Walk on the Wilder Side by Serena Bell

38

Rachel

Louisa sits on the side of the bed and watches me fold the last scarf onto the top of my suitcase.

“I’m going to miss you so much,” she says. “But I am so proud of you.”

“I’m terrified,” I admit to her.

“I know, kiddo.” She sighs. “So much bigger than pulling a scarf out of a drawer without looking.”

I’m going back to Rush Creek. And I don’t have a plan. Not even a little one.

All I have is the knowledge that Rush Creek Rachel is who I want to be, the certainty that I belong close to my family, and the strong suspicion that I gave up too easily on Brody. Not much to build a cross-country move on…

Which I guess is the whole point. Not having a plan means trusting those things: Your vision for yourself, your sense of what’s true—instead of a perfect-on-paper to-do list.

Also, let’s be totally honest: It’s not exactly flying without a net if you know you can crash in your childhood bedroom.

But I gotta start somewhere.

I zip up my bags, which Louisa helps me carry down to the front door.

She opens her arms and I hug the heck out of her. I make her promise to come visit me in Rush Creek as soon as she can, and she makes me promise not to be a stranger to Boston. She lets me go, and I bend down to pick up my suitcases.

There’s a knock at the door.

Louisa gets up on tiptoes—she’s teeny—and then turns to look at me with huge eyes.

“There’s a very beautiful man standing on the porch,” she whispers. “He has bed hair and two days worth of scruff and green eyes and lots of tattoos.”

And then she grabs my arm and lets out a long, silent squeal, and runs away to leave me facing the door.

I open it.

“Hey,” Brody says.

Oh, my God, he looks good. Tired, yes, and Louisa wasn’t kidding about the scruff, but that’s definitely a feature, not a bug. He’s got his arms crossed and his eyes down and that bad-boy off-center back-on-his-heels thing going, and my whole body pretty much tunes into his station.

I try to say hey back, but my voice fails me. I try again. “Hey.”

“I want to be part of the plan,” he says.

It’s slowly dawning on me that Brody Wilder has just flown across the entire country to tell me he wants to be with me. My heart is pounding, my pulse beating in my throat. My hands are icy.

“I’ve spent my whole fucking life feeling like I wasn’t invited to the party, when the truth is that I was too busy blowing off the party so I wouldn’t feel shitty if I didn’t get an invitation.”

“Oh,” I say, because this makes perfect sense. In fact, it makes everything about Brody make sense.

“I did it with Justin, with Gabe, with you—and I’m not fucking doing it anymore. There are things I want, Rachel. I want Justin in my life. I want to be Gabe’s partner—like, for real. And—”

Brody is looking at me with the full, unfiltered force of those green eyes, and they are wrecking me. Or maybe it’s the longing and the hunger in them.

“I want you. And I have a plan. For the first time in my entire life, I have a plan.”

I start laughing.

“Jesus, Rachel,” he says, taken aback. “That wasn’t exactly the response I was expecting.”

I stop laughing immediately, but of course I have to explain. I step back, opening the door wider so he can see my two suitcases, sitting there.

“I was coming back to Rush Creek. Without a plan.”

“Oh,” he says. Just that. And then his arms are around me and his mouth is on mine, and it’s—

Well, honestly, it’s perfect. The real, messy, complicated, imperfect kind of perfect.

It takes a humongous effort of will to stop kissing him long enough to say, “I just booked an Uber to the airport. Give me thirty seconds to cancel that and my flight.”

I have barely hung up the phone when he starts kissing me again, and I lead him down the hall to my bedroom, in which, sadly, the bed is unmade because my sheets are packed in my suitcase. But maybe that’s for the best because it turns out that standing-up sex is a perfectly good way to show someone how much you missed them and how much you want them to be part of your plan, or not-plan, as the case may be.

Afterwards,once we get our clothes all restored to their rightful places and the condom disposed of, Brody describes how things went without me. First, he tells me about his conversation with Connor, then about his conversation with Gabe.

“I love that you gave yourself a promotion.”

“Yeah,” he says, pleased. “I guess I did.”

I frown. “I still need to have a talk with Connor. I’m still really pissed that he went off on you like that. Like I needed protection from you or something. It’s insulting to both of us.”

Brody strokes my cheek. “Don’t be too hard on him. He told me he was jealous, which I don’t think was easy for him to say.”

“I’ll only yell at him a little bit.”

He grins.

“So, after you talked to Gabe, you bought a plane ticket and flew out here?”

He gets a slightly sheepish look his face. “Well, yes, and no. I bought a plane ticket. But it was two days out, because holy shit summer flights fill up fast. I had some time to kill. So I called a lawyer.”

“You—what?”

“I called a lawyer. About Justin. And custody.”

I guess I give him a dirty look, because he hastily says, “I’m not using the lawyer against Zoë. It was her idea, actually. We talked about Justin, and—here’s the thing. He’s not mine genetically, but the birth certificate does have my name on it. Because… well, Zoë technically committed fraud. Theoretically, I should have my name taken off and Len’s put on, but when I suggested that to Zoë, just to, you know, straighten everything out so it’s legal, it started us both thinking. So she reached out to Len. And he’s willing to waive paternity.”

“Oh. Wow.”

“Yeah. What the lawyer said is that if Len waives rights, the court might very well be willing to grant them to me, because they tend to be sympathetic in cases where the petitioner has lived with the mother and child for a period of time.”

“Which you did, with Zoë and Justin.”

“Exactly,” he says. “If Len waives his rights and I ask for them…”

“You have a really good chance of getting them.”

“That’s right. And Zoë is open to it, even though theoretically I could use my new powers to try to get fifty-fifty custody—”

“But you won’t.”

“But I won’t. And she gets something out of it, because I’ll have to pay child support. Which, God, Rachel, I’d do in a heartbeat.”

“I know you would,” I say, and lean my head on his shoulder. “Brody, that’s so, so good. I’m so happy for you.”

“I wanted to be able to come here and tell you I’d move to Boston for you,” he says quietly, stroking my hair. “Like Gabe did for Lucy. Give up everything, move to the East Coast. And if that’s what it took, I would, I swear, but because of Justin, I felt like I had to ask you if you’d move to Rush Creek.”

“Apparently you didn’t have to ask me,” I say.

And tell him my story. About how nothing felt good or right (let alone perfect) in the weeks since I’d been back. About how much I missed Rush Creek, Amanda, Lucy, Hanna, Connor, my parents—Brody’s brothers, even. About how much I missed the groups of women on the boat, and their unexpected frankness, the way something that was silly and fun and sexy could unlock changes in lives.

“And I felt like you and I weren’t done,” I say.

“We’re not.” Brody ducks his head and kisses me. “We’re definitely not done. We’re just getting started.”

That makes me smile.

“So I decided I would just walk up to the edge and jump. See what happened.”

“And this happened.”

“Yeah,” I say happily. “This happened.”