Chapter 10: On His Knees

I ran down the motel stairs in my socks.

The sun was just coming over the pines, and a long-haul trucker in a mesh cap was climbing out of his cab to stretch.

Two women in scrubs stood smoking by the ice machine.

A man in an orange vest was pumping gas across the road.

Jarrett saw me coming and went down on his knees on the gravel shoulder.

Not because he had fallen.

He put both hands flat on the ground in front of him, and then he lifted them, open, and held them out.

"I'm a coward," he said.

His voice carried across the lot.

The trucker froze with his arms over his head.

"I have been a coward for five years."

"Jarrett, get up."

"No."

"People are looking."

"I want them to."

I stopped three feet from him.

His lips were cracked and grey.

He was shaking so hard I could hear his teeth.

"I should have said it in the hall," he said.

"I should have said it in the cabin, the first night, and every night after."

"Said what?"

"That I love you."

The two women in scrubs turned their heads.

"That I have loved you since the day you told me to wipe my boots at the records house door."

His eyes were bright.

"I was twenty-five and a fool."

"You were the only person in the pack who treated me like a man instead of a title."

"Jarrett."

"I let my grandmother's law be bigger than that."

"I let you wait in the dark, and I would do anything to take it back."

"Anything."

"Even the vow?"

"The vow is dead. I'll tell the pack myself, today, whatever it costs."

He looked up at me.

"I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm asking for the chance to earn it."

The trucker took off his cap.

Across the lot, the man in the orange vest had stopped pumping gas.

Something in me that had been clenched for five years let go.

I knelt on the gravel in front of him and took his face in my hands.

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