“What’s wrong with you?” a voice asked, snapping me out of my thoughts.
I turned to see Jax standing there with a perplexed look in his eyes. My body was trembling as my hands shook with his hat in my grip, and I parted my lips to speak, but no words left my throat.
I saw it in his eyes, too—the way he looked at me as if I were insane, the same way Penn had stared my way for the past year. He was judging me. He was baffled by my moment of unexplainable fear. He was…
Helping me?
“Walk,” he ordered, nodding once.
“I…I-I can’t,” I pushed out, still trembling. The little girl and her mother were no longer in front of me, but the shadows of their moment of love intermixed with the shadows of my own past in my mind. I was overthinking, overdoing, and over-feeling every single emotion that was hammering at my heart.
I couldn’t stop it, though. It was why I did my best to unplug from society. It held too many reminders of all the joy I’d lost.
“You can,” he disagreed. “You can walk.”
He didn’t understand.
No one understood.
His arm slid under mine, and he looped it with his own.
“Wh-what are you do-doing?” I stuttered, my voice hoarse.
“This,” he explained, stepping forward and taking me with him. “Now you do it.”
“Please, no, I ca—”
“Stop it. Stop saying what you can’t do when you can do it. Mind over matter. Come on, Sun…” His voice was low but nowhere near as cold as it’d been before. The nickname I hadn’t heard in so long hit me like a freight train. He knew. He knew it was me. He remembered. “Walk with me,” he begged.
One step.
Then another.
I was moving. That, or he was lifting me up and making me float down the sidewalk. Either way, he walked me all the way back to my house in complete silence as my heartbeats began to come down to a much tamer speed. I felt everyone’s eyes on Jax and me as we walked, and I hated it. I hated the embarrassment that came with the panic attacks, the way people stared as if I were a nutjob.
I remembered my first panic attack in a public place. It was at Penn’s real estate agency’s annual Christmas party. I had a full-blown meltdown while the speakers blasted my baby girl’s favorite holiday song, “This Christmas” by Donny Hathaway. I was mid-conversation with his boss when my knees buckled from beneath me and I hit the ground in a warp of panic.
He was humiliated to call me his wife after that.
I could only imagine how Jax felt walking me home in this moment. What was worse was he wasn’t even married to me. He was a complete and utter stranger dealing with the looks of the whole town. He didn’t seem bothered by it at all, though. He just kept walking with his arm linked with mine.
When we arrived at the house, I thanked him, and he shushed me and told me to sit down on the front step.
“I’m really okay,” I said, still feeling a bit shaky and lightheaded.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes before releasing his sigh. “Please,” he urged. “Sit down.”
Even though I wanted to argue, I decided to pick my battles. I sat, and to my surprise, he took a seat beside me. I didn’t know what to say to him, but thankfully, Jax wasn’t looking for words. He simply sat next to me in a complete silence that felt…comforting? Yes. I felt so much more comfortable than I had when I was walking into town, all because Jax was on that front porch step.
It turned out you didn’t need words to bring you comfort. Sometimes, all you needed was for someone to sit beside you in the middle of your panicked storms.
When the time came for him to leave, he rose to his feet and glanced down at me. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I am. Thank you for helping me.” I paused. “How long? How long did you know I was…me?”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “A few days. I saw your family car sitting in the driveway.”
“I… This…it’s crazy, right? After all these years, for us to meet up like this… I’m just trying to understand what it all means, how it all—”
“Nothing. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
I placed my hand against my chest and breathed in deeply. “But it could, right? It could mean something. I mean it almost feels like kismet, right? Of all the towns I could’ve ended up in, I ended up here. You feel it, don’t you? You feel how this feels…I don’t know…it’s just a feeling in my chest. What if—”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t try to make this something it’s not. Truthfully, we should probably keep our distance. To keep the past in the past.”