Jacked - The Complete Series Box Set (A Lumberjack Neighbor Romance)

by Claire Adams

  I knew she wasn’t there the second I stepped through the doors. The place was full of customers—the whole counter was full—but I knew Wren was not working.

  “Hey, be with you in one second,” Lena said as she rushed by. She looked up and saw that it was me.

  “Oh,” she said. “Um, hi.”

  “Is Wren here?”

  “No.”

  “Is she coming in later?”

  Lena’s eyes darted from the left then to the right. “I might as well tell you!” she exclaimed. “She called the other day and said she wasn’t coming back!”

  “What?!”

  “I guess she just likes it out there so much! I don’t know what to think of it myself, or what’s going to happen here, but for now I’m just going with the flow and trying not to stress out!” Her voice was getting higher with each note. “I’ve got to get these dishes back to the kitchen.”

  She rushed off, and I just stood there, catching bits and pieces of the surrounding conversations. I turned and went outside, pulling my phone out of my pocket as I did so. It went straight to voicemail when I called. I thought about leaving a message but then hung up right as the beep was going off. What I needed to say wasn’t something you could leave in a message for someone. I had to say it to her in person.

  Looks like I’d be going out to San Francisco, after all.

  I was not a city person by any stretch of the imagination; I’d only been to Denver a handful of times, and I’d always been aching to get back to the ranch after a few hours.

  Getting a ticket on such short notice meant I was paying an astronomical fee, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even bother to call Darren to tell him I was coming out; I figured I’d just get in touch with him once I arrived. I packed lightly, stuffing a few pairs of jeans and some work shirts and clean socks into a duffel bag.

  San Francisco International Airport wasn’t actually located in San Francisco; it was south of the city, so I had to take a cab. I’d never been in a cab before, and it felt strange to be sitting in the backseat while the guy in the front drove, a plastic partition separating us. The red numbers on the cab’s meter ticked up every few seconds.

  “So . . . would you like to be more specific with where I’m taking you?” the cab driver asked after a minute. When I’d first gotten in, I’d only said I wanted to go to the city. I’d tried to call Darren but he hadn’t picked up, and now I wasn’t quite sure where I was supposed to go.

  “Uh . . . well, I’m not too familiar with this place, is the thing.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “With my brother.”

  “Okay. Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The cab driver looked at me in the rearview mirror, only his eyes and his eyebrows visible. He didn’t need to tell me how skeptical he was of my response.

  “You don’t know,” he repeated.

  “I don’t. I mean, I bet he’ll call me back soon, and then I’ll know. Where’s a popular spot people go?”

  “I’ll take you downtown,” he said. “It’s a central area. The city isn’t very big anyway. Seven miles by seven miles. Did you know that?”

  “I did not. That doesn’t seem very big at all.”

  “So, wherever your brother lives, you won’t be too far. You can access BART, Muni, more cabs from downtown. Lots of restaurants, shopping. You don’t look like you’re someone who’s that interested in shopping, though. Where are you from?”

  “Colorado.”

  “Is this a vacation for you?”

  “Sort of. The girl I broke up with is out here, and I need to find her.” There was something about being in the cab, with the partition between us, his back to me, the scenery rushing by outside, something about all of that made it easy to talk. Maybe it was because I didn’t know the guy, maybe it was because I knew I’d never see him again, but I found myself overcome with the urge to tell him exactly what I was doing, and why. “I broke up with this girl that I was in love with, and I realize now that I shouldn’t have.”

  “Mmm.” He nodded. “I have heard similar stories like this one. San Francisco is a very romantic city; if you are going to win someone back, this is one of the best places to do it.”

  “That gives me some hope.”

  “Why did you break up with this woman if you loved her so much?”

  “I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  “Sometimes, at the time, we think we’re doing the right thing, only to later realize that it wasn’t. I know the feeling well, my friend.”

  “Yeah, except I knew at the time it wasn’t right. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I still went ahead and did it anyway.” Just saying it out loud made me realize how foolish I’d been.

  The cab driver dropped me off in what I guessed was downtown. A trolley trundled by, commuters zipped past on bicycles, and cars honked their horns. Families bustled around me, carrying shopping bags, holding their phones out to take pictures. I caught bits and pieces of a lively conversation in a language I couldn’t understand. There was so much happening, in every direction, it seemed. I felt my heart begin to speed up, and I wondered if this had been a mistake, coming out here. I was standing there, amongst all these people, all this activity, yet I felt more alone than I ever had.

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I took my phone out and checked to see if Wren or my brother had called me back. Neither of them had.

  “Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you, but would you mind taking our picture?”

  I looked up from my phone to see a young woman holding hers out to me. A guy was standing next to her, looking a little embarrassed.

  “It’s really okay, you don’t have to—” he started, but the girl cut him off.

  “Sean, he doesn’t mind. Do you?” The girl had wavy brown hair the breeze kept blowing across her face. She brushed it back and held her other hand out to me, palm down. A rather large diamond ring glittered on her ring finger. “He proposed to me this morning! At the Palace of Fine Arts. It was so beautiful! And I was completely surprised—”

  “He doesn’t need the whole story,” the guy said, but he was trying not to smile, and I could tell he was just as happy about the whole thing as she was.

  “Sure,” I said, sliding my phone into my pocket. “I’d be happy to take your picture.”

  “Thanks so much! I’m trying to document everything we do today, and I wanted to get a picture of us downtown. We’ll stand here, so the Financial District is in the background.”

  He put his arm around her, and they stood there, big grins on their faces, the tall buildings and skyscrapers rising in the background of the photo. I took a few pictures and then gave her the phone back.

  “Thank you so much!” the girl said. “I hope you have a great day!”

  I smiled and waved as they turned and started walking down the street. Her good mood was infectious, and I felt a renewed hope. I pulled my phone out of my pocket again and called Darren. It rang five times and then he picked up.

  “Ollie?” he said. “Is that really you?”

  “Hi. Yeah, it’s me. Sorry to keep calling you.”

  “No, that’s fine, I would’ve picked up the first time, but I was in the shower. What’s up? Everything okay?”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  There was a pause. “Here? Where do you mean?”

  “Here in San Francisco. I’m . . . I’m downtown, I think. There’s lots of stores.”

  “Wait, what? You’re really here?”

  “Yeah. I know it’s probably unexpected, but . . . I needed to talk to Wren. Is she there?”

  “No, she went out. I’m heading into the office for a little bit, so she went over to Golden Gate Park. She left maybe an hour ago. Why don’t you hail a cab and come up to the house? I’m at—”

  “No, that’s okay. I’m going to go find her.”

  “The park is pretty big. I’d say call her, but she left her phone here. I think by a
ccident, but maybe on purpose, who knows? Are you sure you don’t want to hang out here at the house until she gets back?”

  “The whole reason I came out here was to talk to her.”

  “By talk to her do you mean tell her you realized you two actually belong together?”

  “Did she say something to you?”

  “No. Well, she’s said plenty, but we’ve tried to keep you off limits in terms of topics of conversation. Which, if you want my opinion, is a good sign; if she was able to talk about you, that means she’d be over you. Which I don’t think she is.”

  “I’m hoping that’s the case. I’m just going to head over there. I’ll see you later on today though.”

  I hailed a cab and told the driver I wanted to go to Golden Gate Park.

  “Where in the park?” he asked.

  “Um . . . I don’t know. Someone’s there that I need to find, but I don’t know where exactly she is. Just that she’s at Golden Gate Park.”

  The cabbie gave me a skeptical look. “There’s a million places she could be then.”

  “What’s a popular spot?”

  “I’ll drop you off at the Conservatory of Flowers. Does she like flowers?”

  “Um, I think so—”

  “Of course she does—all girls like flowers. That’s as good a place as any to start looking, at least.”

  As we drove, he kept looking at me in the rearview mirror, as if he thought he knew me or wanted to say something. I tried to ignore it at first, but he kept doing it.

  “Is there something you want to ask me?” I finally said, trying to keep my tone neutral.

  He sighed. “I’m sorry; I know it probably seems like I keep looking back at you. Well, it seems that way because I am, but not for the reasons you think.”

  “You know what I’m thinking?”

  “I’m not gay. I’m not checking you out.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that.” Though now that he mentioned it, I supposed it seemed as good a reason as any for him to keep looking back at me the way he was.

  “Not everyone in this city is a homosexual.”

  “I didn’t think they were.”

  “So, that’s not why I’m looking at you.”

  “Are you going to tell me why, then?”

  He paused, and for a moment it seemed that after all that, he wasn’t going to tell me. He sighed again. “You’re not from around here, I can tell. So, that leads me to believe you’ve come out here to find some girl. Maybe some girl you met online, maybe some girl who broke your heart, I don’t know the details. But you came out here to find a girl, and for that reason, you remind me of me.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, you’re sort of right. I was the one who broke up with her, but…I realized that was a mistake. I don’t know if it’s too late to do something about it.”

  “It probably is,” the cabbie said. “It was for me, anyway. I came out here from Oklahoma. I was twenty, so that was, what, ten, fifteen years ago? It was a while ago, anyway. I’d broken up with my girlfriend because we’d been going out since freshman year of high school, and I thought I needed to see what other fish were swimming in the sea. Which is a strange metaphor for me to use because I fucking hate swimming and I also hate fish. But that’s what kept repeating in my head at the time, and, if I recall correctly, those were actually the words I was foolish enough to utter to her.

  “Well, let me be the first to tell you that there aren’t that many fish swimming in the sea, at least not in Carver, where we lived. So, I tried to get back in touch with her, with Annie, but she’d moved out here to San Francisco. You see, she’d always been happy living in Carver, liked being a small-town girl, but then she was so heartbroken over our break up that she decided she needed to do something drastic, so she moved out here.”

  I shifted in the seat, a feeling of discomfort coursing through my gut. Obviously, his story did not have the ending that he wanted it to, and there were quite a few similarities to my own.

  “So, I came out here, just like you, feeling as out of place as you look. This also being at a time before everyone had cell phones, so matters were a bit more complicated. But I didn’t care. It took me almost three weeks of walking the streets, sitting in cafes, going in and out of stores, before I finally—finally!—found her. In Golden Gate Park, as a matter of fact. Not at the Conservatory of Flowers, though, no she was out on Martin Luther King Drive, rollerblading. She zipped right past me and would have kept on going, but I called her name, and she stopped. She was with another guy.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Well, the guy she was rollerblading with was gay—you should’ve seen how short the shorts were he was wearing—but that’s not the point. The point is, he was kind enough to give us a few minutes to talk, in which time Annie told me, in no uncertain terms, that I’d broken her heart and she’d never forgive me for it. Yet she also thanked me because if I hadn’t broken up with her, she probably never would have moved out here to begin with.”

  I swallowed even though my throat felt like sandpaper. Sure, some of the details were different, but the major points were all the same. I’d broken up with Wren, so she came out here, and if I were to find her, she’d just send me packing, though not before thanking me for—inadvertently—setting her life on a new course.

  “I realize that’s probably not what you want to hear,” the cab driver continued, “but I am just struck by the similarities. We can hope that your ending goes better than mine.”

  “You’re still out here,” I said. “Why did you stay?”

  “At first I stayed because I thought she’d change her mind. We’d been together for so long, had so many good memories together, I figured she just needed some time to be angry at me, to punish me, and then we’d get back together. But…that never happened. She meant it when she said she had moved on. It was the biggest mistake of my life, and one that I wasn’t able to undo.”

  We sat in silence for the rest of the drive. I didn’t know what to say other than his little story had completely freaked me out because of course that’s exactly what was going to happen to me, too. Even though this whole time I told myself it didn’t matter if she turned me down—what mattered was just telling her, regardless of her response—that was bullshit. I wanted to tell her and have her say she forgave me and she wasn’t planning on staying out here forever and we could go back to Colorado and pretend that whole thing had never happened.

  But I knew it didn’t work that way.

  You couldn’t erase the memory of something no matter how hard you tried or how much you wanted to. Even if you were able to scrub it from your waking thoughts, it would resurface later as a dream. That was something I knew all too well.

  When we got to the park, he wished me luck, gave me a look that might’ve been pity or maybe empathy, and then drove off. I stood there for a moment, trying to get my bearings. What I needed to do was forget about that whole conversation, but that was impossible. I felt as though I’d just had a dozen cups of coffee in quick succession. I started to walk toward the Conservatory, which was a large, white, dome-shaped greenhouse with smaller buildings flanking both sides. Beds of brightly colored flowers set amidst the vibrant green grass. It would be easy enough to get distracted by the scenery, so I tore my eyes away from the flowers and looked at the people. None of them were Wren.

  I climbed the steps and went into the greenhouse. General admission was eight dollars, which would be worth it even if I didn’t find Wren here because the whole place felt like you had stepped into another world. I felt myself start to calm down a little. I had no idea what most of the plants and flowers were called, but you didn’t need to know specific names to appreciate the beauty. It felt soothing to be there, and I figured if Wren was going to be anywhere in the park, there was probably a good chance she was here.

  I wandered through the different sections, each room representing a different climate. The room with the orchids was warm and humid, and though the f
lowers were beautiful, I could only stand to be in that temperature for a few minutes. I looked at each person’s face as I made my way through. No Wren.

  Being in there lulled me into a sort of waking dream, where it felt as though I could just wander amongst the plants forever. And if I did, I wouldn’t have to face the reality that maybe I’d come out here for no reason, maybe I wouldn’t find her, or, if I did, she’d tell me to go to hell.

  Finally, though, I made myself leave.

  After I left the greenhouse, I walked down the steps and then followed one of the paths to the Dahlia Garden. I looked at the brightly-colored flowers and tried to think about where I should go next. There were other places in the park, but I didn’t have a map. I figured I could just start walking, and maybe end up walking the entire city, if I had to.

  But as I was passing the stairs that led back to the entrance of the Conservatory, I stopped in my tracks.

  There she was.

  Sitting there on the steps, looking down as she dug through her purse.

  I walked closer but stopped a few feet away. She continued to rummage, oblivious to the people passing by.

  “Shit,” she said, under hear breath, but loud enough that I could hear. “Of all the days to forget my phone…”

  I took another couple of steps, close enough now to touch her. “You can use my phone,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Wren

  I looked up, started to decline the kind offer, and then stopped. My jaw dropped as my eyes tried to compute what I was seeing.

  “Wren,” he said.

  At first, I didn’t believe it was really him.

  But he’d just said my name, hadn’t he? And he was standing right there.

  I blinked, halfway believing that he’d just disappear. That I was missing him so badly that my brain had somehow conjured up this mirage of him.

  He smiled, which was an attempt to mask his uncertainty. I could tell from the look in his eyes that he was expecting me to ignore him, or tell him off, or to turn and walk in the opposite direction.

  And maybe a part of me wanted to. He had broken my heart, after all. I’d fallen in love with him without even realizing it, and he so easily dismissed it, like it didn’t matter at all. Yet here he was, and he was smiling.