by L. E. Bross
“I’m not trying to piss you off, man,” Seth said. He sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re just always taking care of everyone else, and I’d like to see someone taking care of you for a change.”
I finally managed to swallow and pushed the plate away. No way was I getting any more down right now. Not while Seth insisted on being a Grade A asshole.
“Oh, I’m taken care of just fine, thank you.” I lifted an eyebrow so he would not miss the double meaning. “And I appreciate the thought, but it isn’t gonna happen. I like how things are. I got decent money in the bank, a good job, and I’m not shackled to one woman. It’s the life for me.”
And Seth needed to drop this line of conversation before shit got ugly.
“I’ll drop it, okay? I just want you to be happy.” Seth reached over and clapped me on the shoulder. “If Shari helps, then keep doing what you’re doing. I won’t piss you off about it again.”
The anger faded. He had my back. Seth knew better than anyone else what my mother’s leaving had done to me and my dad.
“I get it, man, but what you have, it’s just not for me.” I grabbed my plate and pulled it back over. I was suddenly so hungry again that even this nasty excuse for a meal was looking appealing. “So Avery’s at the club with her parents today? Without you? Her mother still hasn’t warmed to the idea of you two, huh?”
Seth choked back a laugh. “She fucking hates me. It’s awesome. I begged Ave to let me go with her, just to see the look on her mom’s face.”
I shook my head. “You are crazy.” How the hell had he gone from prison to dating the daughter of the fucking mayor? No matter, he was happy and on track to make something of himself and I was proud as shit of him. I always knew he’d be the one to get out.
Me?
I planned on making sure my old man was taken care of and that meant I’d probably never live anywhere other than the esteemed Granite Estates trailer park.
This was my life, and nothing was going to change that.
“So Sunday, concert in the park. You, Shari, me, and Ave? I hear there’s a picnic involved.”
Shari had mentioned something about that the last time we were together. Her dad was some big-deal music exec and often asked her to go check out bands with her friends. Sounded like a good time. I laughed. “Who would have thought we’d be picnicking in a fucking park listening to live music? On purpose?”
Seth laughed. “If Ave asked me to walk across a tightrope dressed in a tutu, I’d do it.”
The thing was, he wasn’t joking. He loved Avery enough to do anything she asked, and that’s what scared the living hell out of me the most.
I hated grocery shopping.
Usually Dad and I managed with a pizza or subs every night, but we still needed essentials every couple of weeks. I had my chicken-scratch list in my hand.
I’d stopped at the Discount Food Mart two blocks from our trailer park. The place was a zoo even though it was evening by now, and bored-looking cashiers didn’t seem to notice the lines of people at their registers. Typical really.
I knew where everything was and could shop blindfolded, so I had my basket of stuff pretty fast and got into the closest line. I grabbed a king-size peanut butter cup as my reward for sticking it out and for actually swallowing that sorry excuse Seth called a meal earlier.
A cute kid with blond hair, about three or so, sat in the cart in front of me and looked at my candy bar, then leaned forward and stuck his hand out.
“My candy, pwease?” He gave me a gap-toothed grin that I couldn’t help returning. Couldn’t blame him at all. Peanut butter and chocolate rocked.
And I’ll bet no one told him no with that smile.
The woman who was unloading the cart seemed distracted, muttering numbers under her breath as she shifted items from the cart to the moving belt. I realized she was adding up her total in her head as she went. She stopped for a second and barely glanced at me before she looked at the candy bar and then the boy.
“Sorry, Noah, not today.”
Her hair was twisted up in a loose knot and dark brown pieces stuck out at odd angles. She had on a light green jacket and jeans that hugged her legs very nicely. She didn’t have on any makeup, which was surprising, but I still recognized her.
I would know her anywhere.
The breath left my body.
Tess. She was standing right there in front of me. I’d thought about this moment, about seeing her again, but nothing could have prepared me for the way the ground tilted. Or when a giant invisible vacuum sucked all the sound and light from around me and left me in some black void.
“Candy?” the boy asked again.
“No candy today, Noah.” Her voice rasped against my skin, and I clenched my fingers around the handle of the basket. Her gaze barely skirted higher than my chin, but I still waited for her to recognize me. For a smile. Or a glare. Something that told me she knew who I was.
She didn’t actually look at me, but I couldn’t look away from her. It had been seven years since I’d seen her. She’d moved to Granite Estates to live with her grandmother when she was eight. Three trailers down from me. I couldn’t remember how many summers I spent sitting on her porch sipping sweet lemonade. She was the first girl Seth and I let hang out with us, and she was the first girl I fell in love with when I was fifteen and she was fourteen.
Friendship had turned into love over the years, and I was convinced that we were it. We were going to be the ones who were together forever. Then her grandma got sick and she told me she was going to live with her father. She promised that wouldn’t change anything.
The day she drove off with him, the day after freshman year ended, I believed her with all my heart. And for a while, it seemed like nothing had changed. We still talked every day. She came back to see me, and I took her out on the weekends.
When school started back up, she went to the fancy private academy where her father was a teacher. She stopped calling every day because the coursework was ten times harder than it had been at our public school.
But I still believed her when she said she loved me.
Then something changed. We barely ever saw each other, and when I would call, her father said she was out with friends. It took me six months to figure out the obvious. Six fucking months to stop believing what she had promised me the day she left Granite Estates.
I looked at the kid, Noah, to distract the direction of my thoughts. He had dark brown eyes, the same shade as Tess’s. It hit me in the gut and I almost dropped the basket. This had to be her son.
Questions burned on my tongue. I stared at the back of her head, willing her to turn around again and look at me.
“That’ll be sixty-two fifty-five,” the cashier interrupted.
From behind I saw her shoulders drop. She looked at the belt where the bagger had put almost everything away. “Could you put back the face wipes, please?” she asked quietly.
The cashier looked at the bagger, who exhaled and started digging through the bags. The person behind me groaned. Tess must have heard, because the back of her neck turned fiery red. I wanted to turn around and tell that person to go the fuck right to hell. I might not know what Tess was doing here, but I knew what it felt like to be belittled.
The bagger finally found the face wipes and the cashier swiped them, then set them under the register. “Fifty-seven twenty-two.”
Tess handed her three twenties. As soon as she got her receipt, she ducked her head and pushed the cart away. She didn’t look back at me, didn’t look anywhere but at her hands as she and Noah disappeared out the door. Again the feeling struck me that this was all wrong. She was not the Tess I remembered.
This Tess seemed tired. Defeated.
I stared after her until the cashier cleared her throat. I’d been standing there holding my basket full of stuff like a dumb-as
s. I set my things on the conveyor belt and tucked the basket underneath it.
“Forty-eight eighty-two,” the cashier said. I don’t know what the hell made me do it, but before I could decide otherwise, I opened my mouth. “Add those face wipes on too, will you?”
“The ones that girl left?” the cashier asked. I could see the confusion on her face.
“Yep. And one more candy bar.” I grabbed another peanut butter cup as the woman dressed in a hideous pink velour tracksuit behind me sighed. I looked over my shoulder and smiled the most insincere fucking smile I could manage. “So sorry. Am I keeping you from your hair appointment?”
Her derisive return snort made my day.
The cashier dug the wipes out from under the counter, scanned them and the candy bar, and then gave me my new total. I paid the girl and grabbed my bags, then walked as fast as I could to the doors. I thought I caught a glimpse of a green jacket a little farther down and headed in that direction.
It was like fifteen-year-old Ryan had climbed inside my skin and was driving me toward where Tess loaded her things into a shitty white Honda. I was surprised. I’d expected her to be driving some fancy Mercedes SUV by now.
By the time adult Ryan realized what a crap-assed mistake this was, teenage Ryan had stopped just behind Tess. She slammed the trunk shut and turned to reach for Noah.
That’s when she saw me. And took a step in front of Noah and reached into her purse. I was pretty sure I was about five seconds away from getting maced. I held up my hands, with grocery bags dangling from them, and gave her a half smile.
“Hey, Tess.”
Her hand froze and her eyebrows dipped down. For the first time, she looked straight into my eyes. I waited for the flicker of recognition. My heart thundered against my ribs. It was pretty obvious I’d made a huge mistake.
“I, ah, got these. For you.” I moved the bags to one hand, reached into one and pulled out the wipes and candy bar. Noah immediately reached for the candy and pulled it from my hand. I barely noticed. Tess was looking at me, and I couldn’t look away. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen when we were young, but now?
Now she was the most beautiful woman on the planet.
When she saw the wipes her lips turned down but her chin shot up. “We don’t need charity.”
“It was just an excuse to talk to you. A dumb mistake obviously.” I shook my head. “Enjoy the candy bar, buddy,” I said to Noah. I allowed myself one last look at Tess. I guess seven years is long enough to forget someone who never really mattered much. That burn of not being good enough, one that I had put behind me until right this second, filled my chest. “Good to see you again, Tess.”
Then I turned and started to walk away.
“Ryan?” Her voice was so low that I thought I imagined it. “Ryan.” Louder now and impossible to resist, I stopped. “It is you, isn’t it?” Her voice shook, but still I didn’t turn around. From the moment I saw her in that line, I hadn’t been thinking straight.
What had I expected when I came over?
That she would be glad to see me? That she might tell me she was sorry she stopped calling me without any kind of explanation as to why? What kind of asshole was I to hold on to a broken heart for so long?
She told me a week before she left that her father had money, and even though she never really knew him growing up, he had promised her the best education and a real house in a nice neighborhood and a private school.
That if she lived with him she could really be someone, go places, do things. Things that didn’t include me, apparently. She hadn’t said as much, but I could see it written all over her face—Tess wanted out of her trailer-park life more than she wanted me, and this was her ticket.
Despite her promises.
I didn’t ever tell her that I was afraid I was going to lose her. And then I did. For seven years I wondered if she had done all the things she’d wanted to.
I had the chance to ask her now, but it didn’t even seem important. Resentment burned in my gut as I finished crossing the distance to my truck without looking back and threw my bags into the bed. I knew she was still watching me, because I could feel her gaze like a physical touch.
I jammed the key in the ignition and lowered the window as soon as it started.
Don’t look back.
And then I heard it.
Ticktickticktick.
I knew that sound. Someone’s starter was shot. The back of my neck prickled. No way. But I knew the sound had to be coming from the white Honda. Because that was my fucking luck today.
Ticktickticktick.
Tess could crank the key all she wanted, but there was no way in hell the car was going to start. I banged my head on the steering wheel. What kind of fucked-up universe does something like this?
I could just drive away. She could call whomever she had in her life now and I wouldn’t have to get my hands dirty again. Except I already knew what I was going to do. I turned my key and the engine went quiet.
There was a damsel in distress, and me, I was the fucking knight in shining armor.
CHAPTER THREE
tess
I was shaking so badly I didn’t know if it was my car or my hands giving me the problem.
I could have handled running into anyone from my past except for him. Anyone but Ryan in a discount grocery store. I still hadn’t reconciled the fact that he had been standing close enough to touch only a few minutes ago. Close enough to see the hurt in his eyes when I didn’t recognize him.
It wasn’t my fault. Not really. He’d changed so much from the scrawny kid I grew up with in that run-down trailer park. His shoulders were broad and the T-shirt he had on stretched taut over muscles that had not been there before. The angles of his chin were covered in a shadow of stubble and his dirty-blond hair curled out from under his ball cap.
I thought he was just some guy being a guy. It wasn’t until he lifted his chin up enough and I could see his deep brown eyes that the flicker of recognition shook me to the bone.
I would have known it was him in an instant if I’d gotten more than three hours of sleep last night. When he stood right in front of me, close enough that I could see the flecks of green and gold mixed in with the deep chocolate color, I remembered.
And it felt like someone kicked me in the gut.
It had been seven years, yet it felt like only yesterday now. As I stared into the eyes of the first boy I loved, the one I had planned my forever with, the pain of leaving him in that godforsaken trailer park for what I’d thought was the faraway castle that held all my dreams shot straight into my heart. It hadn’t been my choice, not really; when my father had come for me, I wasn’t in a place to say no. But I’d be lying if I said a small part of me hadn’t been excited to see what was waiting outside the tiny trailer park where I’d lived with Gran—I would miss Ryan, but nothing would really change, and I’d finally live the life I’d always dreamed of.
What a fucking joke.
By the time I realized all that, it was too late. Years had passed and I’d given up the best thing in my life pursuing my father’s dreams, never my own. And the irony was that it had been my father who had ruined my chances at that bright future. Everything was gone in a blink. College. Scholarships. Freedom.
So of course life had to kick me when I was down and send the boy who made my fourteen-year-old heart race back into my life at its lowest point.
I took a deep breath and focused on the situation at hand: getting the hell out of this parking lot.
I turned the key. All I heard was a ticking sound. I tried again. The same.
I’d just spent my last sixty on groceries, and I didn’t work again until Wednesday.
I lowered my head to my crossed arms.
Shit.
One break. Why couldn’t I catch just one break?
T
ears burned my eyes.
“Is the car broked again?” Noah asked innocently.
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw him with chocolate smeared all over his face. From the candy bar Ryan brought him because I didn’t even have enough for a goddamned piece of chocolate. The tears splashed free and streamed down my face.
I had no one to call for help. No money to pay for a cab, and definitely no money to pay for more repairs. I took a ragged breath in. We lived about four blocks away. Could I walk it with the groceries and Noah?
Before I could decide, someone tapped on the window.
I looked over to see Ryan leaning down, peering in at me. I guess the universe hadn’t had its fill of screwing with me today. There was something in his eyes that looked too much like concern, so I quickly wiped my face and rolled down the window.
Ryan leaned in and put his hand on my shoulder. It was bigger now, and warm, and for one second I basked in the feelings his touch ignited. I had the sudden urge to move my own hand up to cover his, but panic, exhaustion, desperation, and hopelessness kept my hands immobile in my lap. How long had it been since anyone had touched me?
I tried to convince myself it was worth the sacrifice, but right at this moment, I wished more than anything I did have time for me, for my needs. At least for someone to lean on for thirty seconds.
“Pop the hood, Tess,” Ryan said slowly. “I’ll take a look.”
So I did, because Ryan always had a way of taking control of the situation, and he had only gotten better at it with time. It was just a few words, but they made me feel safe. Which made no sense at all, considering that he probably couldn’t care less about me anymore.
Our past was in the past.
He sauntered to the front of the car and flipped his cap around before pulling up the hood and ducking under it.
Let it be a loose wire.
God, please let it be a loose wire, because after I pay Louisa I’ve got only enough left for gas and the electric bill this week.
