He mimicked my movements, studying my hands carefully before confidently filling wells on his own.
“Yes,” he sighed, “I can’t blame my parents. The pressure I put on myself they reciprocated, and vice versa. I think they saw how hard I was working and they wanted to support that, but it was hard to do that without pushing me a little harder than I was already pushing myself. It’s hard to know where the pressure started. I think it’s inherent, honestly.”
“In you?”
“In anything anyone craves. You want it to be perfect. No matter what it is. It just has to be ... the best. If it’s not, what the hell’s the point? There. Done.” Regan stood back with a victorious grin on his face.
I took the tin and slid it into the oven. “Well, in half an hour, we’ll find out if there’s a point to all of this.”
Turning around, I found Regan with an entire muffin in his mouth. One I’d taken out earlier.
“Oh,” he talked with a full mouth, “there’s definitely a point. These are delicious! Can I have another one?”
“Sure.” I grabbed my travel mug, filled it with coffee, and turned back around. “Grab a few and follow me back outside.”
Once we were outside, I locked the door and led Regan back across the street.
“I’m not jumping.” He sat on the rock wall and swung his legs over the edge.
“Ha. Ha. It’s not like I leapt to my death, or something. Dial it down a little.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes, eating the muffins and sipping — or in his case, slurping — the coffee.
“These are gluten-free, too?” he asked after eating his third muffin.
“I told you, the whole bakery is.” I snatched a muffin before he ate them all.
“Why? Do you have celiac or something?”
“You know about that? I’m impressed.”
“I pay attention to news and shit.” He nudged his shoulder into mine as he laughed.
The more time I spent with him, the more my assumptions of him were stripped away. Is that how it worked? Would it work the same with me? I couldn’t decide right then if I wanted him to have his assumptions of me dismantled. Whatever they were.
“I don’t have celiac, but I know people who do. And, frankly, you just don’t need wheat for a number of reasons I don’t want to get into at eight o’clock on a weekend morning.”
Regan shrugged and continued slurping his coffee. Seriously, what was with that?
“Do you always drink your coffee like that?” I asked, clicking my tongue in irritation.
“Like what? With my mouth? Swallowing?”
I brought my cup to my lips and mimicked the slurping sound.
“That was a bit dramatic,” he scoffed.
“You’re right ... it was.” I raised my eyebrow at him and he lightly smacked my shoulder with the back of his hand.
“All right, all right. Sorry. I have no idea why I do that.”
“Has no one said anything about it to you before? It’s really quite offensive.” I laughed, setting my mug on the wall.
Regan went silent for a minute. When I looked over at him, he was staring at his hands. You’ve got to be kidding me.
I cleared my throat. “Rae?”
He nodded. “It’s okay.”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Well, she died...” He winced through that whole sentence, nearly closing his eyes by the end of it.
I sighed, my window of distraction officially slamming shut. “Tell me.”
“We were out on a trail ride,” he started.
“No,” I cut in, “I don’t need to know about that. Tell me about her.”
I knew how hard it could be to talk about how people used to be, but for me, it provided a sense of comfort that the memories existed at all. I’d take the bad if I got to have all of the good that came before it.
I think.
“I don’t know if I can...”
In the span of my drift off into my thought process, I’d missed that Regan had taken down his hair and tucked it behind his ears, snapping the elastic around his wrist repeatedly.
“Just ... just tell me your favorite thing about her.” I leaned my shoulder into his and left it there. His muscles were tense. Hesitant.
He laughed sort of silently. “She came out of nowhere. Tiny, bossy, and full of certainties.”
“Certainties?” I tucked my knees into my chest.
“Yeah, she was filled with this stone-solid conviction. When she was passionate about something, she wouldn’t let go. It wasn’t in-your-face ... it was ... this quiet resolve. She was ferocious. She’d been through more than you and I both before I’d even met her.”
I doubted that, but let him continue with his story.
“I’ve been in love before, but with her...”
“You’ve been in love before?” I pulled my head back and scrunched my forehead.
He smiled. “Oh, of course. Love is great. Swept off your feet, and all of that? I love it. The first time I was in love was with Kylee Graham in seventh grade. She always wore flowery dresses, and I was certain I’d marry her.”
I bit my lip as I smiled. A thirteen-year-old Regan Kane, in love and making plans to marry. His cousin would consider such thoughts treasonous to the brotherhood of men.
“Anyway,” he sighed wistful thoughts of Kylee into the sea air, “Rae was the first time I felt grown up love.”
“What’s the difference?”
He looked up and then closed his eyes. “It rewired my insides.”
A hole the shape of my mother’s smile seared through me and choked the air away from my throat. I let out an exhale as though I’d been punched in the gut. Because I had, by his words alone. I was left struggling for the comfortable air of my cynicism.
“I know. Intense, right?” He smiled and took a silent sip of his coffee.
“Keep slurping it,” I blurted out.
I needed him to be real, still. Flawed in the volume of his drinking. Loud enough to override the palpable rawness of his allegiance to the doctrine of love.
“When I was in high school I pictured a future with a few girls. With Rae, I felt it here.” He patted his stomach, leaving his fingers to bunch around the fabric of his shirt.
“How long were you together, again?” I couldn’t remember if he’d told me, but I was losing traction on reality.
“Barely two months.”
“Wow.”
“Mmmhmm.” He ran a hand through his hair.
“Did she feel the same way?” I knew I was trudging into mucky personal territory, but come on, we were talking about his dead ex-girlfriend as it was.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I never told her.”
“What?” My shock offended two nearby seagulls, who flew away in a tizzy.
“What?” Regan cleared his throat, looking concerned at my sudden trip into intensity.
“All of that talk about being in love before you even knew what to do with yourself and you never told her?”
The pained look in his eyes signaled I’d done it. I’d pushed too far.
“Well ... I didn’t exactly get the chance to, Georgia. I felt it so deeply that I was afraid if I told her that soon then I’d push her away. Then—”
“I know.”
Regan reached his hand across my lap, grasping my knee. “Let me talk about it.”
“Okay,” I whispered.
“Then ... she died. She. Didn’t. Make it. Jesus.” He sniffed and inconspicuously wiped under his eye. “Words have never hit me like that before. I’d been shot, I was sure of it. Every time I took a breath it felt like the air was leaving my chest through a hole before it ever got to my lungs.”
It was time for me to regain some emotional control over this conversation. We’d passed my comfort level at the intersection of love and certainty.
“Was there an exit wound?”
He turned to me with a perfectly quizzical look on his face. “Huh?�
�
“An exit would. From feeling like you were shot. Did the bullet leave your body, or do we need to go fishing for it?”
“I...” Regan shook his head slowly, looking between me and the ocean with his bottomless eyes.
“Sew yourself up if it’s gone, Regan. That’s the only way you’ll move on. If you want to move on. Come on ... the muffins are done.” I stood, brushing crumbled gravel from my jeans, and walked back toward the bakery.
Georgia
“And that was it? That’s all you said to him? And all he said to you?” Lissa shook a martini like her life depended on it as we navigated an annoyingly busy Friday night.
I shrugged. “Yep. That was it. Then he went back to his apartment and I haven’t really seen him since.”
“Did he take the card?”
“No.”
“Do you still have it?” She slid the martini to her customer in an uncharacteristically impersonal manner, more interested in the mild excitement she judged in my life.
“Of course I have it. What the hell would I do? Throw it away?”
It had been an awkward week in La Jolla. Regan hadn’t spoken a word to me since he left the bakery on Sunday. Well, actually, after our chat on the wall before the second batch of muffins was done, he never came back into the bakery. He got up, looked me up and down with a disturbingly unreadable expression on his face, and went back into his apartment.
Saying he hadn’t talked to me was slightly dramatic, given I hadn’t actually seen him. But I heard him. He’d taken to practicing his violin in the wee hours of the morning. On nights I came straight home after work, I could hear him. It sounded like the notes were crying. Given our conversation on the swing set, it was hard to tell if he was escaping from something or putting pressure on himself.
I determined I wouldn’t push him about the card from Rae. He knew I had it, and that was that. I’ve found that if you push people, they have an uncanny tendency to push back.
Lissa slid by me, lightly smacking my butt. “You’ve got skills, sister.”
“Skills?”
She chuckled. “You spent all that time with him inside the bakery and you managed to avoid all discussion about it, its theme, or your mother whatsoever.”
I roughly set a rack of glasses at the edge of the bar. “It’s not just him. I don’t talk about my mom. To anyone.”
“Why?” She put her hands on her hips, as though we hadn’t had this conversation every few weeks for the duration of our friendship.
“You know why. No one gets close enough.”
“You don’t let them.”
I growled under my breath. “Liss. You know why.”
Visibly frustrated, Lissa grabbed my arm and pulled me into the small entryway to the kitchen. “You can’t use circular reasoning, G. You keep people away because of your mom, and you don’t tell people about her because no one is close. Then, this amazingly nice and clean-cut guy comes in here, is clearly interested in you, and you still insist on pushing him away.”
“Who? Regan? You saw how he nearly drank his face off over his dead girlfriend the other night. I’d hardly call that a place of moving on.” Crossing my arms, I leaned back against the greasy wall.
“Whatever. I haven’t heard him mention her once. If he’s opening up to you, he trusts you. And that look he gets around you? The one where his pupils double in size?”
“How the hell can you tell what his pupils do in this light?” I challenged.
“Because,” she smirked, “I can’t stop looking at them.”
I rolled mine. “Lissa, I don’t even know what the point of this conversation is anymore.”
“Georgia,” her voice lowered to a purr, “the first night he was in here with the band, I saw the looks you two were giving each other. I chalked it up to fresh meat, something new.”
“Romantic,” I murmured.
“Shut up. But, that night he played with just CJ on stage, when Willow Shaw came in after? You should have seen yourself. You let go, G. All the way.”
“It was music. What’s your point?” I looked up at her as my cheeks heated.
She took two fingers and ran them across the apple of my cheek. “It was his music. And, for Christ’s sake, you told me he tried to kiss you.”
I thought back to the night that he and CJ dominated E’s for an hour. And I forgot about my life for fifty-eight minutes of that time.
“It was a fluke. And he didn’t really try. It was just that tense, vibrating sort of pre-kiss moment.” I cleared my throat, ignoring my lips’ desperation to have his on them.
“A pre-kiss moment you bailed on.”
My shoulders sank as I pressed my head back into the wall. “I’ll just hurt him. It’s inevitable.”
Lissa grabbed my shoulders. “No, Georgia, it’s not.”
“Genetics are pretty cut and dry, Liss.”
She sighed, keeping her eyes closed as she swallowed hard. “You know that’s not one hundred percent.”
“Whatever. I’m not going to pursue something with someone who isn’t even sure how long he’s going to be here, who has a dead girlfriend that’s sending him mail, only to inform him he’ll lose me when the white rabbit drops his pocket watch down the hole in my brain and I go in after it.”
“You and that goddamn fairytale...” she trailed off in a whisper.
“It’s no fucking fairytale, Lissa. It’s just the sordid story of a lonely girl. And there’s no prince.”
Lissa dropped her arms from my body and stood back, knowing this was where the conversation ended. It’s where it always ended. She had nothing to say. No charts to disprove the course I was on. No scissors to cut the strings that were tied around my wrists generations ago.
Just a lonely girl.
And no prince.
I remained quiet for the rest of my shift. Head down when behind the bar, smile up when dealing with customers. Lissa didn’t try to smooth over our earlier conversation. Not that she had any apologizing to do, but she knew well enough to leave me alone for the rest of the evening.
When I got into my car, and onto the highway, I had about fifteen minutes to make a decision on which exit to take. Home, to my quiet and comfortable bed, or another twenty minutes north to anywhere but comfort. After a few minutes of indecision, I realized I couldn’t bail on her for the third night.
The staff at Breezy Pointe was beyond accommodating to our situation, and I felt bad when I didn’t use it as set up. Visiting hours were pretty strict and did not encompass three in the morning. But, given I’d be an orphan when she decided she couldn’t take it anymore, they’d always let me work on a schedule with them. Okay, maybe I wasn’t a minor anymore, as I was when I first came out here and started my twilight visits a few times a year, so orphan wasn’t a technical term.
Especially since half of the time I already felt like one.
There was a woman at the front desk I’d only seen a few times before, so it took me a few extra minutes to get back to my mother’s unit. As usual, Daniel was waiting to check me in and put my belongings behind the nurses’ station.
“She’s gonna be pissed,” he mumbled with a slight snicker.
“Did you just curse?” I gasped and dramatically put my hand to my chest.
He shook his head as we approached her door. “You just can’t take no for an answer, can you?”
Actually, I could. I’d heard that word for most of my life. No, things can’t be normal. No, you and Daddy can’t come with me to California. No, I can’t promise you this won’t happen to you, too. Still, for Daniel, I laughed at his attempt at camaraderie.
“I told you not to come here,” my mother’s voice, graciously playful with a hint of discipline, rang from the other side of the door before I even entered.
“Mama,” I sighed, “you’re awake, so am I—what’s the big deal.”
“The big deal, young lady, is you don’t have a life.”
Amanda Hall seemed back to her old s
elf, whatever that meant, and had been getting there over the course of the last several days. She sat on the edge of the bed. No wheelchair, a real smile, and making eye contact with me.
Daniel dutifully stood in the doorway as I walked over to the bed and took a seat next to my mother, laying my head on her shoulder. “You’re my life, Mom.”
“No, Georgia. You’re mine. I demand you go get one.” She nudged my shoulder. “Plus, I’m leaving here as soon as the administrative cats crawl into the office in a few hours.”
Out of habit, when she said something I hadn’t heard from her doctor first, my eyes flashed to Daniel, who refused, it seemed, to look at me.
“You don’t have to check with him, Georgia.” My mother caught me staring. “I checked myself in. I’m checking myself out.”
“No ... I know that. It’s just...”
“You’re scared that if I leave now, I’ll be back here in a few days, like I was last time.”
I nodded, peering up at her as if I were a small child again, and we were in my room for a bedtime story. Those usually had happy endings, though. “Last time you were only out for two weeks, Mom.”
“And it was several months before that.” She gave a firm nod, as if to signal the end of the discussion.
Only, it wasn’t. There was no end in sight to these discussions.
“Susan—”
She cut me off at the mention of her sister’s name. “I have a condo. I don’t need to stay with Susan, and I will not be staying with you. Also, I need to talk to you about a decision I’ve come to.”
Her words didn’t make me nervous, but Daniel taking a purposeful step toward me did. I looked at him for a few seconds, trying to determine the risk I was about to take simply by listening to her. His face was set like stone, though.
“Georgia,” my mother confidently brought my attention back to her, “I’ve decided to go forward with the ECT.”
“What?” I shouted, causing Daniel to take another step forward. My mother didn’t flinch. “No. Absolutely not.”
“Darling,” she put her hand on my leg, “that’s not a decision you get to make.”
I stood. “Oh, so now it’s not a decision I get to make, but you drilled into me for, like, five years that when it was my decision to make, it was to be a hard no every time? What the hell? What’s going on?”
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