“I mean it. Get in the fucking house. Now.” His tone told me not to argue. His stance was angry.
Frankly, it scared me a little.
With my heart pounding and my breath caught in my chest, I turned away from him, ran up the steps and into the house, shutting the front door behind me.
By the time I looked out the living room window, he was gone.
As soon as I got to my room, I picked up my phone and looked at the time: 9:57 PM. Emme was so tired these days, I didn’t want to take the chance of waking her, so I called Maren. It was still early in Oregon.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Hey. How’s it going with Grams?”
“Fine.” I sighed. “Grams is fine.”
“But you’re not?”
“I don’t know what I am.”
“I heard about Buzz. Sorry, Stell.”
“It’s okay. It’s not like he broke my heart or anything. I just feel stupid that I didn’t see it coming.”
“I know. But don’t. Just move on to someone better.”
I stared up at the ceiling in the dark. “Maren, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Have you ever felt like you have no idea what you’re doing? Like on the outside everyone thinks you’ve got your shit together, but on the inside you have this sinking feeling you’ve been faking it and pretty soon everybody is going to figure it out?”
“Stella, what’s going on?”
I blinked back tears. “I don’t know. For years I’ve felt like I was at least ninety-five percent shit-together and five percent neurotic mess, but now I feel like the scales are tipping and pretty soon my crazy is going to start to show. I mean, why can’t I get this girl-boy thing right?”
A pause. “Honey, have you been drinking?”
“No. I mean yes, but that was earlier. Before I made a total ass out of myself.”
“What are you talking about?”
Sighing deeply, I told her the whole story—how Grams was clearly trying to set me up with her neighbor, how he turned out to be this sexy, complicated ex-Marine I couldn’t stop thinking about, how reluctant he’d been to talk to me, how Grams had given me a makeover and sent me over there with a pie she claimed was magic.
At that point, Maren was cracking up. “I’m sorry,” she said, wheezing, “I know it’s not supposed to be a funny story, but I’m just picturing you going over there looking like Marilyn Monroe in Grams’s little clothes and holding a pie.”
“It was only her sweater,” I said testily. “And her pearls.”
“Oh God, the pearls,” she gasped. “I cannot wait until Emme hears all this.”
“And she gave me all this ridiculous advice about how to flirt with him.” I started to smile in spite of myself.
“Like what? Drop a hankie and let him pick it up? Bat your lashes over the top of a fan? Swoon so he could catch you?”
I was laughing now, too. “No, no. My only prop was the pie, but it seemed to work. He loved it.”
“So what went wrong?”
“I have no idea. He invited me in and we sat at his kitchen table eating pie and chatting. I was just trying to get to know him better, but I asked about his military service, and that must have set him off because the next thing I knew he was all defensive and angry, telling me how he doesn’t need a therapist.”
“Oh dear. Were you in your therapist mode? Trying to probe his brain and analyze his thoughts?”
“No,” I said, offended. “At least, I don’t think so.”
“Sometimes I think you do it without even realizing it.”
I bit my lip. “Maybe. But it’s only because I’m curious. People fascinate me. And I care.”
“So then what happened?”
“Well, the conversation basically ended with him saying he’s not interested in me, so I left. Then I sat down on Grams’s front porch steps to contemplate what an idiot I’d been—and that’s where he found me.”
She sucked in her breath. “Found you?”
“Yeah. He came over to apologize. Said he’d felt bad about the way I’d left. And he said he was interested.
Another gasp. “And then?”
“Then I threw myself at him.”
“What?” she squealed. “You did not.”
“Well, I told him to kiss me.”
“Did he?”
“Yes.” Thinking about that kiss made my insides warm. I turned onto my side and curled into a ball, as if I didn’t want to let the feeling get away.
“And?” Her voice rose an octave.
“And it was the hottest, sexiest, most amazing kiss of my entire life. Pretty sure I’d have taken my clothes off right there on Grams’s front lawn if he asked me to.”
“Omigod!”
“But then he pushed me away and told me to go in the house.”
“Why?”
“No idea.”
“You think he could be married?”
I hesitated. “I suppose it’s possible. Grams said his wife left him, and he definitely lives alone, but who knows?”
“Well, I know things didn’t exactly go your way tonight, but I love that you went after him. I think it’s healthy. You’re too careful with your feelings.”
I sighed. “Maybe, but then something like this happens and it reminds me why being careful is better than being reckless.”
“Listen, don’t give up. Maybe he’s … I don’t know, religious or something. Maybe his divorce isn’t final.”
“Maybe he’s just not that into me.”
“But he said he was!”
“Actions speak louder than words in this case.” I rolled onto my back again. “I just hope I don’t run into him before I leave. I don’t think I could look him in the eye.”
“Well, he’s crazy if he doesn’t want you,” my sister said. “I think he does need a therapist.”
I laughed a little. “Thanks. Love you.”
“Love you too. Thanks for taking care of Grams.”
We hung up and I got ready for bed, where I lay on my back and blinked at the ceiling. That kiss. That kiss. That kiss. I touched my lips, wondering if he was sorry he’d done it. He’d seemed into it, but then he’d gotten so mad. Was he angry with me? Or with himself?
I wondered if he’d gone to bed yet. Did he sleep naked?
The thought sent a warm rush through my body.
I closed my eyes and tried to relax, but it was a long time before the tension in my body eased enough for me to fall asleep.
Twelve
Ryan
What the actual fuck was wrong with me?
I tossed and turned all night long, alternately congratulating myself on doing the right thing and hating myself for it. And I didn’t even want to think about the revenge my dick was going to exact on me. It was probably going to refuse to get hard ever again.
But I had done the right thing, hadn’t I? The selfless thing?
So what if she’d been willing to come home with me and overlook the fact that all I had was a shitty mattress on the floor? So what if she’d have let me get my mouth on her, those mile-long legs wrapped around my neck, those full, firm breasts in my hands? So what if she might have stayed for hours and let me fuck her with my tongue, my fingers, my cock? So what if she would have made me come so hard I nearly believed in God again?
It didn’t matter, I told myself, because it would have meant using her just so I could let myself feel something again, and that was an asshole move.
She was kind and thoughtful and made the most delicious pie I’d ever tasted (sorry, Mom). She had sweet dreams about me and believed I was a good man. She was the first woman in a long time that made me wish I were.
She deserved better than a one-night stand on the floor in this decrepit old house with a messed up guy like me.
Still. It was a long fucking night.
“Woods. You with me?”
I realized Mack had been giving me instructions about
something and I’d zoned out. “Sorry. Can you say that again?”
“What’s with you today?” Mack was sitting behind his desk—it was still strange for me to see him like that—going over a list of projects that needed to be finished before the first snowfall. I was sitting in a chair across from him thinking about Stella’s perfect lips and how good her body had felt against mine.
And also the pie. Not gonna lie.
“Sorry, guess I’m a little distracted.” I frowned and looked down at the empty page where I was supposed to be taking some notes.
Mack leaned back in his chair. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re a lying sack of shit.”
I almost smiled.
He tossed his pen on the desk and shut his laptop. “Tell you what. Let’s go get a beer and some wings or something. It’s almost six and I didn’t eat much lunch today.”
“Me neither.”
We agreed to meet at Hop Lot Brewing Co., which was south of downtown. Arriving just a few minutes apart—me on my bike, Mack in his SUV—we sat at the bar, shook hands with the two brothers who owned the place, and ordered a couple locally brewed IPAs along with some wings.
“God, I’m so fucking hungry,” Mack said, shrugging out of his denim jacket.
“Same.” I kept my brown leather on, even though I was a little warm. I had USMC tattooed on my left arm, and I didn’t feel like talking about it tonight. Had I known how many ignorant comments and questions I’d get from the general public about it, I might have thought twice before putting those letters in such a visible place.
“I really need to learn how to cook. My kids are going to starve.” Mack had three daughters—three—with his soon-to-be ex-wife, Carla, whom I’d met only once, which had been enough. He had his kids almost every weekend and every other Tuesday night.
“Was last night one of your Tuesdays?” I asked as the bartender set two full glasses down in front of us.
“Yeah. We had takeout.”
“Pizza again?”
He shook his head and picked up his beer. “Millie’s on some kind of diet where she won’t eat bread.”
“Diet?” I paused with my glass halfway to my mouth. “Isn’t she like nine years old?”
“Ten,” he answered after a healthy couple of swallows. “But she listens to every word her mother says, and Carla has decided that bread is the enemy. But not just bread—anything with wheat in it.”
“Isn’t that like, half the possible foods on the planet?”
Mack nodded and tossed back some more beer. “Yeah. I know how to make exactly three things for them: microwave mac and cheese, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and chicken nuggets. All of which are deadly now, apparently.”
“Damn. Sorry, brother.”
We sipped in silence for a minute, then he spoke again. “It’s fucking crazy, you know? You think you have it all figured out—the wife, the kids, the future—and then boom. It all goes up in smoke.”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure what exactly had gone wrong in Mack’s marriage and didn’t want to ask, but I did want him to know he could trust me. “I hear you.”
“I keep looking back, trying to pinpoint the moment it started to burn, and I can’t find it.”
“I couldn’t either.”
“Why is that, you think? Are we more fucked in the head than we realize?”
“I don’t know.” I’d wondered the same thing about a million times. Not all of us came back damaged, I’d said to Stella last night. But maybe we had. Maybe it was impossible not to.
“I mean, I know guys that lost legs. Fuck, I knew guys who didn’t come back at all. Sometimes I think, what the fuck is wrong with me that I can’t handle this—regular life?”
I shook my head. Tipped up my beer. “We know too much,” I said quietly.
He looked over at me. “You think that’s it?”
“Yeah. I do.”
We sat in silence for a minute, each of us trying not to think about the same things.
“You heard from Bones lately?” Mack asked. Tommy “Bones” Neilson was one of the guys in our squad, a skinny kid from some small town in Iowa where he grew up milking cows in the morning before school. Like the rest of us, he’d struggled to adjust to life back at home, despite a close-knit family and a girlfriend he was devoted to. He was young—too young to go through what we went through—and we’d all been protective of him.
“Yeah,” I said. “He messaged me a few times last week. Sent some pics of the squad.” Which I deleted, but I hadn’t told Bones that. I loved those guys like brothers, but I had no desire to revisit those days.
“Did he seem okay?”
I shrugged. “What’s okay?”
Mack grimaced. “Right.”
Our wings arrived, and we ate them hungrily, then ordered more, plus another beer apiece.
“So what’s bothering you?” he asked once our glasses were full again and our bellies were at least less empty. “I can tell there’s something.”
I shrugged. “Not exactly sure.”
“Bullshit.”
That was the problem with Mack. He knew me too well. I exhaled and rubbed the back of my neck. “There’s this girl—woman.”
“There always is.”
“Ha. Well, this one is Mrs. Gardner’s granddaughter. Stella.”
“Oh yeah. I think I might have met her a few years ago. Tall blonde? Kind of quiet?”
I nodded. “That’s her. Mrs. Gardner introduced us, and … I don’t know, there’s just something about her. I can’t get her out of my head. Last night she brought me this apple pie …” My eyes closed reverently, and I might have moaned.
Mack laughed. “She knows your weakness.”
“Apparently.”
“She’s visiting?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you take her to dinner at the inn?”
“Because the more I talk to her, the more I like her. And I don’t really want to like her.”
“Why not?”
“What’s the point?”
Mack shook his head. “Dude. You need to get laid.”
I frowned. “I probably could have last night. We messed around a little, but I stopped things before they got out of hand.”
He stared at me like I’d sprouted horns. “Why?”
“Because she told me she thinks I’m honorable. One of the good guys. And I kind of like thinking there’s one beautiful woman in the world who believes I’m a decent human being.”
He sighed. “Take her to dinner, Woods. Just dinner, okay? You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do after that, but I think you’ve been holed up alone in that house long enough. It’s fucking with you.”
On the ride back from Hop Lot, I had an idea.
When I got home, I put my bike away and dug around in the garage for some materials. I still had the tools I’d borrowed from Cloverleigh to fix Mrs. Gardner’s porch as well as some leftover boards, so all I needed was some rope. I couldn’t find any lying around, so I jumped back on my bike and headed to a hardware store. The one in town was already closed, so I had to go almost all the way to Traverse City. By the time I got back, it was long past dark, but I got to work anyway.
I cut and sanded a piece of wood for the seat, wishing I had time to paint it but unwilling to be that patient. I drilled holes in the plank for the ropes, then took everything into Mrs. Gardner’s yard.
There were several trees along the back fence that might have worked, but I remembered Stella had said it was a birch tree, and there was a large one over toward my yard. I glanced at the house, finding it completely dark. They were probably both asleep, since it was almost eleven. Hopefully I could stay quiet enough that I wouldn’t wake them. I didn’t want them to hear a noise and be scared.
Locating a solid branch on the tree, I secured the ropes, tugging on them to make sure it would hold, then slipped the ends through the holes in the seat and tied two simpl
e knots so the seat hung about two feet off the ground. It hung slightly uneven, so I redid the knot on one side until it was level.
Standing back, I looked at the swing and imagined what Stella would say when she noticed it. She’d know it was me who did it, right? I wondered if maybe I should—
“Ryan?”
Startled, I turned around to find Stella standing a few feet away on the grass, wearing a T-shirt and pajama pants, arms crossed over her chest. Her feet were bare, and her hair was loose around her shoulders and a little messy, like she’d already been asleep. Thinking about her in bed did things to my insides. “Hey. Did I wake you?”
“I was awake. My windows are open, and I heard something and thought I saw you through the window. What are you doing?”
“Uh, building you a swing. But it was supposed to be a surprise.” Now that she’d caught me at it, I was kind of embarrassed. What if she thought this was stupid?
“You built me a swing?” She came a little closer, and I realized she might not be able to see it in the dark. The moon was only a sliver tonight.
“Yeah.” I grabbed one of the ropes. “Right here.”
She stared at it. “Why?”
“I’m not entirely sure.”
Her eyes met mine, and my heart pumped harder.
“Want to try it?” I asked.
“Like right now?”
I moved behind it and held both ropes steady. “Come sit.”
She hesitated, and I thought maybe she was going to tell me to quit being weird and go home before she called the cops, but after a few silent seconds, she came toward me. Turned around. Lowered herself to the seat and closed her fingers around the ropes.
“Well?” I asked. “How does it feel? Like you’re a kid again?”
“This was very kind of you, but not necessary.” Her tone was stiffer than her posture.
“Stella.”
She didn’t answer.
“I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“Last night.”
“You’re sorry about what we did?”
“I think I’m more sorry about what we didn’t do.”
Her head turned sharply, and she looked at me over one shoulder. “You sure know how to confuse a girl.”
One and Only Boxed Set Page 59
