Amelia 
FALLING TOGETHER
PARKER AND I HAD THE best dinner ever. We had finally taken this spark between us out on the road, and it had been as electric as I had dreamed. I’d been charming, effervescent even. He had been as handsome and adorable and as sweet as any romantic hero. And then he walked me home, our fingers intertwined, his hand strong and steady and capable in mine, fitting there so nicely that I wondered why we hadn’t been doing this the entire time. And then we were standing close together inside the doorway of my apartment, and I knew what was going to happen next. My mind was racing with thoughts of us on the dock, the heat between us, the urgency.
Then he leaned over and kissed my cheek. Not my lips, not my neck, not any part of me where he wouldn’t have kissed his great-aunt Emily. And all that old self-doubt, all that insufficiency, started creeping in.
Parker had said he would never move on from Greer, and I should have believed him. He obviously hadn’t. Worse still, I could tell myself whatever I wanted to, but I hadn’t moved in with Harris because of Parker. I mean, sure, yes, I’d wanted to leave myself open to the possibility of love, but, come on. I had wanted to leave myself open to the possibility of Parker.
As he put his hand on the doorknob, I thought that I’d made a mistake. Maybe he just didn’t see me in that way. Maybe the kiss was a fluke. Well, this was humiliating. It was defeating. But I still had manners. “Parker,” I said. I was going to thank him for dinner, for making my night out so nice. He turned back to me and, before I could say, Thank you, before I could even think about it, his lips were on mine. I can’t say whether I kissed him or he kissed me, but I think it was more like a magnetic pull took over and we were together, the way we were meant to be.
His hands were in my hair, and our clothes were in a scattered trail from the front door to my bedroom. And I realized that I hadn’t stopped smiling for a single moment. Not one. The thoughts would flood in later, the concerns, the questions. But, for now, having Parker Thaysden as close to me as a man had ever been felt like coming home.
It must have been four a.m. that I woke up in a panic. And then I realized that the hand on me was Parker’s. And he was shirtless and beautiful in my bed. I kissed his chest, which was in close proximity to my face, savoring the manly smell of it and the real, unwaxed chest hair. I kissed his neck as I buried my head in, and then I sat straight up, realizing what the panic was for. I loved him. I was in love with Parker Thaysden. It wasn’t a fling or a crush or a one-night stand or, arguably, the best sex I had ever had. This was real. And I realized that my fear wasn’t the fear that I’d get attached and he’d leave me like with Thad or even Mason. No, I was afraid because I loved him so much I couldn’t bear to be without him—and he was never going to love me as much as he loved her. He was never going to be able to give his heart to me like I had given my heart to him. And I hadn’t even known I was doing it.
“Lia?” he asked sleepily. Now he sat up, too, rubbing his eyes. Then he kissed me and was smiling, and he looked so happy that I thought I should just let it go, play it as it came. But it was only delaying the inevitable. If I thought I loved him now, imagine after six months of dates and memories and future plans. But I think, ultimately, it was the way my heart was beating out of my chest in panic that made me say, “I can’t do this, Parker. I just can’t. I can’t be in her shadow. I can’t be second best.”
He sighed and kissed my bare shoulder. “I will always love her, Lia. Of course I will. Forever. But I love her like I love her. And I love you like I love you.”
I laughed out loud. “Parker Thaysden, you do not love me.” But I knew he did.
He nodded at me very seriously. “Oh yes, I do. Of course I do. I have for…” He looked up to the ceiling like he was calculating. “Seventeen years.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “That’s all?”
He nodded. “You remember that AP World History project we got assigned to do together? The one where we had to write the song?”
Parker had been so off-the-charts smart that he was in my history class his freshman year. (By his junior year, he was mainly in the library, racking up college credits in online courses.) We had written a rousing rendition of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” about Russian history.
I smirked. “Well, of course. I can see how you fell in love with me then. Stalin could make anyone hot.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t then. I mean, don’t get me wrong, sitting on the floor of your playroom getting to breathe your air for hours was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me. I told everyone I got to second base.”
I gasped in mock horror. “Do you have any idea how much that could have hurt my reputation? You were a freshman.”
He shrugged. “Yeah. But you got the last laugh. When Mason heard about it, he punched me in the face.”
I nodded knowingly. “I always wondered how someone as smart as you managed to open a door into your eye.”
“It was at that field party right after. Someone had set up that horrible karaoke machine, and when you got up there, you said, ‘I can’t sing this one without my buddy Parker.’ And we sang ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ and when you said, ‘I done told you once, you son of a bitch, I’m the best there’s ever been,’ you touched the tip of my nose with the tip of your finger. It was nothing, but I knew then that you would always be the one that got away.”
I remembered that night vaguely. The Smirnoff Ice and keg beer, and Parker, who didn’t even have his license, was the one to drive my car home, to get us in the house without a word of complaint. How many times had he come to my rescue, really?
God, that story was so sweet. It warmed all those soft spots around my heart and my belly. I smiled at him in the dark and then leaned my head over onto his shoulder. “The one that got away, huh? I didn’t get that far.”
He pulled me toward him and kissed one cheek and then the other. “I’ll give you time, Liabelle. I’ll let you think this through and get to a night when the moon isn’t so full and I’m not so damn handsome.” He paused to flash me a smile. “But these last few months with you, all of that has come flooding back. I’ve realized that I’ll be okay. I’ll be able to move on and have a life. With you.”
I flopped back dramatically onto the pillows and looked up at the ceiling. I couldn’t look him in the eye when I knew I was about to sound so childish. “That’s the thing, Park. How can I compete with your perfect, untainted memory of your one true love? How could anyone compete with that?”
Parker lay down next to me and pulled my arm so that I rolled over and was face-to-face with him. “It’s really hard,” he whispered, “because she’s gone. She isn’t here to defend herself. And it feels wrong on every level to say something negative about someone who died so tragically.” He bit his lip. “I loved her, Lia, don’t get me wrong. And I don’t fault her for it, but Greer was…” He paused as if afraid to say the word. “Well, she was selfish. I knew it about her, and that was fine. I loved her, and I was fine to move to her town and work for her company and live in her house. But she was the kind of woman who just chose where you went out to dinner and where you went on vacation and what you did with your future. She couldn’t help herself.” He stopped talking, and I could tell how hard this was for him. “ ‘Selfish’ isn’t even the right word, because she was so dedicated to helping people who needed it… but it was like, sometimes, with us, with the people who loved her most, she sort of forgot that we had needs, too.” He paused. “Please don’t think I’m a bad person.”
I kissed him and said, “Parker, I could never ever think that.”
“But when you offered to have a baby for me…” He trailed off, tears in his eyes. “Amelia, that was the most selfless thing I have ever seen one person do for another. You just wanted me to be happy. And I want the person I’m with to be happy, but it has occurred to me lately that maybe I deserve a partner who thinks about my happiness, too.”
I nodded as best I could with my head practically stuck to the pillow.
He squeezed my knee, then got up and headed to the bathroom. He turned back to me. “And I won’t tell you I love you again. That was a little much.”
I wanted to tell him I loved him, too, but instead, I said, “Do you still want them, Parker? The babies?”
“No,” he said quickly, too quickly.
I looked out my window, at the skyscraper across the way. That was the thing about New York. All these windows. All these people. Together, they seemed vast, infinite, maybe even unimportant. But inside each of those windows are families and lovers and friends and maybe even enemies, people falling together and falling apart. And, tonight, Parker and I, we were doing one of those things. I just wasn’t sure which one yet.