“I’ve known what I wanted to do with my life since I was six years old,” Eddie said softly, the anger gone. “I’ve wanted you since you lent me your blue crayon.”
“Because yours was broken,” Faith said, smiling at the memory. “You opened your new box of crayons and the blue was broken. I thought you were going to start crying, so I lent you mine.”
“And you lent Ty all of them, yours and mine, because he didn’t have any crayons,” Eddie said.
Faith smiled more broadly. There really were strong ties between the three of them. Her anger at Eddie left her. “We’ll take this summer to think about things, all right? You work on your mother and try to get her used to the idea that I might be part of your family, and I’ll—”
“You’ll what? Spend your days with Ty? Your nights with him?” Eddie spat out the words.
Again, she stepped back from him. “He never wants to see me again so you don’t have any worries on that part. I think I’ll…”
/> “You’ll do what?” Eddie asked, but softer this time.
“I think I’ll get a job.” She’d not thought of it before, but she suddenly realized that in the last two years she’d been so absorbed in the idea that she was going to be Eddie’s wife that the idea of getting a job was new to her. But now that she’d thought of it she liked it. She could start making a dent on her student loan debt.
“Doing what?” Eddie asked.
“I don’t know,” Faith said, her good mood recovered. “Maybe I’ll become a marriage counselor.” She put her hand on Eddie’s shoulder and pushed him toward the door. “As much as I’ve enjoyed this jealous fit of yours, I want you to go away now, so I can think about what I’m going to do this summer.”
“And after the summer?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’ll marry Mr. Tucker.”
Eddie gave a bit of a smile. Mr. Tucker was a handyman, had no teeth, and was over eighty. He was also the biggest flirt in town.
“Can I give you away?” Eddie asked, deadpan.
Faith laughed and pushed harder on his shoulder, but Eddie didn’t leave. Instead, he turned around, grabbed Faith in his arms, and gave her the most passionate kiss he’d ever given her.
When he released her, his eyes were bright. “There are some things that I can do as well as Tyler Parks can.”
Faith just gave him a little smile, then opened the door and watched him walk out. Her mother was standing a few feet away and she glanced at Faith’s left hand in speculation. Would she be wearing an engagement ring? When she saw her daughter’s naked hand, she gave a sigh that let Faith know she’d again disappointed her mother.
Faith closed the door behind Eddie and leaned on it for a moment. “No you can’t,” she whispered in reply to Eddie’s statement. He couldn’t kiss as well as Ty could. She’d kissed Ty and had been so taken over by his lips that she’d not realized that they were underwater and that a motorboat was heading toward them. If it hadn’t been for Ty’s awareness, they’d both be dead now.
She was thinking about everything that had happened in the last few days as she went to the bathroom to take a shower.
“What happened?” Amy asked.
Faith took a breath. “It seems like so much longer than just sixteen years ago. Ty packed up and left town.”
“He did what?” Amy asked.
“He left town. He was never seen again. When I didn’t see him for about three weeks, I went to visit his mother and she said he’d come home wearing wet clothes, then he’d changed and left in his convertible. To my knowledge, no one in our town ever saw him again.”
“That’s odd,” Amy said. “You’d think he would have fought for you.”
“No,” Faith said softly, “I think that that afternoon he saw me as he thought I had become, and he wanted nothing more to do with me.”
“Or maybe he was in a car wreck and lost his memory,” Zoë said, not looking up from her pad. “It does happen, you know.”
Grimacing, Amy looked back at Faith. “What happened with you and Eddie?”
Faith gave a bit of a smile. “Everything changed. It was as though he saw that it was possible to lose me, so he fought the dragon.”
“And the dragon was his mother,” Zoë said.
“Oh yes. A few days after our confrontation in my bedroom, Eddie told his mother he was marrying me and that was it.”