“Oh,” I said, not prepared for the suddenly broached subject of my ex-whatever.
Oliver ran his hand over the top of a chair. “Well anyway, since we’re here for the long haul, we should cook something.” He backed up toward the kitchen. As I followed, my heart felt heavy with too many unspoken regrets, but also light with gratitude.
The stew we cooked was Oliver’s invention. Both chili and Tabasco sauces.
“Rach. Think fast.” Drops of water hit me in the face. “You’re staring at the wall.”
“Thanks.” It went on like that for a while. Oliver was serious when he’d promised to distract me if I showed any sign of meltdown. He’d flick water from his fingertips at me, or throw the occasional potato peel. After a while, he stopped asking if I was okay, he’d just yell my full name at the top of his lungs.
“Rachel Anne Daughtry!”
It always snapped me out of it, and sometimes I yelled back—“Oliver Fredrick Wentworth!”—making him laugh. And when he laughed, I laughed. Nothing like a yelling/laughing battle in an echoy Victorian house.
He turned on ESPN while we ate. During one of the time-outs of the double-header basketball game, Oliver excused himself, and I heard him on the phone. I took our dishes into the kitchen and moved to the couch, wrapping up in the blanket.
“Dial-a-Nurse?” I asked when he came back. “What advice did she give you for dealing with a lunatic?”
He chuckled, checking something on his cell before tossing it on the coffee table. “Treat it like any other forty-eight-hour virus. Once the fever breaks, you’re golden.” He sat on the other end of the couch and flipped the channel from basketball to CNN. “Sarah’s been calling. I told her you’re here and that you’re okay.”
“Oh.” I felt a blush spread across my cheeks. Wherever Sarah was, she was probably experiencing a meltdown on my behalf. “Crap!” I sat up straight. “I left Sydney at home alone. Rog’s dog.”
“I called Roger, too,” Oliver said.
“You did?”
He nodded. “Sydney’s taken care of.”
My heart pushed against my ribs. I looked down, afraid I might cry. He was taking care of me again, and I hadn’t even realized it. “Oliver,” I whispered. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And it wasn’t Dial-a-Nurse. I had to confer with one of my work colleagues. Let him know I won’t be in tomorrow.” He cut me off before I could protest. “I could use a mental health day and obviously so can you.” He massaged the back of his neck and gave a little groan, then pushed a hand through his hair, that wavy, gorgeous dark hair that I loved so much. Did it smell the same as it used to?
“Rachel.”
“Hmm?”
He lifted his eyebrows. “You’re staring at me now. Why are you looking at me like…like that?”
I didn’t want to know how exactly I was looking at him. Was lust showing on my face?
He shot me one last sideways glance, then flipped back to the basketball game. “Lakers are up by ten, so you quit distracting me.”
We didn’t speak for a while. He flipped through a thick binder as we sat on far ends of the couch, the TV on low. I tried not to hear him breathe or see him move out of the corner of my eye.
After his third grunt of frustration, I asked, “What are you reading?”
“Some work things.”
“It’s probably your eyes. You stare at a computer screen all day, gets tedious.”
He lowered his pencil. “Doesn’t your day job shackle you to a computer? Writing up your little jingles or whatever?”
“Writing jingles isn’t all I do. You have no idea—” His Cheshire cat grin made me stop. “Ahh, distracting me, huh?”
He snickered and went back to the binder on his lap. “I have an even better line of attack for when you really need it.” He scratched out what he’d just written.
“You’re about to wear that poor eraser down to a nub. Shouldn’t you use a computer to work on computer programs?”
He shot a glance at me then back at his papers. “Um, this isn’t for work-work.” He rubbed his jaw and slowly lifted his gaze to me.
“Oh. It’s for your company.”
He nodded and looked away.
“Cool.” My voice sounded unnaturally high.
He didn’t reply.
Crap, I’d spooked him away from talking to me about opening his own business. For that, I sucked, and I deserved his incommunicado and distrust. Obviously, it was really important to him and I’d mocked it—because he hadn’t had “a plan.” I was thinking about straying from my ten-year plan, but that didn’t stop me from being excited about the future, the unknown.
Oliver needed to know I totally got it. But this wasn’t about me, so I pulled my feet up to sit cross-legged and scooted so I faced him. “Cool,” I repeated. “Tell me about it.”
“Nothing to tell.”
“I heard you have an investor,” I said, trying to remember what Ryan had told me at the color run. Though now that I thought about it, that might not be an extremely reliable source. Ryan had said Oliver never seemed satisfied with his job, when really he’d probably just misinterpreted Oliver’s ambition as discontent.
“A few,” he replied.
“Cool,” I chirped enthusiastically. Ugh, that word.
Since I couldn’t trust what I’d heard from Ryan, I had to think of something else. “So…have you submitted your SBA application?”
Oliver scribbled in his binder. “Last month.” Finally, he looked up, warily. Or maybe he was daring me to make a crack.
“Oh, yeah?” I picked at my thumbnail, playing all-nonchalant, but over the moon that he hadn’t told me to drop the subject. “Do you have clients?”
“Ten, so far.”
“Yeah?” I’d been making small talk before, but this was interesting. “How do you go about that? Social media? Work fairs?”
“Networking, mostly. Roger was a big help at the beginning.”
“Roger who?”
“Your brother.” He moved the binder onto the coffee table. “We had lunch a few months back and—”
“Hold on.” I lifted a hand, rewinding what he’d said. “I didn’t realize you were hanging out.”
“He travels to Japan on business a lot. So did I, last year. I’d been here a couple of weeks, and I ran into him at a party.”
“When you met Meghan,” I said without thinking. His mouth was still open, though he didn’t confirm. “You called her when she left her jacket in your car. You were still Rad to me.” I toyed with the hem of my shirt. “Did you know?”
“That you lived here?” He shook his head. “Not until that night.”
I bit the inside of my lip. “Oh.”
“Yeah, oh.”
Why did he sound bitter when I was the one who’d had to live through watching my best friend fall in love with him? I glanced at the TV, though not watching it. Oliver frowned down at his phone, tapping violently at the keypad. Maybe it was my turn to distract him. It was a fair trade-off for all those potato peels and full-name shouting matches.
“Lakers are losing in overtime,” I said conversationally. “But this game doesn’t matter; they clinched their play-off seed last—”
“And that’s another thing, Rachel.” His sharp tone startled me. “I had no idea you followed sports. I had to drag you to that game we went to for your birthday.”
My body flushed with heat at the sudden broach of subject—the past “us.” I thought I was ready for it, but I wasn’t.
He stared at me, waiting for an answer. “And when did you learn guitar?”
“I’ve been playing my whole life.”
“Except for eight months of your freshman year of college? You never mentioned it. Not once.”
His accusatory tone made me flinch, flicked on my defensive stitch. “I thought it was nerdy so I didn’t play for anyone. There was no way I was going to play in front of my totally hot boyfriend, and—wait, hold on.” I exhaled
in relief. Hopeful relief. “Is this you trying to distract me again? Because it’s not funny.”
“What?” He looked baffled. “No.”
Okay. Now I was baffled.
“And now Sarah tells me you’re moving back to Texas. Were you going to alert me to the fact or disappear again?”
My mouth fell open.
“Wow. You were, weren’t you?” He sat back and crossed his arms. “You’re with someone for eight months, you share everything with her, you think you know her—”
“Oliver.” I jumped to my feet. Confusion, defensiveness, and pent-up fury spun inside my brain like a blender. “That’s not fair. This is the first meaningful conversation we’ve had since college. You can’t claim you suddenly don’t know me.”
We’d never argued before. Not once. The way we were yelling now, though, it felt natural to me, necessary, like I had to get it out before I exploded.
“That’s how I feel, like I don’t know you.” He was on his feet, pacing away. “Just because we haven’t talked doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about—” He cut himself off. “You left that day with hardly an explanation.”
“What day?”
“Seven years ago, Rachel. In twenty days it will be seven years.”
I inhaled a gasp like the wind was knocked out of me. All this time, he remembered just as vividly as I did. The realization should have been comforting, but I felt deflated.
“Oh,” I said, dumbly. “Yeah.”
“Yeah.” His tone was sarcastic. “Did you assume I didn’t remember? That I don’t think about that day every time I look at you?”
The words hit like spraying bullets, weakening me even more. But I wasn’t to blame for all of it, especially not these last seven months. “How am I supposed to know what you’re thinking? Until now, we’ve barely talked. How do you think that made me feel when you moved here and totally blew me off?”
“I wasn’t blowing you off, I was pissed at you for what you did back then. Then I thought I could forgive you and that pissed me off again.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “But it happened so long ago, I didn’t know what to say to you.”
“So instead you paraded around with my best friend?”
His eyebrows pulled together. “If you’re talking about Meghan, I went on exactly one date with her, and that was before I saw you. After that, I…”
My anger unclenched, just a tiny bit. “You what?”
“Nothing.” He turned away, his hand kneading the back of his neck.
“No, let’s hear it. You accused me of leaving you for no reason.”
“I never said that.”
“Whatever. This is stupid. After seven years, we’re having our first fight—”
“Then let’s make it mean something, Rachel. Tell me why we broke up. It wasn’t because Roger forced you, was it?”
I should have seen the question coming, I should have welcomed it after all this time. But it felt like a punch in the stomach, deflating me all over again. I had to tell him the truth, though. No matter what happened to us after this conversation, Oliver needed to know.
“No,” I began. “It wasn’t because of Roger. We were teenagers; we didn’t have a clue.”
“That’s bullshit. Did you get bored or just not love me?”
My stomach churned then hit the floor. “What?” I whispered, shock and grief gripping my throat like a noose. How? How could he say that?
“I’ve been thinking about it.” He turned away, his hand massaging his neck again. “And that’s the best explanation I came up with.”
No, he was not going to ruin the memory of the most important relationship of my life. “Of course I loved you.” I could barely speak around the lump in my throat as I walked toward his turned back. “It tore me apart to hurt you. You were my first love, Oliver, my first everything. But, my family.”
He shook his head but was still facing the other way. “Stop it, Rachel,” he muttered. “Do not blame your brother for this.”
“I’m not.” My chest shook with a sob—fortitude mixed with panic. “There were things I didn’t tell you back then. But it wasn’t you, it was me.”
“No.” He looked up at the ceiling, sounding exasperated. “Don’t give me that line.”
“It’s not a line.” I pulled in a breath. “It was you, but it was you because of me. I had this…this plan, these goals.”
He shook his head. “What?”
“And because I was with you,” I said to his back, “I couldn’t keep up with them. But that was my fault, never yours. I wasn’t honest with you when I should’ve been and I’m sorry. I got scared so I ran.”
“Scared of what?”
“Of…of being with you, of the future. I was scared but I always loved you, always.”
“You should’ve told me that.” He whirled around and held me by the arms. “You could’ve told me, and we would’ve figured it out. You didn’t have to run from me.”
“Scared,” I repeated through a shaky voice. “I’m sorry. We were kids and things got too intense.”
“Intense? Like this?” His grip held me in place and he stared down into my face until I almost couldn’t breathe, his eyes blazing. “We’re not kids anymore, Rachel. Are you still scared?”
My breath shook as I nodded.
“Why?” His fingers pressed into my arms. “Why are you scared to be with me?”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my mind and mouth at a loss for more.
“Stop saying you’re sorry. I’m not sorry.” Just as fast as he’d grabbed me, he let go and stepped back.
I stared at him, rubbing my hands over where he’d been holding, unable to process what had just happened.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He turned away, his voice low and hoarse. “Or frighten you. I didn’t mean for any of this.”
My mouth was dry, my heart thudding hard and painfully. Part of me wanted to run away again, while another part was too stubborn to move.
“You should go to bed now.” He still wouldn’t face me. “But I told you I’d stay up.” He shot one glance at me. “Go.”
When I inhaled, my body shook with anger and adrenaline, from the memory of his hands on my arms. I marched away, not bothering to say a word. I entered the guest bedroom and stood in the dark. Oliver was banging stuff around in the other room. My temper flared.
Where did he get off? Yelling at me when I was trying to apologize. He was insane!
I kicked the door shut.
I had no idea what time it was. My purse and phone were out in the living room. The Lakers were playing on the East Coast, so the time difference made it probably close to midnight. Sleep was a long shot, but I stripped off my clothes and threw myself on the bed.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I woke up gasping in a familiar cold sweat, my pulse keeping rhythm with the Budweiser Clydesdales. When I remembered where I was, I bit down on the duvet, trying to slow my heart.
It was a dream, Rachel, I repeated over and over, staring through the dark bedroom toward the window. But it was that dream…the one that had brought me to this house in the first place.
I swung my legs off the side of the bed, stood, and shivered. I wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. Mine were in a heap on the floor somewhere. I felt for the closet door, opened it and touched what felt to be a row of dress shirts. I pulled one off a hanger and pushed my hands through the sleeves. It was huge like a mini dress, hitting me mid-thigh.
The hallway was pitch black. I hesitated for a second at my door, but the fear of what might be lurking in the dark shadows out there was nothing compared to the horrors I’d just faced in bed. No more sleep. I padded toward the kitchen. A light was left on over the stove, which guided me forward like a beacon.
I just wanted a snack or a glass of water—I was suddenly so incredibly thirsty and a little sick to my stomach, and my head hurt, too. All-over body ache. Maybe I could find my oils. Where was my purse?
As I
was about to cross the threshold into the kitchen, the shutting of a drawer made me squeak. Oliver’s back was to me as he crouched in front of the open cabinet below the sink. Hearing my squeak, his head jerked, looking as startled as I felt.
His gaze slid from my face and moved down my body. “Hoooly damn,” he murmured.
That’s about the time I remembered what I was wearing: one of his button-up shirts, though completely unbuttoned and hanging wide open in the front. I yelped and pulled it around me like a double-breasted suit.
Oliver looked at my face and blinked. “I…you…ow!” He yanked his hand out of the drawer he’d just slammed shut and shook it in pain. With all his weight on the balls of his feet, he lost his balance and fell forward, one foot slipping out from under him. He caught himself by the other hand right before he would have face-planted on the tile. When he went to stand, he banged his head on a low-hanging cabinet door above the sink.
“Dammit,” he muttered, rubbing the top of his head.
I giggled at the comedy of errors, but that shriveled in my throat when I noticed he was sporting a pair of black boxers. And nothing else. I was grateful there wasn’t a cabinet door for me to bang into, because hoooly damn was right. I hadn’t seen a more perfect nearly naked man since, well, him.
“Are you okay?” I approached him with a lifted hand, touching the spot on his head where he was rubbing. “Ouch,” I said in empathy when he flinched. He lowered his hand so only I was touching his head. I stroked it gingerly, feeling the swelling goose egg.
“You used to wear my clothes all the time.”
“Hmm?” Though I’d heard him quite clearly. I withdrew my hand and turned to hastily button up my shirt.
“They always looked better on you than on me.”
It was something about the dimness of the room or the lateness of the hour, but we were relaxed, like the fight had never happened.
“You’re delirious. You need ice.” I retreated to the freezer, pulled it open, and let the frigid air cool off my overheated body. “Sit down,” I ordered over my shoulder. After gathering a handful of ice cubes, I grabbed a dish towel and sat in the kitchen chair next to him. “It’s getting hot,” I said, gently placing the ice over the lump on his head.
Someday Maybe Page 19
