63. Jasper Ridge

63

Jasper Ridge

E very muscle in my body was screaming at me as I sprinted down the middle of the road towards my house–towards her. The girl who had become my home, my everything .

My perfect Gwen Stacy .

I’d fight my way back to her even if it killed me because there was no way in hell I would ever let that girl slip away from me again.

Even more so because there was this unsettling feeling pooling in the bottom of my stomach, similar to the one I had when Jakson, Lia and I watched Avengers: Infinity war for the first time, mimicking that feeling of utter helplessness as Tony Stark watched Peter Parker fade away into nothingness.

I couldn’t seem to shake it.

But I tried to remain positive–tried to channel my inner Jakson Calloway and pretend like everything was fine. Because it was . I was just overthinking it. Yeah , that had to be it. Maybe I was stressed from practice and Koa’s comments about my ability to be their captain. All I wanted to do was cuddle with my girl and watch Captain America and the Winter Soldier and let the stress of the day fall away.

As I reached the porch steps, the little fairy lights my mother had hung across the ceiling and wrapped around the oak beams for Lia were glowing softly in the darkness of the late-night sky. Lia loved the stars and the moon–anything that was blue, and anything that glowed too.

I never told my mom what happened to Lia, or the secrets I kept for her, but part of me felt that she already knew…or at least suspected as much.

Since the day she told me my dad had passed away before I was born, I’d become so worried about how she would cope without him, but she showed me that it was okay to feel grief and vulnerability. That I didn’t have to be this perfectly held together version of myself all the time. And even though I’d never met him, I could still miss him.

Together, we started to heal in our own time.

But still, I couldn’t help but think that maybe part of her was scared of letting herself be vulnerable like that again with someone new.

When I asked her about it once, she just smiled sadly at me and said, “You only get one great love story, honey, and your dad was mine. I was lucky enough to have found him, and together we made such a beautiful child. I see him in you more and more each day, and I just know he would be so proud of you, Jasper. Never, ever, doubt that. We both love you so unbelievably much.”

That was the first time I cried since he passed.

The first time I felt some sort of connection to him.

After she said those words to me and sat down with a photo album full of Polaroids from when they traveled around Europe together–my mother working as a lifeguard whilst my dad competed in the European surfing circuit–made me feel closer to him than I ever had before.

And ever since then, I’d made it my mission to follow in his footsteps to try and finish the legacy he started .

As my fingers reached for the door handle, I halted.

The front door was already slightly ajar.

“Poppy? Mamma?” I yelled out, “you guys okay?”

The creek of the door as it opened trailed down the back of my spine, making me shiver as I stepped into the dimly lit hallway. There was no laughter, no singing, no sound of life or happiness inside. It was completely barren, aside from the small hallway lamp that was flickering to the same beat as my thundering heart.

“Oh, Jasper,” my mother said, appearing in the door frame of the kitchen, looking at me with a pair of saddened eyes, “I’m so sorry.”

And I knew.