Jordan

“Need anything to drink, Toby?”

He was sitting in my movie room. I’d bought another Xbox so we could play video games together when we hung out here. His thumbs and fingers rapidly clicked on the black controller.

“Toby?”

“Huh?” He glanced at me and back to the large projection screen.

“Drink?”

“I’m good.”

Damn. This kid got intense with an electronic device in his hand and an apoplectic game in front of him.

“Right. I’m gonna go check on your mom. See what she’s doing.”

He didn’t respond, and I wasn’t surprised.

I took off out of the movie room upstairs and headed downstairs. I’d left Destiny in the kitchen when we took off to start the game, but when I reached it, she wasn’t there. Instead, she was on the patio out back, hands curled around the deck railing and eyes on the golf course. Dinner had been good if not awkward, but she’d loosened up slowly, mostly thanks to Cooper ensuring she was included. Rebecca had been fine, clearly head over heels infatuated with her nephew but when we returned from our short tour of the course, Destiny hadn’t been there.

Physically, she was in the house. Mentally, she seemed like she’d already run back to Houston.

I’d cornered Rebecca at one point and asked her what the hell she’d done. She’d smirked at me. I wasn’t mean. I was honest, and she needed it.

She doesn’t need shit. Not from you and I warned you. I’d replied.

Yeah, well, I’m not afraid of you. But I do love you, and I only gave her something to think about. That’s it.

I’d thrown her another scowl and headed back to Cooper and Toby who were sprawled out on my massive sectional couch. It could fit an entire baseball team and they were already engrossed in the St. Louis Cardinals game.

Whatever happened between the two women still had Destiny strung tight. I grabbed a beer from the fridge and headed outside.

She turned as I opened the slider door and shut it behind me, already pulling my bottle of beer from my mouth.

“What’d she say to you?” There was no point in pleasantries or stepping around the issues. We already had a mountain to scale in the short time she was here.

“Nothing I didn’t deserve.” She turned back, eyes on the course then lifting to the sky and sighed. “She told me you almost didn’t leave for college.”

That’s what this was about. I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to go back there.

“Des—”

“She said when I left you were destroyed. And I’ve been sitting here thinking about everything Rebecca said, and wondering if I was always so selfish? All those years I tried to be nothing like my mother, but was I? I mean, is it my bones to abandon everyone I care about?”

Okay, apparently we were doing this.

I moved to her and wrapped my hand around her elbow pulling her so she was facing me at the railing. “Shut up.” She opened her mouth, but I didn’t let her speak. “Enough with the pity-party-for-one bullshit you’ve always been so fond of. Whatever Rebecca said to you was probably utter crap meant to get under your skin and she’s good at that shit. And as for you being like your mom, you’re completely wrong. Your mom took off because all she saw and craved were drugs and whatever she needed to do to get them. You took off to give your kid a better life. Still wrong, but beneath that was the heart of a woman who’d do anything to protect her child, not leave him to the wolves.”

“That’s nice of you to say—”

“I’m not saying it to be nice, I’m saying it because it’s true.” Something dark had slid into her eyes, the color of doubt and disbelief. I hated when she got like that, so strung up on what people thought, she missed everything she really was. All the good shit that went past a body my teenage brain couldn’t stop thinking of.

Despite everything she’d done, it still pissed me off she thought so little of herself. And I still had that ache inside of me to soothe it all away. She might have only been in town a week or two, but I’d already realized it was still my job to take care of her. She was still the only woman I’d ever loved in that desperate soul clinging for life and breath sort of way.

I took a long swallow of my beer. All those years ago, the day I’d gone to her house to get her for a day in the fields where we’d take out one of the ATVs, pack a lunch. She’d be wearing her tiny bikini under denim cut-offs and a tank top and we’d spend hours, touching each other. Memorizing the sounds we made when I’d get her off by the creek with my hands, other parts of me in the grass hidden from view.

It was the first time in my life Tillie had been cold to me.

She left. And she ain’t coming back. Said to give you this.

She handed me a note. Not even a pretty note with pretty stationery I knew Tillie had. It was a simple, ripped sheet of notebook paper and in her cursive writing two fucking sentences that would send me on a rampage.

I’m sorry. You deserve better.

“We need to hash this shit out to get past it, let’s do it.” That ball of anger and pain pulsed deep in my gut like the opening bass drum to a kickass rock song that grew in speed and strength with every breath.

“I don’t—”

Oh no. She’d started it. We were doing this.

“Refused to leave for school. Took Dad manhandling me into the truck to get me to go. No way in hell was I leaving town with you gone. I figured you got scared of college or whatever and after I left you’d return. Was so damn sure of it. I came home every damn weekend. Drove by Tillie’s so often I was sure she was gonna call the cops on me for stalking her.”

“I didn’t think—”

“I know you didn’t.” I didn’t even know what she was going to say, but I knew it would be wrong. She didn’t think I loved her enough. She didn’t think I could handle it. She didn’t think we could do it. She just didn’t fucking think.

“I was eighteen and had my life exactly how I wanted it, Destiny. I knew exactly everything we’d do. All those nights we spent talking about it, dreaming of it, of traveling and families and settling wherever I played ball, all that shit…I wanted it. I was a kid, we were kids, but I’d found everything I’d ever wanted right here in Carlton. You were the one who didn’t trust it enough.”

Her chin shook, and tears spilled down her cheeks. She shook her head and turned back to the course. I stopped her with my hand on her jaw and forced her to meet my gaze.

I was tearing her up.

She totally deserved it.

She’d done it to me for a decade, ruined me as a kid.

She’d done that, and she needed to hear the rest.

“It was my twenty-first birthday before I ever touched another girl,” I said, my voice low. My body trembled with the memory of that disaster. She jerked like I slapped her, but I kept my hand on her, forced her to listen to me. To really, finally fucking see how I was still so damn in love with her, she was still, all I’d ever need. “Teammates took me to a bar, got me wasted. They’d ribbed me for years for not taking what was easily offered to me on campus. Lived with them in an apartment, six of us in a three bedroom and there was always a girl skittering out of there in the morning. And that night I was so damn drunk, so damn tired of still not getting you out of my head I found some girl at a bar, took her back to my place, and when I came, buried deep inside a girl who looked so similar to you she was the only girl in the bar who’d had a chance of making my dick hard, I came, groaning your fucking name.”

She flinched and squeezed her eyes closed.

What an asshole I’d been.

It’d make me more pathetic if I admitted I still had that damn note folded and tucked away in a drawer in my closet where I kept my watches.

I’d never had a chance at getting over her. Or I’d never tried.

Maybe she was the reason I came back to this damn place after all.