Small Town Hearts

by Lillie Vale

  Chad didn’t move away, but he dropped his arms. They hung limp at his sides.

  “Hey. C’mon. Talk to me.” I caught his hands, even though they were like unyielding marble. “Don’t shut me out.”

  “Did she tell you why?” His voice was hoarse. “Because she didn’t really give me a reason.”

  “I … no.”

  “Really?” He shot me a confused look.

  I shook my head. “I didn’t even know until a few minutes ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “She … she may have said something about wanting a fresh start. Um, because of starting college in the fall. I think she just wants to feel new again. Like she’s someone else.”

  “She could always change her mind. You know how she gets,” he said. “Just blowing off steam. Because I didn’t want to have dinner with her grandparents after graduation.” He waved his hand, crumpled face now looking a bit less hopeless.

  He made it sound like it was easier if Penny had decided to end things on a whim. Maybe because it meant she could decide to un-end things on a whim, too.

  “It isn’t like those times.” I drew my lips under my teeth, letting my jaw apply blunt pressure, blunt pain. “She was for real. I think she meant it. No, no, she did mean it.”

  Some of the hope dwindled from his face. I hated that I was the one who had caused it.

  He took a deep breath, tilting his face to the side. “Wait, so what does ‘feeling new’ mean, anyway? Be someone else?” Seeming to skip from denial straight to anger, his voice turned sharp. “Or be with someone else?”

  The distinction was just one word, but it was so much more than that. The air was sucked out of me. Oh, God. I hadn’t thought of that. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she could want to be with someone else—someone who wasn’t Chad.

  “I bet it’s fucking Vince,” he said. “He’s always hanging around her. Maybe it’s already started between the two of them.” He slid his eyes to me, nostrils flared. “You’d tell me if it was like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course I would. If I thought she’d messed around behind your back, do you think I would be doing this for her? You know me a hell of a lot better than that,” I fired back. “She doesn’t want to be with you anymore. I’m sorry. She asked me to tell you so she didn’t have to. I have no idea if it has anything to do with Vince or any other guy.” I hesitated before saying, “And it had nothing to do with your not going out to eat after graduation.”

  It didn’t. I would have known if it had, because Penny had just rolled her eyes when Chad said he was going to get baked with the guys instead. At Penny’s insistence, I’d gone in his place.

  “I should still talk to her,” said Chad, looking more unmoored than I’d ever seen him. “Maybe we can still figure this out.”

  “You shouldn’t,” I said, jumping in front of him when he started to turn around. “It’d just make things worse. More awkward.”

  His eyes searched mine, raw and hesitant. “She really doesn’t want me there, does she?”

  It would be another dagger in his back if I confirmed it. I settled for saying nothing, but even that said it all.

  My silence drew a brittle laugh from him. “Yeah. Okay. Great.” He threw his hands in the air. “Thanks for the message.”

  “I didn’t want to,” I said, voice small. “You’re both my best friends. It was awkward for me, too, you know.”

  “For you? It doesn’t even affect you.” He paused. “Shit, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. You’re part of this, too. I didn’t mean it like—”

  I wrapped my arms around myself. “No, you did. It’s fine. I was being—I didn’t think before I spoke. I know you’re hurting worse than me.”

  Chad’s face was bathed in shadow. The sun had already dipped beyond view, the golden dusk giving way to dusty lavender. His face tilted in the direction of Penny’s houseboat, looking more faraway than I’d ever seen him.

  I wasn’t so sure my being here was helpful. She should have been the one to break things off, properly. I’d thought maybe she was right at first, that I’d be able to do it gently and without drama, but now …

  My stomach lurched. Penny was a coward.

  Whether it was me or her, it didn’t matter who did the hurting. It hurt Chad either way.

  Self-loathing burned through me. I’d been flattered Penny thought that I had a way with Chad, that I was better with him than she was. But what about this was better? I could see it the way he saw it. Humiliation, to be told by a friend rather than his girlfriend. Shock, that it came out of nowhere. Hurt, that a relationship of four years didn’t even merit a face-to-face conversation.

  I couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “God, this is so fucked up, isn’t it?” I said. “Do you want to—I mean, if you wanted, we could go for a drive along the highway. Or head back to my place. If you want to just get away for a little while…” I trailed off, blinking. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Chad smiled. It was tinged with sadness, but it was still there. “You’re always thinking of me,” he said, fondness coming through in the way his smile reached his eyes, crinkling the outer corners. “You’re a great friend, you know?”

  Before I could answer, he took a step closer. And then he was everywhere, invading my space with his strong arms and broad chest. With his face buried in the crook of my neck and my blonde hair tangled between us, I hugged him back.

  The heaviness that had settled in a leaden pit in my stomach didn’t disappear, but lessened somehow. I was cocooned by the scent of warm sunshine on his skin and spicy aftershave, and his hug felt like forgiveness.

  He was the first to pull back. His arms tightened around me, all hard muscle and bare skin. His fingertips electrified. The moment was charged, and I knew we were on the precipice of something.

  “Babe,” he began to say.

  I tensed, pressing my lips together. The softness in his voice, the tenderness in his eyes …

  “Maybe … maybe we could give you and me a go,” he continued.

  There was something so comforting about being in the arms of someone you loved, but this—no, this was wrong. We couldn’t have this conversation. Penny trusted us, trusted me.

  Chad fell silent.

  It was a warm summer night, but my body flashed cold. I knew what he wanted to say. He’d said it before, once, when we were drunk and Penny had fallen asleep. In the hazy dreaminess of dawn, while the gentle sways of Penny’s houseboat lulled us into sleepiness, he’d whispered, “I love you, Babe.”

  We’d never spoken about it. In the light of day, I hadn’t wanted to bring it up, hadn’t wanted to know in what way he meant it. Later, it was easier to just assume he loved me as a friend—of course that was how he meant it, and I felt the same. But it always hung between us as the last real thing we’d shared.

  “It could have been you,” he said, breaking the silence.

  His voice sounded too loud and too everywhere. Our hips were still touching, so with one soft push on his chest, I put space between us again. “What are you talking about?”

  “You and Penny,” said Chad. He ducked his head as if embarrassed. “I liked you both. It was just that she asked me out first.”

  Something inside me sparked. It was half anger, half interest. I stifled the latter to focus on the former. He had liked us both? As if the outcome didn’t matter, as if Penny didn’t matter. What an asshole.

  “Wow,” I scoffed. “That’s pretty shitty. We’re not interchangeable.”

  “That’s not how I meant it!” Chad looked up, eyes flaring with emotion. “You’re both my best friends. I love you both.”

  Years ago, I’d been at Penny’s house for a sleepover when she’d dared me to call him and ask him out. I’d been too chicken, so she’d grabbed the phone from me and raced to the bathroom. I’d gone screeching after her, freaked out that she would say something dumb and embarrass me. She’d locked the door behind her, cackling, turning it off ju
st long enough to very sweetly ask for Chad when his mom picked up the phone.

  I had no idea how long I’d waited outside the door, uncertainty and excitement giving me that prickly having-to-pee feeling. Would he say yes? Or would he think it was super weird that I didn’t have the guts to ask him out myself? When it finally opened, Penny was the one who had the date with Chad, not me. She hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted him back then, not even when I shoved my way into her bathroom and slammed the door. I stayed there for half an hour, pretending I was sick, even when Mrs. Wang came to ask if I was okay.

  I didn’t want a reason to feel more upset right now. Hearing that it could have so easily been me wasn’t the soothing balm that Chad had intended. It was dumping the whole salt shaker into an open wound.

  The space between my eyes was beginning to hurt. “I should go.”

  “Babe, wait.”

  “You’re her boyfriend,” I said heatedly, but he cut me off.

  “Ex-boyfriend.” Chad exhaled. “Remember?”

  I glared. Considering what had just happened, I wasn’t likely to forget.

  He lifted his hand tentatively, stopping centimeters away from my face. When I didn’t move, he brushed his knuckles across my cheekbone. The featherlight tenderness seemed out of place somehow. Everything about this seemed out of place. “I wish,” said Chad, “that it had been you. Maybe things would be different now.”

  There had been a time that I wished it had been me, too. Once, long ago.

  But Penny had never let me feel, not for one instant, like I was the third wheel. Every step of their relationship, I’d been there. Every up and every down. She asked me to go birthday shopping with her, let me pick out a shirt for Chad that matched his eyes. She deferred to my judgment when I told her to give him some space. She asked me to spend the night, all three of us curled up in her bed, after an exhausting night of partying.

  I knew what I owed her for wanting me as much as she wanted him. I also knew she would view the words Chad was saying—and the old, decrepit emotions he was stirring—as disloyalty.

  “There hasn’t been anyone for you since Elodie left,” he murmured. “And now I don’t have anyone, either.”

  His implication was clear. But was he really saying what I thought he was? Or was he just looking for some comfort in a what-could-have-been?

  Flustered, I tried to find the right words. “It doesn’t work like that. Just because we’re both single doesn’t mean that—” I broke off, dropping my eyes to the sand.

  “We make sense. We could just try it. See how we feel after.” Chad took a step closer. And then another one. “Maybe it’ll be magic.”

  My head hurt, but it had nothing on the excruciating sensation that was sporadically clenching and unclenching my heart. Was he as afraid to be alone as I was? We were back on the precipice, but this time, I didn’t want to pull away.

  I wanted to fall.

  So when Chad bridged the distance between us and tipped his head down to mine, I let myself fall over the edge. As his lips settled on mine and his hands squeezed my hips, I kissed him back not for myself, but for the girl I used to be.

  For the part of myself, no matter how small, that still fluttered when he said he wished it had been me and him for the last four years.

  I wasn’t falling for him, I knew that. My feelings for Chad were very much in the past tense, faded into nostalgia. I was just falling for the moment. The what-could-have-been. The what-almost-was.

  But this wasn’t just a fall. This was a ruination.

  three

  When I woke up the next morning, it took a second for everything to sink in. And when it did, queasiness quickly followed. I stumbled to the bathroom, desperate to brush the bad taste out of my mouth. Last night’s whiplash was still fresh in my mind. The way everything had gone so wrong, so fast. Perfect summer with my best friends? Ha! Whatever we were now, whatever this was … it was the antithesis of perfect. But a little trick I’d learned after Elodie left was that baking would get my mind off things. I was usually an early riser, but today I woke even before the sun came up and made my way, bleary-eyed, to the kitchen. It was time to cookie.

  Within minutes, my narrow galley kitchen was in disarray. Flour, sugar, and eggs lined the counter in bowls, and by the time the oven had preheated, my arm was sore from mixing. A few drops of vanilla and a handful of dark chocolate chunks later, I had my cookie batter ready. I laid out two dozen cookies on my baking trays, sprinkled them with sea salt and crushed pistachio, and then into the oven they went.

  There was no time to rest, though. I still had the doughnuts to make. Using the same ingredients, I browned butter in a saucepan before mixing it with everything else, then poured the cake doughnut batter into molds. I popped them into the oven right as the cookies came out.

  While I worked, I focused just on the task right in front of me. The tacky feel of the dough in my hands, the ache in my shoulder as I whisked. The aroma of warm sugar escaping when the oven opened, the crunch of the sweet and salty pistachio cookies when I bit into them.

  It was only when the doughnuts came out that my flurry of activity came to a stop, and the world came rushing back. Penny. Chad. My perfect summer hanging in the balance of what could potentially turn into A Great Big Thing.

  I sighed, leaning against my now-spotless counters. It had been such a mistake returning Chad’s kiss last night. It wasn’t a bad kiss, exactly, but it wasn’t a good one, either. If he’d been waiting for some magical moment full of fireworks and electricity, this wasn’t it. I thought of myself as a pretty good kisser, but the total lack of anything on his face had given it all away—this wasn’t the outcome he’d been expecting. Nostalgia wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. The kiss hadn’t meant anything to either of us.

  Our friendship would change when both of my best friends started college. Even though Oar’s Rest Tech was right in town, I couldn’t count on things staying the same. Maybe they’d make new friends. Maybe I’d be the one to drift away like a lost kite, no one to chase after me. I squeezed my eyes shut against the image. There were a thousand things that could happen. Maybe Chad would finally buckle down and start taking school seriously. Maybe Penny would make new girlfriends, people in her marine technology program who would share her interests. What was holding the three of us together, after all? High school? Memories? Blurry nights of booze?

  Chad was right. We hadn’t talked about anything real in a long time. These days it was all houseboat parties and lying around on the beach. Penny reveled in her role as party hostess—for her, fun usually involved a bottle or three. Chad and his friend John were fixing up a car together. And then there was me. Stuck in limbo. Penny had clearly changed, but I hadn’t. I was still the same Babe. I didn’t want things to change. And if they did, I didn’t want it to be now. Not when we still had the summer for ourselves. I’d worry about everything else when it happened.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Penny swung by my lighthouse home with a four-pack of ginger beer tucked into the basket of her bubblegum-pink bike. “Hey!” she called out.

  Using the wooden stepladder, I made my way down to the ground-floor kitchen to open the door. The third floor was the bathroom and laundry room, separated by a wall; the second floor was a cozily cramped living room with all my furniture pointed at a bookshelf instead of a television. I could still remember the look on my friends’ faces when they asked for my nonexistent Wi-Fi password. I preferred books to TV—any shows I sat through were usually just to bond with my mom. When I was younger, it was Sex and the City reruns. Now it was anything with glamorous, high-powered middle-aged women, and she watched them with her roommate, Abby. If I wanted to watch anything, I made do with the data on my phone and the public library’s hot spot.

  From my fourth-floor bedroom, I’d seen Penny coming. I swung the door open before she even had to knock. “Hey,” I said breathlessly, running a hand through my hair like I had been in a rush
to answer the door and not because I’d been standing behind it for a minute freaking out.

  Her eyes zeroed in on the tote slung over my shoulder. “Where are you off to?” she asked, forehead scrunching.

  “Work.” I had a long shift today at the Busy Bean.

  Honestly, I was glad to have the excuse not to linger and chat. With my kiss with Chad still branded on my memory—and my lips—it was impossible not to feel the scorch of guilt. Yes, they were broken up, but I doubted she would see it that way. It wouldn’t matter that I didn’t want to be with Chad, or take something that was hers, but it still felt like a betrayal. And I knew that.

  I pulled the door shut behind me and pretended not to see Penny’s face fall.

  She touched the neck of one of the ginger-beer bottles. “I was thinking we could hang out. I just wanted to say thanks for handling…” Her hand fluttered between us. “You know, everything with Chad.”

  “Yeah, no, absolutely.”

  “You said he took it okay?” Penny paused, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. “He’s cool still being friends?”

  After he kissed me, the only thing I was concerned with was pretending it hadn’t happened. We hadn’t talked about what the breakup would mean for him and Penny. We’d parted ways, both flustered and reeling from the mistake, and I’d beat a retreat back to my lighthouse. But under her scrutiny, I could only give a tense, jerky nod. What else could I do?

  In the twinkling twilight, it had been so easy to let the world fade away. I could still see the recklessness in his eyes, feel the warm breeze against my neck. The chatter on the beach and the crashing of the waves. I could remember what it felt like to be a kid again and to want Chad to want me the way he wanted Penny. But I’d known, even before we kissed, that I wasn’t that girl anymore. That was what no one told you about the road not taken. You can’t go back to the start of something that was never yours to begin with. Sometimes you just had to deal with taking the wrong exit ramp.

  Penny exhaled. “Well, thanks. It was pretty cool of you to help me out.”