by Lauren Layne
And maybe he knows he went too far, because there’s something like regret that flickers in his blue eyes before he looks back at the road.
I swallow the lump in my throat, and smooth a shaky hand over the notebook once more. “We’re taking 64 to I-95 South,” I say, relieved that my voice doesn’t wobble.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see him nod once before reaching out a hand and flicking on the radio.
It’s rock. Eighties crap that I hate, but it’s better than silence. And it’s definitely better than talking.
I turn my head to look out the window and I try to focus on Oscar—try to imagine what it’ll feel like when I surprise him. See, I know Oscar. If he knows I’m coming, he’ll get all nervous, get his restaurant staff all hyped up and nervous too. I want to see his new restaurant just as it is on any day. I want to see him in his element.
So yeah, he’ll be surprised, but not annoyed. Oscar’s easygoing, and gorgeous, and loves to laugh. Unlike the guy next to me, who’s never had a damn thing easy in his life and looks like he hasn’t laughed in months.
He probably hasn’t.
It hits me then that there’s something I haven’t said—something I need to say—even as I sit here hating him.
“How are you doing, truly?” I ask. “I really am so sorry about your father.”
The words come out as a whisper, and at first I think he doesn’t hear me, because he doesn’t respond.
Okay then. I guess we’re not going to talk about that day.
Then I remember who I’m dealing with. Reece Sullivan takes any and all emotions and buries them deep. Any sort of kind gesture is likely to be ignored, or worse, used as a weapon.
Fine then. I lash out with the only recourse I have at the moment, turning the radio to country.
Reece hates country.
I turn it up.
It’s a classic Jenny Dawson song. “Heartbreaker.”
Perfect. Absolutely perfect.
Chapter 9
LUCY, TWENTY-FOUR, REECE, TWENTY-FIVE
Lucy nervously stepped into the small funeral parlor; for a second she thought she was in the wrong place.
A quick glance to her right showed the unassuming, handwritten sign telling people why they were here.
Right place.
But so few people.
Her chest hurt.
Nobody turned to look at her as she walked in, everyone lost in the somberness of the occasion.
She spotted the backs of four heads, all in a row, all familiar. Lucy bit her lip, realizing belatedly that she should have told them that she was coming.
Not that they’d be unhappy to see her, but this was no time or place for surprises.
It wasn’t like she’d meant to make a grand entrance or anything, it’s just…her family hadn’t even asked if she was coming. Like it hadn’t occurred to them that she would make the time.
The realization was more jarring than she wanted to admit, even to herself. Then again, it’s not like she’d given them reason to think otherwise.
She certainly hadn’t given him reason to think otherwise.
Lucy came even with the row of chairs where her family was sitting. Her dad was on the end, glancing up at her distractedly, then doing a double take when he recognized her.
Her mom and siblings did the same, smiles mingling with the sadness in their eyes.
She touched her dad’s shoulder, intending to scoot past him to go sit in the empty seat by Brandi, but even as she started to move in that direction, her eyes scanned the room for the reason she’d come.
He was all by himself.
Why wasn’t anyone with him?
Reece sat by himself in the front row, empty seats on either side of him. An older couple sat behind him—his aunt and uncle, if she was remembering correctly—but she’d never seen someone so utterly alone.
Lucy’s mom read her thoughts. “He wanted some space,” she whispered quietly.
Bullshit, Lucy thought.
Not that she’d say it to her mother. But why did everyone insist on believing Reece when he put on his brave face?
Why did nobody see that I want to be alone was his code for letting everyone off the hook? Why did nobody understand that he didn’t want to be alone, he just expected it?
He wouldn’t want to see her. She knew that.
Heck, she wasn’t sure she wanted to see him. Not after everything that had gone down between them.
The last time they’d spoken was over a year ago at a dreadful Thanksgiving dinner where they’d both put on a painful show for her family, pretending they hadn’t broken each other’s hearts.
No, scratch that. It was her heart that was broken. She wasn’t sure he had one where she was concerned.
But that didn’t change the fact that Reece’s father had just died, and he was all by himself.
Before she could think better of it, she moved toward him, scanning the room as she did so.
There were fewer than thirty people in attendance for Jeff Sullivan’s funeral.
Not surprising, perhaps, given that the man had isolated himself for years even before the cancer had taken its toll.
What was surprising was that his own daughter hadn’t showed yet.
Or maybe not. Trish Sullivan hadn’t looked back when she’d skipped out on her family a decade ago. Lucy wasn’t all that shocked that apparently even funerals weren’t worth her while.
She didn’t blame Trish for needing some distance when her mom had died and her dad had turned into a zombie. Lucy did blame her for leaving her much younger brother to fend for himself.
No matter. This wasn’t about Trish.
This was about Reece.
Lucy swallowed as she reached the front row, and before she could lose her nerve, walked straight to him, sitting in the chair directly to his left.
He glanced down at her in shock.
Reece opened his mouth, and she braced for him to tell her to get the hell out of here, but before he could speak, there was a throat-clearing from the front of the room, and a pastor stepped up to the small podium beside Jeff Sullivan’s casket and started his somber opening remarks.
“Just until it’s over,” Lucy said under her breath. “Then you’ll never have to see me again.”
Reece fiddled with a wrinkled piece of paper in his hands. It looked like it had been folded and unfolded a million times.
A eulogy, she realized.
Her eyes watered. Poor Reece.
He didn’t move the entire time. Not until he briefly left his seat to stand and give a short, wooden-sounding eulogy about his late father.
When he returned to his seat, Lucy briefly searched his face. There was no trace of tears, and that somehow made it all the sadder.
Without thinking, she slipped her hand into his. The first time she’d touched him in six years.
He stiffened, and she braced for him to shake her off.
Instead, his fingers very slowly spread apart until they were palm to palm. Then he linked his fingers with hers, and squeezed hard. Lucy’s eyes watered, and she wasn’t sure if it was from the pressure of his grip, or from the pain she felt coming off him in waves.
Reece had no one now.
Once, he might have had her, but that ship had sailed in the most heartbreaking way possible.
True to her promise, she’d left after the funeral was over.
All without Reece Sullivan saying a single word to the woman who’d once loved him with all her heart.
Chapter 10
Reece
The motel that Lucy directs us to is as crappy as I expected given the price. The “swimming pool” looks like a wannabe sewer, and the roof is one tropical storm away from caving in.
But she tells me it’s “near the river,” whatever that means.
I pull into the parking lot and turn off the ignition, the silence the first respite we’ve had in hours of an ongoing radio war. Nudging the volume up every time we changed the sta
tion wasn’t exactly mature, but damn if it didn’t feel kind of good.
The silence now is deafening, though, and as I glance toward the crooked check-in sign, the awkwardness of the situation hits me.
Here are two reasonably attractive twentysomethings checking into a motel at four o’clock on a humid afternoon, with…separate rooms.
Maybe whoever’s working the front desk will assume we’re siblings.
I sneak a glance over at the long expanse of Lucy’s slim thigh peeking out of her little shorts.
Nope. Not siblings.
I shove open the car door before I do something stupid like drool or cop a feel. I step onto the pavement and stretch. I don’t really need to stretch. The drive has only been a few hours, which is horseshit, considering we could have made it much farther.
And yet, as I inhale, trying to clear my head of Lucy, I admit that maybe she’s onto something with her little plan, because there’s something oddly nice about stopping just because we can. Something indulgent about spending time in a place that doesn’t require work or laundry or having your heart torn out by people dying and pretty brunettes leaving.
Realizing Lucy hasn’t gotten out of the car yet, I brace a palm on the top of Horny and lean down to see what’s up.
She’s scribbling in that stupid notebook, bottom lip drawn between her teeth as she writes.
“Dude. What are you doing?”
She doesn’t stop writing.
“Hello? Weirdo, it’s hot. Let’s go.”
She clicks her pen shut and reads what she’s just written. “And then, after not speaking for over three hundred miles, his first words are dude and weirdo. I’m no longer puzzled as to why he doesn’t have a girlfriend—”
I roll my eyes and slam the driver’s-side door on her sentence, and the passenger door opens a second later.
She stretches like I did, inhales like I did too, before she beams. “This is what I wanted.”
My eyebrows lift. “This? A one-star roadside motel with more roaches than guests?”
“Lighten up, grandpa. We’re on vacation.”
“Yeah, that’s not what this is,” I mutter, as I follow her up toward the check-in desk.
The thirtysomething dude with a scraggly goatee couldn’t care less whether we want one room or four, although he does give us neighboring rooms without us having to ask.
I’m relieved. Torture as it’ll be to share a wall with her, I don’t exactly love how isolated the motel is, and I’m betting the locks on the doors wouldn’t withstand a strong fart.
The AAA card her dad gave me makes the already cheap rate even cheaper, and I’m a little relieved to realize that if we keep finding shitty, cheap places like this, I won’t have to deplete as much of my savings during these two weeks as I thought. The last thing I need is to be tempted to share a room in order to save money.
Keys in hand, we head back to Horny to grab our bags. I pop the trunk, grabbing the duffel where I’ve packed clothes and toothbrush and shit, and wait for her to grab one of her nine hundred bags.
I look over impatiently when I see her simply surveying the contents. “I don’t think this place has a bellhop, Hawkins.”
She purses her lips. “Trying to figure out which bags I put which stuff in.”
I grunt in frustration. “You didn’t pack a go bag?”
She laughs. “A go bag? Simmer down there, Bourne.”
“You’re telling me you have a road trip diary with stupid stickers, but not a road trip bag?”
She scratches her temple. “Oops?”
“Unbelievable,” I mutter, shoving my own duffel at her. “Which ones? I’ll bring them in tonight, but then you repack it all into one.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see her salute mockingly, and five minutes later I’m hauling three bulging bags, two of them pink, toward our rooms.
Lucy unlocks her door first, and it opens with a tired creak. I follow her into the room, not all that surprised by the slight smell of mildew, nor by the fugly bedspread.
I drop her bags unceremoniously on the bed, intending to grab my own bag and get the hell out of here, either for a shower or a beer, I haven’t decided yet.
I pause when I see her expression.
“Come on,” I say, nudging the strap of my bag off her slim shoulder, trying to ignore the fact that I can feel the heat of her skin even through her T-shirt. “Surely at fifty bucks a night you weren’t expecting anything more.”
“No,” she says with a cheerful little smile. “It’s just…someday, Reece. Someday…”
I stiffen, freezing for a split second as I sling my bag over my own shoulder. Someday. It’s so her.
She’s always been more obsessed with someday than today.
It’s a game she used to love, starting back when we were kids, taking turns with far-off dreams.
Someday, I’ll get my braces off.
Someday, I’ll have my first kiss.
Someday, I’ll tell my family about us.
Someday, we’ll do this in a bigger bed.
Someday, I’ll be the darling of Napa.
“Someday what?” I snap, wondering how much bigger and more precocious her dreams have become.
“Someday, we’ll drop the Mercedes off at valet at a four-star resort, mints on the pillow and champagne chilling.”
Lucy smiles up at me, a little shy and a lot happy, her face so damn expectant it feels like a kick in the nuts.
“As I thought,” I snap. “You’re more of a snob now than you were at eighteen.”
I brush past her, jerking the flimsy door open.
“Reece?” her voice is tentative, a little hurt.
I turn back, meet her eyes. “You know the biggest flaw with your latest someday scenario?” I ask, letting a sneer curl my lip. “There might be a fancy hotel in your future, maybe even the Mercedes, but there sure as hell is not, and will never be, a we.”
I step out into the bright sunshine, not waiting for a response as I slam the door behind me.
Why bother?
Whatever things we might have needed to say to each other once don’t matter anymore.
Chapter 11
LUCY, NINE, REECE, TEN
“This is stupid. I want to play baseball.”
“You can’t,” Lucy told her brother as she adjusted the doily atop her head. “Mom said you have to play with me and Brandi since it’s her birthday.”
Five-year-old Brandi nodded. “And I want to play wedding.”
Ten-year-old Craig sighed with big-brother exasperation. “If you’re going to play wedding, shouldn’t you want to be the bride?”
Brandi scowled at him from where she stood on top of a beat-up cooler to bring her up to her playmates’ heights. “The bride is boring. I want to be the pastor.”
“Fine,” Craig said, kicking at a tuft of grass. “But why do I have to be the usher?”
“Well you can’t be the groom, because Spock’s the bride, and sisters can’t marry brothers,” Brandi said with impeccable little-kid logic.
Craig scowled at Lucy, as though it was her fault, and she merely shrugged. “She has a point.”
“Can we, um, just get this over with?” Reece Sullivan asked, tugging at an ancient red bow tie that Lucy and Brandi had commandeered from their dad’s closet.
Brandi gave him a curious look, her crooked ponytail touching her shoulder as she studied him. “You don’t want to be the groom?”
Reece made a face. “I don’t want to get married. Ever.”
Brandi’s face turned red, the sure sign of a full-on tantrum, and Lucy rushed to mollify the birthday girl.
“Come on guys, let’s just get this over with. We’ll be quick, and it’ll make Brandi happy.”
“How come you’re not more annoyed?” Craig asked, giving Lucy a suspicious look. “You were supposed to ride bikes with Robin.”
“I wanted to do something nice for my sister,” Lucy said with a serene smile.
C
raig rolled his eyes, and Brandi beamed, both taking her answer at face value.
As Reece and Lucy stood before “Reverend Brandi” and pretended to exchange vows, she snuck a glance at Reece, saw him giving her a knowing look.
She broke eye contact, and bit her lip, wondering if he knew. Wondering if he knew as well as she did, that someday…
They’d be exchanging vows for real.
Chapter 12
Lucy
When I’d planned this road trip, I’d thought I’d be doing it alone—and I thought I’d prepared myself for a little jab of the loneliness of rolling through a strange city all by myself.
But sitting here at the cute Wilmington restaurant I’d bookmarked weeks ago, I realize that there’s something worse than traveling alone.
It’s worse to travel with someone who absolutely despises you. To be sitting all alone at a four-top table, not because of circumstance, but because your travel companion can’t stand the sight of you.
I suppose that’s not fair. The loathing is mutual. And I’m pretty sure I hate him for what he did more than he hates me. Which begs the question. Why does he hate me?
I’ve never quite understood that part.
He’s the one who messed up.
He’s the one who was making out with another girl within hours of getting in my pants for the first time.
Me: the wronged.
Him: the wronger.
But it hadn’t felt that way in the motel this afternoon. It had felt like he hated me.
I take a sip of my better-than-expected chardonnay and mentally kick myself for going there with him today. The stupid Someday game had just rolled off my tongue. Apparently the past six years of heartbreak weren’t enough to erase the ten that came before that. The decade of my life where Reece wasn’t just a part of my life, he was my life. My everything.
The server comes over, asks if I want to order another glass of wine, and well, what the hell, sure I do. The restaurant is walking distance to the motel; I can stumble home if necessary.
I hold off ordering my food, figuring I might as well stretch out the dinner since I’m not exactly dying to get back to the gross motel. Plus, I can sleep in a bit tomorrow, get a later start. Our next stop is Savannah, which is hardly some several days’ grueling drive from Wilmington.
