“Much.”
“So, where’s home?” he asked, leaning back.
He slung one arm along the back of the couch and looped one bare foot across his knee. I wondered if he had any idea how sexy he looked. Probably not. The vibes I got from him were all instinctive, like nothing he did was on purpose. I envied him that. Everything I did was on purpose. And it was exhausting sometimes.
“Still Baytown,” I said.
“Your family still there?” he asked.
I sank into the opposite end of the couch, sitting sideways to face him and drawing my knees up. “No,” I said softly. “My parents died a few years back.”
“Sorry.”
I hugged my knees. “It’s hard sometimes. I feel it more now that Lanie—my daughter—left for school. Like I have no roots anymore.”
“So what keeps you there?”
I sighed, struck with the weirdest feeling that I could talk to him. Like another day when I’d spilled my whole life.
“A relationship.”
I saw his eyebrows raise slightly. “A relationship,” he repeated. I heard the mocking tone. “What does that mean?”
I rolled my eyes, and then felt sixteen doing it. “It means what it always means, Montgomery.”
He held a palm out and let it drop. “A boyfriend?”
“Kinda.”
“Kinda?” he mocked again.
“Quit doing that,” I said, kicking a foot at his thigh.
“Well, there’s no such thing as a kinda boyfriend, Fremont,” he said. “Unless you’re thirteen, and you don’t circle yes or no in the note.”
I laughed at that. “I know.” I covered my face with my hands for a second. “It’s just complicated.”
“How so?” He crossed his arms, and the look almost made me laugh again. It was a weird kind of bizarre. But in a good way.
“Must we?”
“Most definitely.”
I ran fingers through my damp hair. “I live with someone. Sort of.”
He laughed, and it was warm and reminiscent of another time. “There it is again, Fremont. You do or you don’t.”
I blew out a breath. “Okay, I do, but it wasn’t planned—”
“Usually isn’t,” he said. “Whose place was it?”
I frowned. “Well, originally he kind of moved into mine—”
“Kind of.”
I flashed him a look. “Just go with it, will you?” He held up his hands with a grin. “So, he ended up there, but kept his condo, and somewhere along the way—I don’t know. Somehow, we ended up at the condo, and I sold my house.”
“You sold a house to move to a condo?”
“I know,” I said with a frown. “Doesn’t make sense. That’s what I’m saying, nothing was planned, it just sort of evolved.”
“He wanted to be at his place,” Jesse said, his tone matter-of-fact. “And he managed to get you to think that was the best idea, as well.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m not liking this game.”
“There’s no game here,” he said, gesturing with one hand. “It’s just easier sometimes for an outsider to see the true colors.” He studied me for a moment. “What were you running from today?”
I physically pulled back. “Running?” I laughed. “I wasn’t running.”
“You’re off on a road trip to get away, if I remember right,” he said. “By yourself. Without the sort-of-live-in-kinda-boyfriend.”
I rested a hand over my eyes. “You are having way too good a time with this.”
He reached over and pulled my hand away, setting it back on my knee and sending every nerve ending on that side of my body into a frenzy. Jesus, it was nuts to still be affected that way.
“Fremont, I know it’s been a long time, and it was only one day, but it was one hell of a day.”
My breath left me, and I swallowed hard to get it back. “True.”
“I told you things I’ve never told anyone then or since,” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“That’s because sometimes it’s easier with outsiders,” I said, keeping a straight face. “They see the true colors.”
He threw a pillow at me. “I’m saying you can talk to me,” he said.
In the dim room, with the wind howling outside and no sharp contrast to anything, the air felt softer, muted. Like it was safe to talk in that room as long as the lights were out.
“Well, how about you?” I said, flipping it. “I seem to remember pre-law and your dad’s law firm? What’s the progression from that to diner owner?”
He laid his head back against the couch and closed his eyes. He really hadn’t changed much. His hair was shorter, with maybe a little dusting of something lighter here and there. The only thing really different in his face was stress. Worry. Life.
“Yeah, that’s been an eventful journey.”
“And you can talk to me,” I said, tilting my head a little.
“Quit using my words,” he said, making me bite down a grin. He sighed. “Law was my father’s dream, not mine,” he said, staring off at the opposite wall. “I ended up leaving his firm to work on a shrimp boat in the Gulf.”
My eyes popped open wide. “Holy shit, Montgomery, that’s—”
“Quite the leap, yeah, I know,” he finished, laughing to himself. “Not like I wanted to be a shrimp fisherman, either, believe me, but I just—needed to do something else. Figure out what I was supposed to do.”
“And—that was to run a diner?”
He shook his head and got up to walk to the kitchen. “No, that was to build things.” He opened the fridge quickly and pulled two waters out before closing it back to keep the cold in. “I got on a construction crew after the boat, building tract homes.” He laughed sarcastically as he sat back down and handed me a bottle. “Once my dad realized I enjoyed it, he decided I should go back to school for architecture.”
“Oh, wow.”
“I couldn’t just do that. It was always about the higher education with him. In order for me to succeed in his eyes, I needed a degree in something.”
“So I’m guessing you didn’t go,” I said, swigging down the cold water.
He did an eyebrow gesture that said no. “He’s still waiting.”
I laughed. “And the diner?”
The light in his eyes went out. I was enjoying the camaraderie so much, I wanted to put it back.
“That was my wife’s idea.” His face went completely void of expression. As he went somewhere inside himself and I played with my water bottle lid, I tried to figure out what to say.
“I heard about—um—that you lost your wife,” I said, wincing a little as his head jerked toward me. “Sorry.”
“What?” he asked, his tone curt. “How would you know that?”
His complete change of demeanor threw me. “I’m—sorry I mentioned it. Jarvis just told—”
“Jarvis,” he said, enunciating slowly, leaning forward. It was more like a question and I was left to wonder if I’d remembered the name wrong.
“The old man?” I thumbed toward the downstairs area. “Isn’t that his name?”
Jesse looked at me with an odd expression, something I couldn’t read and didn’t even know if I was supposed to try. “Jarvis told you about my wife?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
I raised my eyebrows, so bewildered. “This morning? At breakfast?” I flopped the pillow back at him. “And at the time, it wasn’t about you, at least not to me. I didn’t know you were the owner of the diner that he was talking about. Why the third degree?”
He looked away and shook his head. “Nothing.”
“He just likes to talk, I think,” I said, assuming that maybe Jesse didn’t appreciate Jarvis putting his business out to strangers. “He told May that he misses his boat.”
Jesse’s eyes shot back to me again, and he ran both hands over his hair as if they just needed something to do. “What else?”
I shook my head. “Why?”
>
He looked at me, hard, as if deciding on something, then gave a little head shake and appeared to switch gears. “Jarvis and his wife, May, were who I bought the diner from,” he said finally. “They’re good people.”
“Oh, seriously?” I said. “Wow, they didn’t say anything about owning it. He started talking about that boat, and just—”
“Kept talking,” Jesse finished, his face and voice softening. “Yeah, he loved that old boat. It’s been probably six years since he sold it to me, and he never stopped fussing over it. Making sure I kept up the maintenance and updated my tags.” He laced his fingers and stared at them. “Whether I was using it or not. He just couldn’t handle it anymore and didn’t want to see it go to waste.”
“My dad used to judge people by their boats,” I said.
His expression went thoughtful like he was recalling a memory. “I told my son something like that once. That a boat is an extension of the man driving it. Doesn’t have to be big or flashy, just solid and made of integrity.” He sighed with the memory, his eyes lost in it. “I taught him how to drive it, dock and launch, even how to fish in it long before it was mine. Jarvis used to bring us out, then let me borrow it when Jamie got bigger and it didn’t fit three comfortably anymore.”
I liked how his face transformed when he spoke of his son.
“So how old is Jamie now?”
Jesse took a deep breath and let a couple of blinks pass. “He’s nineteen.”
“Off to college somewhere?” I asked, sensing something wasn’t right.
He shook his head and got up again, tossing his empty bottle onto the nearby chair. “He lives in Austin with my in-laws.”
I frowned and waited for the explanation, but he looked antsy, like a pacing cat.
“Did you have a falling-out?” I asked finally.
He turned and met my eyes, startling me with the pain that shot out from his. “You could say that,” he said quietly. “He thinks I killed his mother.”
Chapter Six
Okay then.
I found myself transfixed once again by a gaze I couldn’t turn from. His eyes dared me to question, and begged me not to. I had no idea what any of it meant, but I did have a sudden fleeting regret that no one knew where I was.
Somehow, even not knowing the man he became over the last two decades, I knew it wasn’t as it sounded. The fierce pain and rawness I saw in his face told me it was something else. Something deeply rooted and inherently private.
I didn’t have a chance to say anything, because the sound of ice pecking the windows spurred him into action.
“Hail,” he muttered, shoving nearby sneakers onto his bare feet. “Great.”
I envisioned Brad’s car being deckled as well as drowned, and groaned. “What do we need to do?”
“Right now—go check the windows and the water level, and here—” He opened a closet and pulled out another small cooler. “Can you go fill this one with ice to keep up here? Don’t know how long this’ll go on.”
“Yeah,” I said, grabbing the cooler and following him down. For the moment I figured the activity was a valid distraction from the conversation.
The view when we reached the bottom was pretty dismal. Even through the sandy glass, the sight of hail pummeling the new parking lot lake was rather intimidating. Especially the inconsistent directions it was doing it in. It appeared to come from every direction at once, taking my breath away every time the full wrath of it would slam into the predominantly glass front.
“Holy shit,” I whispered. Looking for Brad’s car made my heart sink, as waves lapped at the diner’s porch.
“Don’t look,” he said softly from behind me, as if reading my mind. “There’s nothing we can do to change it, come on.” He pointed out the ice machine. “Close it back as quickly as you can.”
There wasn’t much ice left in it.
I looked at the hail swirling and bouncing against the sidewalk. “What if we grab some of that?”
He stopped, mid-reach toward a closet door, and turned to see what I was pointing at. “Are you serious?”
“It hasn’t made any more ice, and that’s free,” I said, fiddling with the locks till they surrendered. I pushed the door open with my back and shoved the cooler through the gap. I turned my face away as I held on to it. Actually, I’d planned on letting it sit there without me, but I quickly realized it would blow away.
It filled in minutes, and I pulled it back, holding it up as the door banged back into place. Jesse laughed and walked up to me, taking the cooler from my hand.
“Well, aren’t you innovative?” he said, wiping the rainwater from my face with his fingers. The touch was electric, and our eyes met. In that one second, we were back on a lakeshore and no time had passed. Something pulled at me, drawing me closer, but the earlier dark moment clouded his expression.
His eyebrows twitched as he blinked and looked away, blowing out a breath. He turned and set the cooler on the counter on his way back to the closet, leaving me to flex my hands and mentally kick myself. Brad, Brad, Brad . . .
I watched him unlock and pull open the closet at the end of the bar and disappear into it. One by one, sandbags were tossed out with solid thuds. My God, he was such a Boy Scout. I walked over to hoist one of them up and heard a chuckle behind me as I grunted and wobbled in place.
“Stay with it there, Fremont, I don’t want to have to rescue you again.”
Seriously? I craned my neck around to glare at him, but at least the playfulness was back. For now.
“Where do you want these?” I asked.
“Along the front,” he said with the strain of lugging two at once. “Pile extra around the door.”
We heaved, grunted, and shoved bags till they were all in place. All twenty-one of them. I counted.
“Jesus, what possessed you to fill all these?” I panted, plopping down in a booth far away from the windows. They were scaring me.
“My low land,” he said, leaning against the bar to catch his breath. “Gotta do what it takes to take care of what I have. Guess that’s why law didn’t do it for me,” he said with a shrug. “Legal documents and putting on a show in the courtroom isn’t who I am.” He held up his hands. “I work for what I have.”
I stood up to peer out at the porch, now flush with the ice-chummed water. “Sure hope they work.”
The big clock over the bar mocked me, showing me with its battery-operated superiority that I only had sixteen hours left. God, every time I thought I had it settled in my mind—every time I made peace with the thought of going home to Brad and starting our life together—something weird escalated with Jesse. And things weren’t supposed to escalate with Jesse! There wasn’t supposed to be a Jesse.
“Shit,” I muttered to myself. Or what I thought was to myself.
“What?”
Just One Day Page 6
