29
VICTORIA
I’d imagined my reunion with Luke completely differently in my head. I’d anticipated it happening over a month ago. My plan was to swoop into Phoenix in the warm August sun in my favorite sundress, the hot wind against my cheeks. Luke would have been rightly shocked at my unannounced appearance at La Vie where he was a sous chef—I’d pieced together the bits of information he had revealed over the months—but he would have taken me into his arms anyway, amid the applause of his coworkers. We were going to live together happily ever after.
Yes, I have a slight penchant for dramatics. My underlying logic reminds me that the ideal scene was fairytale-like at best, but at the very least, Luke would have received my arrival with such joy and relief that he would have lifted me off my feet and given me a hug to end all hugs. At the absolute minimum, if he ended up being more of an introvert than I guessed he was, his elation would have been written all over his face.
Instead, on that day, there was horror in his expression. Pure fear, because the pregnant host that greeted me when I bounced into that restaurant, ready to declare my love? She was his wife.
“So, where do you want to go next?” he asks. I’m in the passenger seat of Luke’s rental car. He has a hand on the steering wheel, the other on the car’s stick shift. His profile is painfully handsome, a James Dean look-alike, straight from a DVD cover out of my mom’s classic movie collection. But the expression on his face right now is hard to decipher. It’s a familiar one, true, but I don’t trust him or trust myself to know what it means. This is what happens when someone breaks you. You realize that it doesn’t matter whose fault it was—you still have to do the work to bring yourself back.
“I’m pretty tired. I want to go home.”
“Okay.” He maneuvers the car down the historic downtown main street where we’d grabbed coffee earlier and attempted to talk over live bluegrass music. Frankly, the band was an excellent excuse not to speak. Now, I’m yearning to scream to fill the silence.
“If you go down this main road, the campground is about a mile on the left.”
“How’s it feel to be back glamping?”
That’s right, I had told him all about my childhood glamping vacations. It’s another stab in the ribs, and I suck in a breath. God, I told him my fears. I told him my fantasies. I choke out an answer. “Good.”
I root my gaze outside my window, to pedestrians milling about, to lovers holding hands, seemingly in bliss. I see groups of friends huddle over ice cream cones. Laughter filters through the traffic, along with the occasional loud rumble of a motorcycle.
Usually, this kind of people watching would inspire me to write, would conjure sentences in my brain that I had to spew out onto the page. But right now, it’s salt in the wound of what could have been with the man driving next to me.
I’m counting the seconds until I get back home.
And by home, I mean the campground, where everything is easier, the atmosphere bucolic. Where my focus is on making the next meal, starting the next fire.
Where Joel is.
I tear my eyes away from people watching and look down at my own hands. Red pill or blue pill? Earlier, I made a choice to go with Luke, and was it worth it? Being with him for the afternoon didn’t enlighten me. He has yet to explain himself. I am not any closer to the peace I thought this day would bring me.
Luke parks the car in the campground office lot. We’re alone in the lot. He keeps the engine on but pulls up on the emergency break. He lays both hands on his lap.
My pain is superseded by anger. Admittedly, his appearance took me aback, pleased me. While I knew it was over between us, and the afternoon was uncomfortable, this grand gesture earned him points. But I’m still waiting for his explanation. He was supposed to prove me wrong—prove that I’d truly misinterpreted what had happened. That this was all one big mistake.
His car’s running engine tells me he’s staying just long enough to give me some half-assed explanation.
“Why are you here, Luke?” My voice shakes, and it takes everything in me to keep it from cracking. The hurt I’d gotten good at hiding was starting to surface, and like acid, the pain sears.
He sits up in his seat, the leather squeaking under him. “I couldn’t not come. You wouldn’t answer my calls, my emails, my texts. And when I saw that commercial . . .” A pause. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“You drove from Phoenix to make sure I was okay? That’s it?” I blow out an incredulous noise. “You’ve got to do better than that. I mean, I guess I did come to see you unannounced, but I was under the impression that I was finally going to meet the person who claimed to be the love of my life.” I scratch my chin and half laugh at the rant spewing from me. “Only to find that he’s married, expecting a kid. Hell, I thought you were a sous chef! You are a fucking waiter. Which wouldn’t have been bad if you had told me the truth, but you didn’t. Not one truth.”
“Vic—”
“Don’t.” I don’t want his protracted explanation now. I realize that there’s nothing he can say to fix this, because it’s done. “I’m not falling for it. Not this time, not ever. What did you tell your wife? Where did you say you were going? Surely by now she’s noticed that you’ve been gone for days.”
“That’s not important.”
“Not important?” I shake my head, laughing, because another fact strikes down like lightning over land, and in the discharge of energy the extent of this travesty unfolds in front of me. By seeking closure, he’s with me, rather than with them. I am a homewrecker. “That statement alone tells me everything. Go home, Luke. You have nothing I want. You can’t give me a straight answer for anything.” I open the car door. With a heaviness filling my chest, like I’m being suffocated, I get out.
I’m met with a wall of crickets and the smell of a campfire, and while it’s reassuring that my friends, people who are my present and future, are just beyond the path, tears threaten to burst from me.
I step onto the path. I need to get the hell out of here. There’s no way I’m going to let Luke see me cry.
Behind me, a car door creaks open. Luke is following me; leaves and rocks crack under his feet. “I didn’t lie about everything.”
A guffaw bursts from me, though I slow.
“What I mean is that yes, I lied about all the details of my life. But I didn’t lie about how I feel about you. Because you’re amazing. I knew it from the moment I reached out to you. You’re different from the rest of the world . . . you’ve got this light that no one else has.”
“A light, sure.” Sarcasm bleeds through my words. “A light that did me no good; it wasn’t bright enough to reveal what a liar you were. Are.” The path splits into three and I take the rightmost toward our RV site. I halt then.
This would be the end of the line, because my home, as temporary as it might be, is off-limits. He would no longer tarnish any more memories. I turn. “All I hear are empty words. Can you even tell me why you did it?”
Luke is an arm’s length away. “I wanted a different life, and that’s why I lied. It’s no excuse. I’ve got no excuses. My wife and I are together because we have something else that bonds us—this baby. I can’t leave them; I won’t be the person that causes them trauma.”
“And yet you’re here.”
“Look, I want us to have our weekend together.”
Stunned at the switch in his tone, from apologetic to giddy, I ask, “What?”
“Alone. I want us to get it out of our system. Let’s do this.”
“You’re propositioning me? That is . . . ridiculous.” The idea is so off the wall my lips curl in disbelief.
“I’m not being ridiculous. Hear me out. You came all the way to Phoenix to be with me, and now, I’m here to be with you. You can’t deny that what you felt for me was real, down to the core. Don’t you see? Nothing else matters. No one else matters but us. Don’t you think we have a right to see where this can go?”
“No . . . no. You’re wrong. Everything matters. Your family matters. My self-respect matters. Truth matters. Love shouldn’t be about two people against the world. It should be about two people helping each other to navigate through it, to do right, to do good. And I can’t believe I didn’t see the truth about you. Despite all the talks we had, the emails and texts, how did I not see that you and I look at the world in a totally different way? It makes this deception worse, because we truly are based on a lie. Love might not be a choice, but how we act on it is all on us.”
“Vic.” His voice is a plea. And dammit, does it scratch that one area of my heart that still hurts.
“Vic?” a deep voice responds from behind me. I turn at the sound of footsteps. Joel comes through the line of trees. He has a bag in one hand, though the other is clenched into a fist. The sight of him calms me, and I can’t help it. I smile from the inside out. But his posture is anything but friendly, and his gaze is squarely on Luke. “Everything okay?”
I look between Joel and Luke, then briefly up to the sky. Perhaps the answer of how to crack this awkward situation will be written up above. Then I succumb to the inevitable. I have to introduce the man I’m with to the man I thought I loved.
“Joel Silva. Luke Graham.”
“Hey, dude.” Luke approaches Joel with a hand outstretched. Joel’s handshake is, I can tell, half-hearted. “You did a great job today.”
“Thanks.” Joel’s eyes cut to me, assessing. He lifts the bag in his hand. “I was getting rid of this garbage.”
“Cool, cool,” Luke says.
Silence settles over us, we’re caught in an awkward limbo, and suddenly I feel like this has become a love triangle, which makes the situation entirely unacceptable. I have to separate these two and deal with them one at a time. “Luke, I’ll meet you at the car.”
His lips lift into a grin. It causes my insides to wince; he thinks his proposition has a chance. “Catch you later, Joel.”
The air thickens as Joel and I watch Luke disappear back toward the vehicle. Once he’s out of sight, relief courses through me, until I spin around and see Joel’s stern expression.
“What’s going on, Vic? You’re going back?”
The trace of accusation in his voice takes me so aback that my initial thought to hug him dissipates. “I’m going to say goodbye.”
“What more do you have to say? Come back with me.”
I frown. “But I . . . I’m not done talking to him.”
He passes me without speaking and tosses the garbage in the campground trash. When he turns around, his face is screwed into a hurt expression. “I can’t do this, Vic. I respect what we have.”
“You don’t think I respect what we have? Didn’t you hear what I told him?”
“I did. You’ve already said goodbye. What more do you want?”
“Nothing.” Confused, I shake my head.
“Are you sure?”
My hand flies up, my index finger taking the lead to deflect his insinuation. “Oh no, you don’t. I don’t owe you an explanation, nor do I need your permission to speak to other people.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“It was implied in your tone. I don’t belong to you, nor do I belong to anyone else. And we’re nothing, remember? You told me so every step of the way. And now suddenly you want claim over this non-relationship? I might not be as old or as experienced as you, but even I know that’s not how it works.”
“That’s not what I—” Joel steps back. “Fine. Goodnight. See you in the morning.” He takes another step backward, then disappears into our campsite, into the darkness.
I throw my hands up. What the hell just happened?