Page 85 of Escape

Laughter spilled out of me, and it was a good thing it did, because if I allowed my thoughts to run wild, I wasn’t sure I would have been able to lighten the mood.

Josie seemed content to keep talking, to get answers to her questions. “What did we just do, Huck?”

There was no reason to hold back. We’d come this far, and I wasn’t about to turn back now. “We did what we should have done years ago.”

“What?” There was an edge of doubt in Josie’s tone, like she couldn’t understand why I would have said what I just said.

“After that kiss, tell me you feel differently,” I demanded, pulling my head back so I could look at her. “Because that kiss just made me realize that I made the biggest mistake of my life by not making you mine years ago.”

Her lips parted in shock, disbelief etched into her features. “Huck, I?—”

“Fuck, Josie, I never should have left you after high school,” I clipped, needing her to know precisely how I felt. “Where would we be right now if I had stayed?”

Josie bit the corner of her lip, likely taking a moment to consider precisely how different our lives would have been. Her hand that had been at the back of my head drifted down slightly to my neck, where she squeezed. “You had to go. That was your dream, and I never would have wanted to take that away from you.”

No, she wouldn’t have.

Because that’s just who she was.

But it still didn’t change the way I felt.

I shook my head, feeling so much guilt and regret consuming me. “Even if that’s the case, I should have looked you up when I came back. I should have tried anything I could to get you back in my life. It’s not like I haven’t had the resources in all the years I’ve been working at Harper Security Ops.”

“Don’t do this,” she pleaded with me, her voice a touch over a whisper. “Please, don’t do this.”

“I’m sorry. I just feel like I’ve wasted so much time.”

“And I feel like I’ve just experienced the best thing in my life, and the last thing I would ever want you to feel about it is regret.”

I brought both hands up to frame her face. “I don’t regret you. Not for one second. I just wish I had done something differently than I did.”

“But we can’t go back to change it, so dwelling on it or allowing ourselves to feel guilty about what we didn’t do then won’t make anything better for either one of us.”

“How can you not be sad about it? How can you not hate that we could have been with one another all these years? Don’t you feel like we missed out on so much that we can’t ever get back?”

I was bombarding her with so many questions, and part of me felt bad about it, but I was so consumed by disappointment with myself. I could have saved her from a world of hurt if I’d thought about her when I got back.

I didn’t, and I’d never be able to fix that.

In a surprising twist, the corners of Josie’s mouth tipped up slightly. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that if things had been different, we would have both been very happy. Of course, there’s a part of me that wonders what if. I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t the case. But like I said before, we can’t change the past. All we can do is move forward from here. And I’m not sad, because I know you, Huck. I know you’ll make whatever happens from here on out better than I could have ever dreamed of having. I don’t want to look back at what could have been. Now that we’re here, I know the best days of my life are ahead of me.”

I closed my eyes and exhaled.

She was right.

And gracious.

I didn’t think I deserved that, either. Not when Josie had every justifiable reason to be upset with me for leaving and never coming back for her.

Her hands had fallen to my waist, where she tightened her grip and asked, “Will you try?”

“Try what?”

“To forgive yourself. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in therapy, it’s that we’re all always going to make mistakes. Some are worse than others. But we need to find a way to forgive ourselves for those mistakes, Huck. And I want you to do that. Please, try to do that. For me.”

Even if I didn’t want to do that, even if I didn’t think I deserved it, I refused to deny her anything. So, I nodded slowly. “I’ll try, honey.”

“Good. Now, are we going to do that again?”