Chapter Fourteen
Will was greeted at the door by a very curious-looking Cora, a frowning Tori, and the scuttling tap of Sarge’s imminent approach.
“I brought two, just in case,” he offered, smiling broadly.
“Didn’t you just,” Cora murmured, staring at him speculatively. “Well, come on in.”
“Cora,” Tori hissed, but Cora ignored her and walked farther into the house. He followed, but Tori stood by the door looking mutinous.
“Coming?” he asked, still grinning.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Pizza,” he replied, bending over to give Sarge a good ear scratch. Micah clattered down the stairs and came into view. “Hey, MJ.”
Micah rolled his eyes. “Try LeBron, son.”
Will laughed as the boy zeroed in on the pizza. Will had been in the house a few times. He’d helped Brandon move some of Lilly’s stuff, and he and Brandon had done a few repairs for Cora.
It was a nice house. Small rooms, but open. Well lived in, the kind of home he hadn’t had growing up. He’d had all of the newest things, and they’d had a maid to keep the house sparkling. Basketballs had been forbidden in the house.
Love had been forbidden in that house, and it shone through here.
Which was a terribly morbid thought and he didn’t particularly want to dwell on it.
“Had a nice chat with the new pizza place owner,” Will offered as Cora opened up all the boxes and handed everyone a plate. “He seems determined to make something of it, so maybe we’ll actually have somewhere to send people to eat after a hike besides Corbin’s lodge.”
“Oh, I hope it lasts.” Cora bit into a slice of pizza and groaned. “I haven’t had fresh take-out pizza in ages. Is the bakery still going?”
“So far.” He glanced at Tori, who was still standing at the entrance to the small kitchen, the plate clutched angrily in her hands.
“Going to eat?” he asked cheerfully.
She set her mouth into a firm line, dropping her plate on the edge of the counter before grabbing his arm.
She took his pizza-filled plate out of his hands and set it on top of hers.
“Hey.”
Then she was dragging him to the front of the house, and out of it. For a second, he thought she was going to leave him in the front yard, go back inside, and lock the door.
He wasn’t entirely sure that wasn’t her plan, but if it was, she changed her mind and stepped out onto the grass with him.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest. Her hair was still down, and she was wearing athletic shorts and a T-shirt, and her feet were bare. She looked . . . soft, almost. Like some woman he didn’t know.
An uncomfortable thought, so he smiled. “I was eating pizza until I was so rudely—”
“What are you doing?” she repeated, and it was the fact she didn’t seem angry, but a little hurt, that had him softening enough to tell her. That would be part of it, he thought. Some straightforward honesty was required to rebuild a friendship.
“I want to be your friend again,” he said as earnestly as he could manage without feeling . . . squirmy. Okay, he still felt a little uncomfortable at that much forthrightness, but it was a start.
“By barging into my dinner and movie night?” she demanded, changing her stance from arms crossed to hands on her hips.
“Yes.” He smiled again, because he was certain he could charm her. “Consider the inevitable chick flick my penance for inviting myself.”
“Will.” She tangled her hands in her hair in frustration. It was always so distracting when it was down, thick and wavy. It’d be soft, and smell like her shampoo.
“Will!”
“What?”
She looked at him, exasperation and something a little too close to fear. Was she afraid of him? But what exactly about him? He’d been a good friend. Yeah, he’d clumsily shut down the whole love thing, but before that he’d been a good friend.
What was there to be afraid of?
“We’re not friends,” she said softly. “Not like that. Too much has happened. We can’t just . . . be what we were.”
“Are you the exact same person you were back then?”
“No, but I am the exact same person you kissed the other night. I can’t do this whole thing again. This half-and-half shit.”
“Okay.” He supposed it was his problem he felt a little half-and-half himself. His problem, not hers. He held out his hand, but she only scowled at it.
“Don’t be a coward, take my hand.”
Her lips firmed and he could tell she was trying to fight her innate reaction to fall into the trap of reverse psychology. Still, they might not be the same people they were, but he knew Tori Appleby. Deep down, regardless of all the other crap, he knew what made her tick.
She slipped her hand into his, gaze wary but determined. He gave it a squeeze.
“I only want to be your friend again. I’m not the same kid I was, and neither are you, which means it won’t be the same friendship. It’s not the same us. But I don’t want to be angry, and I don’t want to be tense.”
“You can’t just decide not to be those things. There’s . . . It’s there. You can’t erase it.”
He took a deep breath, but he didn’t release her hand. “I don’t want to erase it.” She tried to tug her hand away, but he held firm. He’d made a decision, for the best of Mile High, and his friends, and himself, he’d made a decision.
Much like deciding to tell Brandon about the things that had happened with Courtney a few months ago, it was a decision he couldn’t back off from, because it mattered. It was important.
“I’m not suggesting we pretend it never happened. I’m saying that we’re different people. We’re adults, and it’s been a long time. The kiss the other night . . .” Well, it was certainly something, but he didn’t need to figure it out right this second. One step at a time.
“Was a giant mistake,” Tori said firmly.
“Yeah.” Maybe. “And I think borne in part due to frustration and trying to pretend and trying to rehash and . . . I just want to start over. That doesn’t erase anything that’s happened between us, it just puts it firmly in the past. Where it belongs.”
She inhaled, still staring at him, still kind of pulling away from him though he held her hand firmly. She swallowed. “I don’t know how to do that.”
“Honestly? I don’t know that I know how either, but I figure it’s worth a shot. We’re building Mile High into something that could change Gracely, you know? You’re a part of that now. I don’t want it to feel heavy.”
His chest ached at the look on her face before she schooled it away, but he’d seen it. Fear and uncertainty. Underneath all that tough façade, all that poking at old wounds, she was just as scared as he was.
The problem was, he didn’t know what he was afraid of, only that a low-level panic lived in his chest. Was she the same? As in the dark about that clutching thing and its cause as he was?
“So . . .”
“So we go in and have a movie night. Maybe we shuffle the schedule around a bit so we’re on some of the same excursions every once in a while. We enjoy each other’s company when our friends get together. We agree that we’re different people, in a different time. We were kids before. At least, I was. I hadn’t grown up yet.”
“And now you have?” she asked skeptically.
He smiled self-deprecatingly. “Slowly figuring it out. A failed marriage helps, believe it or not.”
It softened her, he could feel it in her hand, he could see it on her face. “Why did it fail?” she asked softly.
He wanted to withdraw his hand now, but he didn’t. This was the thing you did when you were an adult. This was the thing he’d seen Brandon do, time and time again, no matter how hard.
When someone asked you a difficult question, one that hurt and brought up things you didn’t want to face, you answered it anyway. You summoned whatever strength you had, and you looked the discomfort in the eye.
Brandon had never shied away from being an Evans in this town when it had come to be a curse. He’d marched on, determined to make it mean something else.
So Will would march on, determined to make this strained relationship with Tori something else. Something better.
“I realized how far apart we were, how little we meant to each other, and I reached a point where it wasn’t what I wanted for myself anymore.” Not every detail, but the truth.
She was still studying him, the colorful sunset behind him reflecting in her eyes. A vibrant, cloudy storm within.
“So you were the one who walked away?”
“I filed for divorce, but we’d both walked away from each other a long time before that. There was no fight. No tears. She said, ‘Suit yourself,’ and that was it.” She terminated our child. It was on the tip of his tongue, but it was a pretty summer night and he didn’t want that ugliness between him and Tori. Not when he was holding her hand.
“All right,” she said, her voice something close to a whisper. She gripped his hand tighter, began to pull him back toward the door. “You’re sounding an awful lot like a woman, I think a chick flick will be right up your alley.”
It was so Tori, so something she would have said to him years ago, that he smiled and followed.
* * *
Thank God for wine. It was the only tangible thought in Tori’s mind as she sat on the couch next to Will and watched the romantic comedy Cora had picked out.
Tori seemed to be the only one who thought this was fucking weird. Cora and Will had laughed at different things in the movie, Micah had played video games on a handheld thing, occasionally asking Will for help. As though they were some screwed-up New Age family.
Tori took a long sip of her wine.
Will wanted to be friends. That was fine. She should be glad. Isn’t that what she’d wanted? For them to be able to be comfortable, or comfortable-ish, around each other. That’s all she was after. The opportunity to work at Mile High and with him and not feel horribly awkward.
She felt horribly, horribly awkward. This was so much worse than fighting. Fighting she knew how to do. Play nice when they weren’t working, when he was infiltrating her new life?
This was supposed to be separate. Her house, her friendship with Cora. This was supposed to be the thing he wasn’t a part of.
But he’d answered her very personal question about his marriage outside and unfortunately, she knew enough about Will to know that was a step for him. A change. He didn’t like to talk about hard things. He never wanted to dig too deep into a problem.
Wasn’t that what she’d liked about him? He’d never asked why she ran away from home, and if she gave a sort of half explanation of what happened with her brother, he never pushed for more details. He never demanded more information. He treated everything with the kind of superficiality that appealed to her.
Because God knew she didn’t want to delve into that shit with herself let alone anyone else.
Back then it had seemed reasonable to avoid, to pretend, and now . . .
She realized, belatedly, that the credits were rolling and Cora was picking up plates and glasses and hauling them into the kitchen.
Tori let out a sigh of relief. Will would leave now. She could go back to her little house by herself and relax. She could stop feeling like her muscles would never unclench.
She got up off the couch and the world spun a little bit. Will’s long fingers curled around her elbow.
He didn’t say anything. Just steadied her and then let her go. Very friendly all in all. Not even a joke about her needing help to stand.
She let out a shaky breath and didn’t dare look at him. “Come on, Sarge. Bedtime.”
“I’ll walk with you.”
Dammit. She should have waited for him to leave before she tried to. Maybe she could still . . . She glanced at Cora who had a look on her face that reminded Tori far too much of Lilly. A sort of calculating certainty.
Sarge happily followed Will toward the door and Tori could only trudge after. She glanced back at Cora once more, hoping for her friend’s interference, but Cora only smiled far too widely.
“You’re going to pay for this,” Tori muttered, not quite knowing how she would make Cora pay.
Cora chuckled. “I’ll pay and pay for it, as long as you give me all the details.”
“There will be no details,” she growled. She glanced at Will, who was opening the door and letting Sarge prance outside to do his business.
Cora shrugged as if she didn’t believe her. Well. Tori would prove it. She’d prove to everyone that she was stronger than the Tori of old. She did not have to fall head over heels for Will Evans. She was stronger. She was immune.
That’s so why she’d kissed him back the other night. Immunity to his charms.
She squeezed her eyes shut before reopening them and forcing herself to follow Will outside.
The night was cool, the sky heavy with clouds. There was a faint rumble of thunder and a flash to the west.
“I sure hope we get the rain. I think the customers who keep rescheduling are going to give up eventually.”
“Oh, they’ll be back,” Will said with every confidence in the world. “They know we can’t control the weather.”
“If it stays dry—”
“It won’t forever.”
And, of course, as though he could control the weather, a fat raindrop landed on her nose and then her cheek. Lightning flashed again in the distance. Sarge quickly trotted over to her house and the little overhang that protected the stoop from rain.
“Smart dog,” she muttered still standing stock-still in the middle of Cora’s yard. Will’s hand curled around hers for the second time today.
“Come on, drunky.”
“I am not drunk.” But when she took a step, she stumbled a little. “I am elegantly tipsy.”
Will snorted as they broke into a jog across the yard and onto her protected stoop.
“Elegant in all things. Especially drunk off box wine.”
“Tipsy.”
Her hair was wet again, and so was her shirt and her feet in her flip-flops. She couldn’t see Will in the dark. She should’ve left a porch light on, she thought dimly.
Her hand was still in his.
Again, standing in front of her house, too close. Too many thoughts catapulting through her brain. Thoughts of that kiss. Thoughts of his hands. Oh, who was she kidding? She’d always be this way, helpless and hopeless when it came to him.
Yeah, she’d learned not to tell him that. Learned to keep things like that to herself. Her life had been a series of learning to tamp down her feelings. But it never erased those feelings. They were still there. Haunting her.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in to wait out the storm?”
He said it too soft. Too silky. And it was far too tempting. To invite him in. To be alone with him. Be unsteady with him with her hand in his.
“That’s what a friend would do,” he said, his voice too close to her temple, his breath brushing across her forehead.
“I guess we’re not friends then, because I am not inviting you in,” she said, her voice overloud compared to his.
“Why not?”
She wished she could see him. If she could see his expression, she’d understand his tone better.
Why not? Was he really that clueless? Or was he trying to get her to say something? This was the thing she hated. The thing she couldn’t stand. The not knowing how to do it. Not knowing what the other person was after.
“I’ll go,” he said. “Because we are going to be friends again. I don’t want to jeopardize that.”
She really didn’t know what that meant. How was coming inside jeopardizing it? Did he think she couldn’t control herself around him?
Was that it? That pissed her off, because she damn well could. Maybe not her emotions or her heart, but definitely herself.
She opened her mouth to say just that, but he was talking on in that low, silky voice that made her stomach jump and her heart beat so hard she could barely hear what he had to say.
“Because I think if I came inside, I’d be tempted to kiss you again. And you don’t want that.”
No, she didn’t want that. Couldn’t, anyway.
His thumb brushed across her wet knuckles, and then he released her hand. “Good night, Tori. Night, Sarge.”
Then he was gone. When Tori could think again, she’d blame her head spinning on the wine.