Page 39 of Somewhere Only We Know (Healing in Cincy #4)

We lay there on the gym floor just looking at each other.

This week has been quick kisses before hopping onto meetings or heading out to train.

We’re doing the back and forth between our houses, but we haven’t gotten to the sleepover part.

Despite us being married, that would be the next big step in our relationship.

“What are you thinking about?” Jax whispers.

“Everything.” I tell her. And it’s the truth.

I can’t turn my brain off. I’m constantly thinking about my next step–our next step now, and it’s driving me insane.

I’ve always been a chronic over-thinker and now that I have Jax to worry about, I fear it’ll send me backwards.

Erasing all of the strides I made to go with the flow in life.

Jax’s brows furrow, before she’s sitting up and holding her hand out to me. “Come on.”

Tentatively, I place my hand in hers and let her assist in pulling me to a standing position.

But let’s be real. There is no way Jax could pull me up on her own.

I outweigh and tower over her. With confusion plaguing me, I grab my phone and turn out the lights, before following Jax upstairs.

She walks with a purpose to my living room where I see a gift wrapped box sitting on my coffee table.

“I’m all sweaty. And I have cum in my shorts. Can I shower first?”

“No.” Jax demands and laughs before pulling me to sit on the couch next to her. “I did some snooping around earlier this week before knowing you needed this.”

Christmas is a week away and it didn’t even dawn on me that we were doing gifts.

“I didn’t get you anything,” I admit weakly.

“Baby, I don’t care about that. Plus you know I love giving gifts.” Jax wraps her hand around my neck and pulls me down for a quick kiss. “This is also for me, too.”

I look at Jax, my heart already bursting from the love I feel for her. Squeezing her knee affectionately, I lean forward and grab the box. It’s got a bit of weight to it and I look at her before tearing it open .

“You didn’t.”

“I did,” Jax says with glee coating both words.

I tear the rest of the paper off and open the box. Inside is the top of the line Nikon. My other cameras are stored at my mom’s place. And since baseball took over my life, I didn’t find them necessary to have around.

“No. Jaclyn Marie, this is too expensive.”

“Will you stop? Nate,” she pauses to collect her words, “one of the things I was most jealous of when we were younger was your passion for things. Photography being one of them. You didn’t see you from my point of view.

Baseball, that was a given. But you behind a lens was like watching Jackie Robinson or Willie Mays up to bat.

I loved seeing that version of you because there was no thought behind what you took.

You just let yourself feel. And if a camera is going to help you turn your mind off, because I can see when you start to overthink, then I want you to help you get back to that. ”

I run my hands over the body of the camera and smile as Jax’s words soak in. She’s right. I did stop thinking when I had a camera in my hands. Everything shutdown and it’s as if she knew that this is what I needed without me telling her.

“Jax,” I start and turn to her but she cuts me off.

“Don’t say something that’s going to freak me out.”

“How about I love you?”

She smiles, albeit wobbly, but a smile nonetheless. “Yeah, that’ll do it. I love you, too.”

I lean forward and close the small gap between us. Jax is trembling against my lips, emotion taking over as those three words are said as a married couple.

The fire pit on Jax’s back porch crackles and warms us in the late December cold.

We’re cuddled up on one of the outdoor couches with mugs of hot chocolate keeping us somewhat warm.

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve and I find myself pinching myself that we’re married.

That I’m coming out of this year with the girl I dreamed of marrying when I was twenty-one. Talk about destiny.

Jax and I talk. A lot. It’s like we’ve both stored things away in the years we were apart and are now playing catch-up.

“Do you go home often?” she asks as we watch the lights in the city illuminate the river.

“No. I can’t.”

“Will you tell me?”

Jax doesn’t have to elaborate. I know what she’s asking me to tell her.

“It was a few months after I found that my dad had limited time left with us. Um, because we were in season, my coach sat down with my parents to be made aware of what was happening. He got their phone numbers in case of big emergencies.” I don’t have to clarify what I mean by the big emergency and I swallow as my telling this story takes me back to that day.

“Luckily, we were playing at home. I must’ve been in a spot on the field or up to bat where I didn’t see my coach take a phone call that would change everything.

He made the call to have me finish the game.

And when it was over, he told me my dad had collapsed again.

That it was Kayla who found him. I left the field then and there.

In my uniform and cleats as I sped to the hospital just hoping to make it in time.

He passed just minutes after I got there. ”

Jax’s hands wipes away the tears I didn’t know had fallen.

December is usually my darkest month. It’s when I made the decision to leave school and the girl I loved.

It’s when I found out he was sick and that there was no cure.

How can we make so many medical advances and not find a cure for so many things?

I was mad. At my parents, at the doctors, at science.

When March rolls around, that’s when I feel the weight of his loss the most.

“In hindsight I know my coach made the right call not to tell me until after the game. But knowing I could have had more moments with him, is something I find unforgivable. I didn’t cope the way I should have. I lost my dad. I lost the person I look up to from an incurable disease.”

“Did you ever…” Jax stumbles over her words as she thinks of what to ask me.

“Want to join him?”

She nods against me. “Yeah.”

“The thought crossed my mind. He was my best friend.” I tell her and don’t miss the wince. “But then I looked at my mom and Kayla, how they were also just as lost, and I realized that my absence would have destroyed them.”

“I’m glad you stayed.” Jax whispers.

I look at Jax, whose eyes are filled with a light sheen of tears, and lift up my arm in invitation for her to snuggle closer. “Me too, Bee.”

“If things ever get dark again—will you tell me?”

“I promise.”

The hard thing about suffering is that it’s mostly done in silence.

That’s why they call it suffering in silence .

The stranger you pass on the street could be contemplating ending it because no one listens to them.

An outburst at work means they suffered for too long and needed to let it out before it destroyed them.

My suffering was needing to escape from the grief I couldn’t process.

“Will you tell me about your Dad? ”

Jax and I lean further back into the couch cushions.

With the fire going and the hum from downtown faintly reaching us, I tell her everything.

I tell her about his afterwork routine and how, like clockwork, I would hear the sound of his office chair squeaking as he reclined to finish up the rest of his work for the day.

I told her that he was a quiet man, but when he spoke, people listened.

His stories from when he was a kid, traveling around the country to where his Dad was stationed in the Navy, to his own stint playing college football and then the Navy as well.

I tell her about when my parents met as two broke kids who said that love was more than enough.

And how they were together for over thirty years until he passed away.

“I realize that my wanting to disappear would have been an act of selfishness.” Jax grips onto me tighter as she lets me get the words out. “My mom lost her other half. The person that she thought she would grow old with. How can she live her life without him?”

“Maybe when we go visit your family, you can ask her?”

I kiss the top of Jax’s head and rest my cheek there. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Do you wanna know how I would feel? If the love of my life was no longer here?”

I think of my not being here and Jax living life without me. The thought is too much to handle. But maybe she’ll tell me her experience from when we were apart. “Tell me.”

“I would feel lost. And in an endless cycle of sadness. I don’t know what it’s like for your Mom to lose her other half. But I feel like that’s what it’s like for her. An endless cycle of sadness.”

Jax saying that makes me think that maybe my mom is only keeping it together for me and Kayla. That she’s only here because of me and Kayla. How many times has she cried herself to sleep at night? Is she eating enough? Is Kayla making sure she’s getting to work?

When I got drafted, I left and never looked back.

It was the only way I knew how to cope. How to heal.

That makes me a bad son, but I couldn’t stay there any longer.

I wanted to make something of myself and I did that to honor my dad.

It’s why I wear number 37. I never asked why that was his favorite number.

But if I had to guess it was the age he was when Kayla was born. So I wear that number with pride.

“I can book us tickets and we can go visit our families this week.” I tell Jax with another kiss on her forehead and I feel her nod against my chest.

We stay on the patio until not even the fire and blankets can keep us warm.

With an extended goodbye in the form of over-the-clothes groping on her couch, I head back to my empty house.

Walking in with no one here, makes me want to speed up our dating process so we can get to the forever part.

I love my house, but I would rather live with Jax.

So it’s time to accelerate the process of us living together.