That meant this room was dangerous. And I should leave. I should stick with my plan. I should remember my party goals and abandon Levi’s help.
And yet… the push and pull that had always existed between us felt different tonight. There was more pull for starters. And I didn’t want to push Levi away right now. I wanted to… I didn’t know what I wanted to do.
The bucket list burned in my pocket. I thought about bringing up Kristen again. Talking about his girlfriend usually doused whatever simmered between us in ice cold water. But I couldn’t bring myself to say her name. Not then or for the next two hours as we talked about everything but Kristen or Logan.
Instead, we enjoyed our beers and laughed about our past and the crazy things we did to each other over the years. Eventually we found ourselves lying on our backs, staring up at the sky, counting stars and talking about the future.
“I’m never coming back here,” I whispered to him, the words springing to life once they hit the cool night air. “I’m leaving for college and I’m never coming back. I never want to see this town again.”
He turned his head from the sky and stared at the side of my face. “What about your mom?”
“She can come visit me. Any time she wants. I just… I can’t come back to this place and that trailer and face this world ever again.”
“Was it really that bad? Was I really that bad?”
I laughed and turned to face him. Propping my head in my hand, I found myself brushing his hair back with the tips of my free fingers. “You weren’t awesome. But, I don’t know, I never minded what went on between us. It felt like we were at least playing on equal footing. It’s the rest of the town. The pity. The judgmental looks. The… discrimination. This town is snobby as shit. I’m done being judge based on where I live and who my mom is.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been an asshole.”
I smiled and it felt real. Two hours ago, I’d expected to go to my grave hating Levi Cole. Now he was apologizing for his assholery? What a crazy night. “I forgive you.” He scooted closer, his hand resting on my hip—the heat of it burning through my clothes and skin and somehow branding the bone there. I sucked in a sharp breath at the contact. “I’m sorry too,” I whispered, meaning it.
He held my gaze. “Then I guess you’ll make me visit you, too.”
Confusion interrupted the heating warmth in my belly. “What?”
“If I want to see you, I’m going to have to go to you. Since you’re never coming back here again.”
“Yeah, but you won’t—”
“I will,” he promised, cutting me off. “I will want to see you again.”
“Levi, we’re going in separate directions. This ends tonight.”
His body moved closer to mine, pressing against me from toes to chest. “You’re wrong, Ruby Dawson. This is only getting started.” And then he kissed me into oblivion.
Rolling me underneath him, he took my mouth captive with his. He tasted like beer and breath mints and something solid and lasting and like nothing I expected.
Where I thought his lips would be hard and rough, they were pillow soft and enticing. His kisses were insistent, yes, hungry even. But not invasive.
My fingers curled into his Clark City Football t-shirt and I held him closer to me, desperate for more of him, more of his mouth on me. His hand slipped under my tank top, finding my breast. I arched my back, pressing closer to him.
While this wasn’t my first kiss, this was my first trip to second base and I had no idea I would like it so much. Things were moving quickly, and I didn’t know how to stop. How to stop us.
Or even if I wanted to.
He kissed me harder, his mouth taking mine until I released a breathy sound that came from the very center of me. Led by instinct, I reached for his jeans, slipping my fingers into the waistband and sliding them around to find his fly.
He shivered and laughed at the same time. “God, that tickled.”
Enjoying torturing him, I slid my fingers back, dipping them further inside his boxer briefs.
“Ruby,” he hissed, settling his body more firmly on top of mine, before pulling away completely and jumping to his feet. “I-I can’t.”
I blinked up at him, cold reality suddenly washing over me. “You can’t?”
He gave me a tortured look. “Kristen.”
The chill that swept over my body turned to a fire of anger. “Oh, my god.”
“I’ll be right back,” he insisted, holding his hands up placatingly. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
He rushed from the balcony back into the house while I collected myself into a sitting position. I eyed the balcony ledge and contemplated jumping to end this humiliation.
“What was that?” I asked the dark, Nebraska night. He wasn’t into me. He had a girlfriend. He’d just brought me up here to… to… Holy shit, was this another one of his pranks?
I folded my legs and buried my face in my hands, feeling the heat of my blush. “Son of a bitch.”
The folded bucket list in my pocket dug into my thigh and I suddenly remembered why I was here tonight. I had been planning to make out with a Cole brother, just not that one.
Logan was probably here by now. I could still check everything off the list and give the middle finger to Levi. The night wasn’t totally lost yet.
It was my turn to jump to my feet and rush inside the house. I knew I looked crazy. My hair was wild from being outside and rolling around on the ground and I’d never had a drink before tonight, so I was definitely buzzed. But I was also on a mission.
I found Logan playing ping pong in the basement with some of the other football guys. He smiled when he saw me and set his paddle down to wrap me in a hug.
“I was hoping I’d see you tonight.” His body was warm, but it wasn’t hot like Levi’s. He was familiar, but it didn’t compare to the lifetime of tug-of-war familiarity I felt with Levi. He was Logan and he was my friend. And Levi was my enemy. I should stop comparing them.
I should.
The weird thing was, I didn’t usually compare them. Logan was the guy I sometimes chatted with online, when we happened to be on the same social media app at the same time and neither of us had anyone else to talk to—so not often. But we did talk occasionally. And we’d been friends for the two years we were in high school together.
More importantly, I’d had a crush on him since I was a little girl. Er, I’d thought he was nice since I was a little girl. Now that he was here, I could admit the crush hadn’t come until later. Probably around my freshman year, when I’d felt it was time to have a crush on somebody. I mean, Coco’s crush had changed every other day. I knew I had to pick someone, or she would likely question my sanity. And Logan Cole was the obvious choice.
There wasn’t anything about him that I didn’t like. He was nice and friendly and… not mean. I knew those all sounded like the same thing, but in my head, they were different.
I hugged him tighter. The most important thing about Logan was that he didn’t feel like Levi. He didn’t make me feel too hot and too overwhelmed and too… confused. He just made me feel nice. And after this day and kissing his brother and a lifetime of feeling like an outsider, I just wanted to feel nice. For once.
For a night.
“Me too,” I told him, letting the hug linger. I’d been better at flirting with him when he lived here. Admittedly, I was rusty with the whole batting my eyelashes and getting him to notice me. But I was on a mission tonight. Plus, he was a guy. All of my experience with men told me it wasn’t super hard to convince them they wanted to get laid. I mean, my mom got a crazy amount of action. And no offense to her, but… if she could do it, surely, I could do it. At least once. Just saying. “I was hoping we could hang out tonight,” I whispered in his ear. “Alone.”
He pulled back, his eyebrows drawing together in confusion. “Alone?”
Shrugging coyly, I dropped my hand into his like Levi had done earlier. I had to shake my head and adjust
my smile back in place to banish Levi from my thoughts, but I pushed on. “Yeah, I don’t know, I thought it would be fun to… catch up.”
His slow smile confirmed that he finally understood. He told his friends he was going to grab another drink but took me upstairs instead. We did grab more drinks and we did catch up for a long time. And it was fun to hangout with him again and laugh and believe he had no sinister motive other than hanging out with me because he genuinely liked me.
Not because he wanted to embarrass me. Not because he wanted to torture me. Like his brother.
When my head felt sufficiently fuzzy and my fingers were numb, I kissed him. And didn’t stop kissing him until my entire bucket list was crossed off.
I woke up in the middle of the night with a massive hangover, an empty bed and a half-torn open condom wrapper I couldn’t remember using. I slipped out of Kristen March’s house without being seen and drove home with more regret than I anticipated.
But my bucket list was done. I’d accomplished everything I set out to do.
And in three months, I would head to college and do the same thing there. Only without the whole virginity thing and Logan Cole.
Or Levi Cole for that matter.
At least that’s what I had hoped would happen.
Six weeks later I puked my guts out after smelling scrambled eggs and everything I had planned and hoped and wished for was thrown into the proverbial fire and set to flames.
I was pregnant.
And six weeks after that, just when I had decided to find the courage to tell Logan, word came back that Logan had been killed in enemy fire in a desert halfway across the world.
That’s when I decided I wouldn’t hope for anything ever again. Hope was for the weak. I had something much stronger now. I had regret. And I would let it direct every step I took forward.
1
Diners, Donuts and Dives
“Why don’t you come on over here and warm me up, darlin’?”
I blinked at the giant belly squeezed between the cracked vinyl of the booth and the Formica table that held the remains of a rather large breakfast and winced on the booth’s behalf.
“Sure thing.” I smiled sweetly, but it wasn’t real. I wanted this man’s tip, but if he called me darlin’ one more time I wasn’t sure I could plead innocent at the trial for his untimely murder. I was three seconds from snapping and losing all sense of sanity.
This was a typical day at Rosie’s Diner and Donuts To Go. Locals simply referred to one of the best eating establishments in town as Rosie’s, but I preferred the full title since it was so utterly ridiculous. Donuts to go?
And they were only sold that way at Rosie’s. Donuts were served through a drive-thru window on the side of the small, square building. If you had enough time to sit down, you had enough time for a full breakfast. Or that was Rosie’s philosophy anyway.
This was my place of employment. And had been since I was fourteen and old enough to wash dishes. I’d been promoted to server when I’d managed to grow boobs a few years later. And now, at the not so tender age of twenty-five, I was used to Mick ordering double bacon with a side of double entendres.
I tilted the coffee pot in my hand and filled his mug to the brim. “Can I get you anything else this morning?”
His leer revealed two missing molars and a long history of chewing tobacco. I swirled the coffee around the glass pot in my hand and held my smile steady.
He made a slow perusal of my body, starting at my red Chucks, up and over my bare legs that could stand a good shave, to the stained ruffled, half-apron tied around my waist and settled somewhere between my boobs and my chin.
“That’ll do, honey. Just come back and check on me from time to time.”
“Will do,” I told him before giving him my back. I knew his gaze moved to my ass and let out a slow sigh of surrender. Five more hours of this shift before I could get the hell out of here. I could survive it.
I could.
It wasn’t the pet names, although those could be intensely annoying, but they also came with the territory. Mick was a farmer. He had farmed all his life. He was approximately the same age as the dirt on his old-as-dirt farm. He couldn’t help all the honeys and darlin’s and sweethearts. In his diesel-addled brain, he thought they counted as compliments.
It wasn’t even the ogling. I could handle that easily enough. Not that I enjoyed it, but I was tough enough to be secure in my womanhood without being threatened by an old pervert’s wandering gaze. To be honest, I judged him the same. The difference was, he appreciated what he saw in me. My judgment of him went the other direction.
What bothered me about this place was the general feeling that everything I did or said or thought was on display. In this town nothing went unnoticed, nothing was unseen. But rarely was anything interpreted correctly.
However how I treated Mick and the rest of my customers this morning would be whispered and murmured about and dissected until someone had noticed I gave Shirly Benjamin the evil eye when I delivered her eggs. And then there would be a made-up reason cycled through town why I hated Shirly Benjamin so much. And was it because her son, the high school science teacher, had turned me down for a date? Or did I have a secret thing for Mr. Benjamin?
Over the course of the day, this tiny rumor would spread through town until I was thought the worst of and my reputation for the trailer trash bad girl was reinforced a hundred times over.
Nobody would ever stop to consider that I gave Shirly Benjamin the evil eye because she complained about everything—like how her eggs were cold, even though I’d brought them straight from the kitchen.
I walked around the counter and settled the coffee pot back on the burner. We’d hit that mid-morning lull that occurred between the breakfast rush and lunch time.
Mick hung around because his two sons had taken over his farm five years ago and he didn’t have anything else to do. Glancing over at him, a heart-attack-waiting-to-happen, I felt a twinge of pity. He’d worked hard his whole life. Sun up to sun down days for years—for more years than I had been alive. And yet, now that the work had been taken away from him, he had nothing left to do with his life except sit at the same booth every single day for hours on end, talking county politics with the other old men that wandered through Rosie’s, and sexually harassing any woman that happened by his table.
The bells over the front door jingled. Another good old boy swaggered in, dirty white t-shirt under stained blue jean overalls, muddy work boots on his feet and a straw dangling out of the corner of his mouth. He was half the size of Mick and mean as hell.
He was also my favorite.
His mouth twitched when he saw me leaning on the counter. “Ruby girl,” he murmured as he slid onto the stool across from me. “How you been?”
I smiled gently at him, before reaching over to fill up another mug of coffee. “Oh, same, RJ. How are you?”
He answered my question by ignoring it. “Any good gossip this morning?”
I chuckled at his bold question. Rosie’s was the social hub in the small town of Clark City, Nebraska. Anybody who was anybody stopped by before lunch for a cup of Rosie’s stellar Colombian roast and a heavy dose of gossip. And then stopped by for supper or a piece of pie afterwards for updates and breaking news.
Lord knows what they had to talk about in the span of a few hours. There just wasn’t that much going on in this town of fifteen hundred people.
I mean, to normal people there wasn’t much going on. The crazies that lived here thought otherwise.
“Dolly Farrow was seen leaving Blake Upchurch’s house early this morning.” RJ raised a bushy white eyebrow, so I sweetened the pot. “In the same dress she was wearing last night at Pug’s.”
“My, my, my, Ms. Farrow,” RJ chuckled. “The chief of police.”
I pressed my lips together to hide my smile. Everybody knew that Blake Upchurch was a womanizing manwhore that had been given too much power too soon.
To be clear
, any other twenty-eight-year-old man could handle as much power as the local chief of police wielded in a town of this size, but not Blake. He was one of those guys that thought his high school days of playing starting wide receiver on the football team still entitled him to free drinks whenever he was off duty. But Dolly Farrow had been chasing him since high school. So, good for her.
“Anything else?”
Feeling guilty for having spilled Dolly’s secrets, I busied myself with finding him a menu. “Not that I’ve heard. You know nothing exciting ever happens here.”
His eyes narrowed. “I’ll have you know, I disagree. I’m exciting,” he argued effectively. “That happens every single day.”
RJ was in his late sixties, still lean and muscled from a lifetime of hard labor and leathery from the same amount of time spent beneath the harsh sun. He was one of those old guys you would assume lived on a fixed income and ate dog food to save money. But I knew for a fact that he was one of the wealthiest farmers in Western Nebraska.
He’d worked as hard as humanly possible to build an agriculture empire out here in the middle of nowhere. And instead of going the way of suits and smarminess, he’d stayed true to his roots and his business.
His dedication to his farm was partly because he knew nobody would ever work as hard as him. He’d told me as much over nine years of coffee at this counter. But I also knew he was an extremely paranoid man. He didn’t trust anybody in this town to run his business.
I thought that made him savvy.
I didn’t trust these people either.
It was only in the last several years, after a stroke, that he’d let his son take the reins. Mark Thrush was as diligent and badass as his dad. RJ didn’t like letting go of the company he’d spent his life turning into a gold mine, but he was proud of his son.
Another fact I knew from countless cups of coffee.
Grinning at him, I pulled out my order pad. “It’s true. You’re the most exciting thing in my day at least.”
Trailer Park Heart Page 2
