Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 94609 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94609 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
“Well, what are you waiting for? Open it!” Jensen said, shoving me in the arm lightly.
I shook my head. “We have to be prepared for whatever this says, Jensen. I know you are hopeful for a certain result, but I want you to know that if it doesn’t turn out the way you want, I’ll always be in your corner, no matter what.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, open the envelope!” he ordered.
I sighed as I opened it. A pit of nerves sat heavily in my stomach. There was a part of me that wanted a certain outcome. A huge part of me wanted to see it say that he was my son. Yet a bigger part would’ve been pissed off that he was my son and I’d missed out on years of being there for him the way he deserved.
Having Jensen as my son would’ve been one of the greatest gifts I’d ever received. He was a good kid. I’d be lucky to call him my own.
But that wasn’t how things seemed to be going for me as of late.
I stared down at the paper and felt as if someone stabbed me straight in my heart. “Sorry, kid,” I muttered. “Turns out we’re just cousins.”
The look of defeat in Jensen’s eyes was crushing.
He sat back in his chair. “I guess that’s how the cookie crumbles.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“It would’ve been cool, though, huh? I think you would’ve made a good dad to me.”
“And you would’ve been a great son.”
He smiled a little and shrugged. The disappointment was still in his eyes. “I’ve kind of been playing a stupid scenario in my mind ever since we’d decided to take the test. Like what it would’ve been like to be Willow’s and your kid.”
I arched an eyebrow. “And Willow’s?”
“Yeah.”
I clasped my hands together. “Sorry, kid, but Willow went back to her hometown.”
“I heard that. When is she coming back?”
“I don’t think she is.”
“Oh.” He nodded. “So when are you going to see her? Are you moving?”
I narrowed my eyes and shook my head. “No. We aren’t together anymore.”
He gripped the edge of the rocking chair and leaned toward me. “What did you do?!”
I liked how his first reaction was that I’d somehow messed up. Not that Willow decided to walk away. “Nothing. She made a decision after some thought that we weren’t right for one another.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Uh, yeah. She did.”
“Well, go tell her you don’t accept it or something. Go tell her how you feel.”
What the hell was going on? Was it “push Theo to go after Willow” week or something?
“Jensen, it’s a done deal. That’s life. Things come, and things go.”
“But Willow isn’t a thing. She’s your person. You can’t just let your person go.”
“She’s not mine.”
“Then what’s the point, huh?!” he shouted, tossing his hands up in the air. “What’s the point of anything?” he questioned, growing more and more emotional.
“Jensen—”
“You love her. And she loves you. How could anything else matter outside of that?”
“You’ll understand when you’re older how—”
“Oh, don’t give me that bull crap, Theo. I might be a teenager, but I’m not a stupid kid. And maybe I haven’t been in love before, but I know what it looks like, and I’d never seen you happier than you’ve ever been with Willow, even during losing PaPa. You were so sad before her. So what, you’re just going to go back to being sad again? Fishing alone? Sitting alone? Being alone?”
Well, yeah.
That was the plan.
His eyes flashed with tears, and I couldn’t comprehend why he was growing so emotional over the topic. It was my heart that was stomped out, not his. Yet based on his reaction, you’d think he was the one going through the motions of heartbreak.
“You thought you loved my mom, right?” he asked me.
I sighed. “Yeah.”
“Did it feel like what you have with Willow?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“How was it different with Willow? How did she make you feel?”
I took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Alive.” She made me feel alive in ways I hadn’t in a long time. I’d been sleepwalking through my life for years, and then Willow came and added color to my world. She woke me up, even if I was first annoyed with finding her wild self in the lake at two in the morning.
She shook me awake.
Jensen frowned. He fiddled with his hands. “Why did she leave?”
“She got scared for some reason. So she ran.”
“Yeah, well. She’s kind of the hummingbird to your oak tree.”
“What?”
“You know, hummingbirds,” he mentioned, gesturing over to the bird feeder he’d put out earlier this summer. It rested against a big oak tree, and the birds would come buzzing in and out nonstop. “Hummingbirds dart away at the first sign of any storm. They get scared.”
“Oh. Well, yes. She’s like a hummingbird.”
“And you’re the oak tree. You just gotta stand still and let her know that she can land on you. You gotta show her that she can trust that your branches are safe places to land so she feels safe enough to stay. That’s why the hummingbirds come back. They know they’ll be okay because the tree isn’t moving.”