“I’ve missed you,” she finally said, when he thought he couldn’t take her silence anymore. “I thought, after so much time passed, that you were gone.”
Mentally he kicked himself. How could he have let her wait all that time, thinking things were over for them? How could he have made her think her love wasn’t the most important part of his world?
“I had a lot of time to think while I was traveling on my own,” he said, hoping she would understand. “The whole time I kept convincing myself that I’d come home and dive back into my real life and, I don’t know, snap out of it or something. Like you were someone I could move on from.” He shook his head, laughing at the memories because otherwise he would cringe.
He told her about the blurry two weeks in Santiago before saying good-bye to a heartsick Jamie. He’d wanted to believe it was worth it to be there for his friend…and yet afterward, it seemed he was always moving, always trying to outrun his thoughts. If he could keep on the road ahead of his memories of the dark-haired girl with her captivating eyes, who did things that scared her and laughed at her fear, then maybe he’d be able to forget.
But he couldn’t. South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Zimbabwe… He went bungee jumping off the world’s highest jump in South Africa to prove to himself that he could, that he didn’t need anyone with him to do it. But while the adrenaline rush was there, the thrill wasn’t. It wasn’t as fun when he didn’t have anyone to laugh with about hollering all the way down.
At Victoria Falls it was like a dam released inside, flooding him with memories. The falls were supposed to be beautiful, but everything in him ached when he stood before the thundering cloud of white spray and wished it would pound him into the rocks, crush him so he didn’t have to feel this way. Julia had said she dreamed of falling, the soaring descent of each drop. But Blake only had eyes for the bottom, where the rocks were steadily pounded down until one day they’d be nothing but dust.
She ran a hand through his hair, pulling a curl behind his ear, and let her fingers linger on his neck. Her touch both melted him and turned him to steel. “I wish you’d told me you felt that way,” she said with a sigh.
“The postcard,” he reminded her.
“I know.”
“It wasn’t much.”
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t.” His stomach tensed with regret, until she said, “At least it let me know you weren’t gone.”
“I think some part of me hoped you’d come after me. Tell me I was wrong. Make me see the light. That sort of thing.”
“I was stunned,” Julia admitted. “It was like when you said you weren’t coming to Rio. I thought we were doing one thing, we’d talked about doing one thing, I thought everything was fine. And then—”
“And then I messed it up doing something else instead.” Blake finished the thought.
Julia sighed. “It makes it hard for me to understand. I don’t know how to read you. I don’t know what to believe.”
“I know that now I’m doing something else unexpected by showing up here like this. But I hope it’s different this time. I want to show you that I’m with you, and I mean it. I want to be with you.” He took a deep breath and let it all out, and with it the hurt and loneliness he’d held on to his whole time on the road. “I’m here now to show you what that means.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Oh God. That was what the voice inside Julia’s head kept repeating. Not exactly helpful, but it was all she had. Oh. Fucking. God.
It should have been impossible, some fantasy she’d dreamed up in her loneliest hours late at night. But it was real. It was happening.
He was here.
And it felt so perfect, so indescribably right to have his fingers circling her palm. Maybe all those months were nothing but a precursor, giving them both the time and distance to know they were ready for this. So that when he finally stopped standing by the kitchen counter and came over to her, his touch, his kiss, told her that no matter where in the world they both were, they were home.
But it was still crazy. It was like they’d skipped ahead five months and he wanted to pick up right back where they’d been.
“Blake,” she started, but when he wrapped his arms around her, she found the words wouldn’t come.
“I know that I’m saying a lot,” Blake said, as though reading her mind. “But I want to be here. I want to be with you. I want to give us a try.”
“I need to ask you something,” she said before she could get too swept away. The words gnawed at her. She didn’t want to address it, but she knew that if she didn’t get it out now, it would keep hanging over her, and she couldn’t do that. She’d let things slide without voicing her feelings, and if she’d learned anything these five lonely months, it was that she wasn’t going to do that with Blake ever again.
Blake pulled away but it was only to see her better as he said, “Of course.”
“Your new show that you’re working on—who’s going to play the leads?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said, looking confused by her question. “There’ll be auditions, but I don’t want to be part of the team that picks. Someone else will know the right players. I want them to go with their gut.”
Julia took a breath and asked outright what she’d meant. “So not Kelley, even though she’s so good in The Everlastings.”
Blake’s eyebrow jumped. “You actually watched the episodes I sent you?”
Immediately the heat rose to her face. “More like every season. Twice.”
His eyes widened.
“Okay, you caught me.” She sighed. “Maybe three times.”
There was a silence. “Wow,” Blake said. “That’s…a lot.”
She winced. “I know.” And then, because he’d come all this way and been so honest with her, she admitted the real reason she’d watched it so many times. “I like falling asleep to it playing in the background. It feels like I’m hearing your voice.”
This time she was the one who reached for him, running her fingers up his hand, his arm, feeling the faint blond hairs and the trace of his forearms where the muscles disappeared under his sleeve.
Blake covered her hand with his.
“Kelley’s not going to be in it. I’m handing over The Everlastings to another writer. I don’t know how long she and Liam will stay on it, or what they’ll be working on next, but the truth is I don’t really care. I want them to be happy, to find roles that they like. Whatever they want from their careers. But for me?” He shook his head. “I want actors who are there to work. I’m not worried about anything else.”
Right away Julia could hear the different way he spoke about Kelley from when they’d been in Brazil. Then, she’d still felt him wince at the pain.
But now it was as though he were talking about something that had happened to somebody else, a long time ago. She knew now in a way she hadn’t before that he was really over her. Everything in his life had moved on.
And in hers. When she thought of Danny and Amy, nothing in her stabbed at the knowledge that he had someone else on his arm. If anything the feeling was akin to what Blake described when he saw Jamie find happiness with somebody new. That she’d had that, once, and let it go. Whenever she closed her eyes, there was one person she pictured, someone who had been far away and was now somehow, inexplicably, sitting right in her kitchen, wrapping her in his arms.
“But, Blake.” She leaned close and shook her head into the crook of his neck, inhaling the scent of him, the surprising softness of his skin. “You live in Australia. I live here.”
“I can live here.”
“What?” She tilted her head to look up at him.