He walks painfully slowly, his eyes troubled as he pins me with his gaze. “I’m going to move back to New York. I’m going to give you back your key to my apartment. You don’t have to move back in straight away. I just want you to be there whenever you want to. If we need to take this slow, then that’s what we’ll do. I never want to be without you again, beautiful girl. I never want to shut you out of my head. From here on out, we’re a team. I promise I’m going to make you so happy. I’m going to spend the rest of my life figuring out how to make
your
life amazing. Nothing else matters. Not the band. Not the cops. Not Chloe, and definitely not my dead father. It won’t be perfect. We’ll fight, and I’ll make mistakes. I’m sure you will, too. But from this point forward, there’s no more running and hiding. I’m going to love you and take care of you, I swear. I knew you were the most precious thing in my life, Avery, but I had no idea I couldn’t physically exist without you until you weren’t there anymore. I could breathe and I could eat and function, but I wasn’t fucking alive. You
make
me alive.” He kisses me again, and this time it’s deep and powerful, tying us together.

Luke’s always been good at words. Writing them down for songs mostly. I suppose when he stopped using those words to communicate with me, I lost faith in them, though. It was hard to believe anything that he’d said to me before, because how could he leave me the way he did if he loved me so much? Right now, though, here, in this very moment, I know with a deep and unwavering certainty that his words are and always have been true. They come from a deep place inside him. They have to travel up through years worth of pain and trauma, so they get colored with emotion along the way. You can feel that in the way he says things.
 

I’ve never been a forgiving sort of person. It’s always been so easy to hold onto the hurts in this life. Recently, though, I’ve changed. I’ve forgiven Noah. I’ve forgiven my mother for what feels like a lifetime of hurt and disinterest. I’ve forgiven my father—that one took some time. I never really, truly, deep down in my heart believed he was responsible for murdering those people, so I wasn’t forgiving him for that. I was forgiving him for leaving me. It felt selfish to be angry toward him for getting himself killed, especially since he allowed it to happen in order to save me, but I couldn’t help it. For years I felt like he’d abandoned me when I needed him the most.
 

And now…here I am, forgiving Luke for the same thing. I love him so damn much. And he’s right; I could chose to move on without him if I really wanted to. I would eat and breathe and function on some level. I wouldn’t be
alive
, though. I’d be a shell of myself, something hollowed out and impersonal. The sun would have disappeared from my world, and it might be that in time I would find something similar to light me up, but nothing would ever shine so brightly.

“Let me love you, Avery,” Luke whispers. “Let me show you how amazing our life together will be.” Pressing his lips against my forehead, my senses are filled with him—his smell, his warmth, the soft lull of his beautiful voice. The voice that has sung so often to me since we started this journey.
 

“Okay,” I whisper back. “Okay, let’s have our amazing life. Show me. I want to experience it all.”

EPILOGUE

LUKE

Tom Wolfe said a person would belong in New York in five minutes as much as they ever would in five years. I felt that way the moment I arrived in the city. The moment I walked into my apartment for the first time. The moment I put on my uniform and I went to work. New York became my home when I sat down on the wobbly stool with the ripped leather seat in O’Flanagan’s and played my first open mic set all those years ago.

I never felt the same way about LA. Los Angeles was a smoke and mirrors place. Nothing seemed real. You were never sure if what you were looking at was truly there, or if it was some sort of mirage that would evaporate in the blink of an eye. My life felt like it was in perfect alignment when I drove my Fastback through the streets of Williamsburg, my possessions packed in boxes and crammed in the trunk. It was strange to go back to my place and find it devoid of all things Avery, though.
 

We said we were going to take things slow, but of course that didn’t last very long. We were living in each other’s pockets, never apart, one of us carrying our toothbrush three blocks over at all times. Didn’t take us long to decide that we should move back in together. It was painful for Avery to be in my apartment, though. The months spent there without me had understandably taken their toll. And the new place Avery had moved into was beautiful, but it didn’t really feel like a home, either. We both gave notice and found a huge loft close by that had stunning views of Manhattan and the river instead. It’s funny how you can think you’re happy in a place until you move somewhere else. Happiness isn’t a location. It’s a state of being. It’s the sound of her laughter as her boots crunch on the carpet of leaves in fall. It’s snowflakes caught in the gentle curve of her eyelashes in winter. It’s the way she lays on the grass in central park, holding flowers under her chin to catch the buttery glow of their reflection on her skin in spring. It’s the sunlight catching on the rogue strands of her hair, transforming it to spun gold in summer.

It’s all of those things and so much more.
 

Avery hums softly as we unpack in our new home together. I recognize the tune, and it makes my heart slow down. Bizarre how a piece of music can have such an instant, calming effect on a person, but Blackbird by the Beatles has always had this power over me. Avery thinks she can’t sing, thinks she has a terrible voice, but that isn’t the truth. She has a wonderfully soft, warm way of singing when she thinks no one is paying attention. I listen to the gentle rise and fall of her voice as she absentmindedly flows through the notes of the song, her slender fingers working quickly through stacks of her father’s old records that she had freighted here from Wyoming.
 

I have to pinch myself. Life just feels so goddamn perfect. The band is already signed with Klaxon Records, and our new band manager, Marcy, is terrifyingly smart and blunt to the point of rudeness, but I trust her. She’s not about polls and commercial viability. She’s about artistic voice and your message as a musician, no matter how confronting and outlandish that message might be.
 
On top of that, Avery is already well into the new college year, and she’s flying academically. I’m so fucking proud of her.
 

I lean back against the kitchen counter, hands in my pockets, and I take a moment to enjoy watching my Iris. She’s chosen a new name for herself and I respect her wishes, calling her Avery and never missing a beat these days. But sometimes, I like to remember Iris. Max Breslin was a remarkable man. His face would light up when he spoke about something that excited him, and his eyes never shone as brightly as they did when he spoke about his little girl. It would be sad if she were forgotten entirely.
 

She doesn’t even realize I’ve stopped working and I’m watching her as she bends over boxes and opens each one methodically, pausing to run her fingertips over the contents of her past. She sends me a sweet smile when I collect up my acoustic guitar and sit down on the floor beside her, though.