Left of Forever (Spunes, OR, #2)

by Tarah DeWitt

I groan, disastrously warm when I pull it out and see an origami bird made from one of the wedding programs. He’s approaching full Ellis on me.

This playful side of Ellis is rare and special, and I feel a dizzying thrill over him taking charge of a plan like this. I missed this. The seamless way he could manage something while giving me just as much control.

“You can be loud, baby, it’s just you and me.”

What if he never even lives with us again? I wasn’t adequately prepared for this at all.

There are so many things we still need to teach him.

“He’ll learn them. We did good. You did so good, baby,”

The love I have for myself physically and the scars I bear have all been earned.

He was more than happy with one kid. I was the one who wanted more. Who asked for more from him when I probably should have been grateful for what we had.

I miss fighting with him. It was when we stopped fighting that everything went cold.

“You didn’t act like you noticed me in that way one iota, Byrd. Not for a few years still,” I say. “You were too good for me,”

Ellis didn’t put me on a pedestal. He put me on a shelf where he had to strain to reach me. Like he thought I’d be harder to break. I stayed there because I couldn’t risk him seeing me in pieces, knowing he’d take all the blame.

“I wasn’t,” I say. “I never was.”

“You were,” he says quietly. “You still are.” He pivots away.

“If that were true then, what’s the difference now?”

“Maybe now I’m just too selfish to give a fuck.”

“I’m supposed to tell you stuff I did not like about you, or things you did that I didn’t like, and that is somehow supposed to work toward my ultimate goal of getting you back?”

If I can tell him all the ways he broke my heart by holding back with his, maybe I can have my husband back.

“I wish you’d … uh. I wish you’d maybe been better with compliments.”

“Sometimes it just would’ve been nice to be told things more often. I’d like to have known what you saw and what was in your head, more often.”

“You were made for someplace like this,” he says. My body erupts in chills. “With that pile of golden hair and all your golden skin in the sun. I thought I missed your baking … That was nothing. I was starving to be near you again.”

“We are on this trip and we know it is early, but we are feeling … cautiously optimistic?”

“We are about to go on this roller coaster, and we are going to be okay. We are happy we’re doing it together.”

“We’re okay.”

I’ve got the biggest, most devastating crush on my ex-husband, and I hope I don’t get absolutely flattened by it in the end.

Not again.

I want all of it back. I want too much too fast.

I hate that. I want to earn my chance back with her. I want her to want me back, too. I don’t want anything else to be the deciding factor when it comes to us again.

“I’m having a hard time not touching you,” I admit. “You are … you’re more beautiful than ever, Wren.”

“You can touch me,”

She kisses me. She’s kissing me.

She’s kissing me. Her lips are on mine after five long years. Five hundred years. She’s kissing me. I’m home.

Well, I lasted a little more than a day.

“Byrd, we’re not going to make it if you keep looking at me like that,”

“How am I looking at you?” “Like you really might eat me alive. Like you’re devising plans. Like you might let me get under that dress and get my hands full of you and find out if you’re wet.”

“Wren, please, baby, I really need you to turn arou...

“That’s not any better,” he mumbles, his gaze on my ...

“And you grew everything and made everything greater. Which is what you always do. You can take anything and make it into something better, Wren.”

“You wanted a family, and you made it there,” he says. “I’m amazed by you.”

“It was big of you to never make it feel like I didn’t have you guys, still. Your sister and your brothers. You never cut me off from that family, and I’m grateful.”

“We both know they wouldn’t have allowed it,” he says. “You’re still a Byrd.” “I am,”

“And we both know that they’re as great as they ar...

“You were my best friend and I still kept shit too close to the chest sometimes.” “So did I,” I confess.

It was easier to convince myself that the growing distance between us was all in my head. I’d thought we could love each other through our hard times, but maybe we should have fought our way through them, too.

“I promise I’ll fight with you more,” I say. I’ll fight for you more, too. “Even if things don’t . .” I don’t want to finish that sentence. “I’ll fight with you, too,” he says, grinning genuinely now. “Even if things don’t.”

“We robbed ourselves of makeup sex...

“I have heard great things about it, but I never felt robbed in that department.”

“Is there anything we never tried that you wish we would have? Is there anything in particular we did that you think about?”

“do you mean sexually?” “Yes.”

“I just think about making you come,”

“But I think about tying you up, too. Binding you, somehow.”