For All You Have Left

Chapter Twenty-Seven The Tree

“What’s this?”

I turn and then sigh once I see what Jorgen’s eyes are planted on. We made it through the whole meeting-the-family thing with not so much as a mention of my life before I was nineteen. Even Hannah kept her mouth shut, which is basically a small miracle. But now, it’s me who leads him straight into an old memory.

“Is the L for Logan?” he asks, eventually.

I slowly nod my head and push my lips to one side.

He glances at me and then turns his attention back to the big oak tree with the heart carved into its bark.

“The A—your tattoo?” he asks.

I nod my head again.

He keeps his eyes planted on the tree, but I know he can see me nodding my head. Meanwhile, I spot a rock on the ground near my feet, and I kick it gently around with my shoe.

“Did you ever have a high school sweetheart?” I ask.

A silent moment passes.

“No,” he says at last, shaking his head.

I feel my eyes grow wide. “I don’t believe you.”

“No, really,” he says. “I never really paid attention too much to girls in high school. My head was so deep into football — that, and I had eight girls in my class and two of them, that I knew of, were my cousins. And I wasn’t really sure about the rest of them either. I was pretty convinced that we were all related somehow or another.”

“Wait. But you dated a girl in high school — who wasn’t in your class, right?”

His forehead wrinkles, and he seems to think about it for a moment.

“In high school? No, not really,” he says. “It was all kind of the same thing. They were all just siblings or cousins of the girls in my class.”

I slowly push my lips into a pout. “That’s kind of sad.”

“What? Why?” he asks.

He’s smiling, but he looks completely puzzled.

“Because,” I say, “that means you never got to write notes back and forth during fourth hour, and you never got to wear someone’s name on the back of your tee shirt during a game or you never broke curfew because you fell asleep in some old hammock somewhere.”

He laughs to himself, and it snaps me out of my starry trance.

“What?” I ask.

“There were other ways to break curfew, Ada Bear.”

I look at him suspiciously.

“And they didn’t involve a hammock,” he adds.

“Well, what did they involve?” I’m curious now.

“I don’t know, usually a couple trucks, some four wheelers and a sandy river bottom.”

“Aah,” I say, starting to laugh.

But after a moment, Jorgen grows quiet, and then I notice him shaking his head. “But, yeah, I didn’t need a first love.”

My eyes instinctively narrow as I wait for him to continue.

But he doesn’t continue — not right away. He takes my hands in his, and his blue eyes seem to leave a thoughtful trail from my lips up to my eyes. And the way he looks at me as if he’s searching my soul forces my expression to soften.

“I’ve got my true love right here,” he says. “That’s all I need.”

He pulls me into him, and suddenly, I feel his warm breaths near my ear. “It’s all I ever needed,” he whispers.

I let myself fall into the muscles in his chest, and I breathe in the scent of his now familiar cologne, and I close my eyes until I feel as if I could just disappear inside his arms.

“And besides,” he whispers as he plants a soft kiss on my neck. “We’ve still got a lifetime of firsts in front of us.”