Spring Romance: NINE Happily Ever Afters

by Tessa Bailey

“By dropping me? I kind of left Oklahoma to get away from people doing that to me, so it’s a good thing I found out early that this can’t go anywhere.” The light sheen in her eyes made his chest ache. “I’m meeting Leanne in the morning to study. We have a test early Monday morning and…I have to go. Bye, Rory.”

  When she breezed past him, Rory swore she ripped off a layer of skin. His stomach shot up into his mouth as Olive moved farther away down the sidewalk, the sound of her sandals fading and blending into the traffic. Jesus, he was going to be sick. He started to go after her, already counting the seconds until he could get his arms around her, but he froze in his tracks when Olive stopped in front of the nicest building on the block. A uniformed man opened the door for her—and the dude must have seen them together, because he sent a look of distaste across the street.

  Olive paused in the entrance, turning back toward Rory and all but imploring him to come and get her. But he hesitated. That doorman had the right idea. He didn’t belong within ten feet of a girl like Olive. Her college career was on the horizon and she was set up, living in the best building money could afford. So although it killed him, he took off down the sidewalk, glancing back a moment later to find her gone. Out of sight.

  Feeling like he’d been hit by a truck, Rory leaned back against the closest building. She’d compared him to the family that had essentially abandoned her. Couldn’t she see this wasn’t to serve his own self-interest? If he allowed himself to be selfish, they would spend every available second together. He would ride her to classes on his bike. He’d watch over her on the beach and buy her so many milkshakes, she’d get sick of them.

  No. No, she’d walked away, too, right? He’d told her everything and she’d made the decision that was right for her. She hadn’t argued or tried to make light of what he’d done in the past—because it wasn’t possible. There was no light angle, it was all dark. He’d done the right thing here. Olive was too young, her future too promising, to get caught up with an older man with so little to offer and a reputation for fighting to boot.

  Go. Turn and go.

  His feet might as well have been encased in concrete boots, but Rory managed to walk back to the beach, emptiness spreading a little further to the corners of his stomach with every single step.

  * * *

  Rory sat on the top step of the house the next morning, watching oranges and reds thread their fingers into the sky. He’d slept approximately eighteen minutes the night before, so he couldn’t exactly appreciate the beauty of nature. He could only think about Olive having an early study date with her friend. How was she getting there? The bus? Did she have a car he didn’t know about?

  What if something bad happened and he wasn’t there to save her?

  He tossed the dregs of his freezing cold coffee into the bushes, set the mug down and scrubbed his hands down his face. She’d called his bluff. No sense in denying it. He’d been awake enough hours and replayed their conversation in his head so many times, he could recite it word for word. Yeah, he’d meant what he said to Olive. There couldn’t be a relationship between them. They lived in different worlds. They were going different places.

  But he hadn’t really allowed himself to consider what it would be like never talking to her again. Never seeing or kissing her again. A world where none of those things were possible left him lifeless, staring out into the sunrise trying to remember if there was a point to going through the motions every day, like he’d been doing for so long.

  Since returning home from prison, he hadn’t allowed himself to be ambitious. Wasn’t ambition kind of pointless with a prison record? How far could a man reasonably go with an assault attached to his name? Even without a record, his hair trigger energy made people uneasy. On the nights he bartended at the Castle Gate, conversations were kept to a quieter pitch. Customers chose to sit at tables instead of in front of him at the bar. Every once in a while, a woman would be attracted to the very same energy that made others wary, but until Olive, Rory hadn’t realized how uncomfortable those women made him. They looked at him and saw a novelty. A one-time thrill.

  No one had ever looked at him the way Olive did. No judgment. Only curiosity, awareness…and that complicated something between them that he didn’t have a name for. Like she wanted to explore him. Like she couldn’t help wanting to. Needing to.

  What would it be like to have Olive look up at him with such trust and open admiration…and know he’d earned it? To be a good man for her?

  Pointless thoughts. Rory traced some carvings on the concrete stairs with the toe of his sneakers. His initials, along with Andrew’s and Jamie’s. He could still remember the afternoon they’d used a stick to alter the wet cement. How their father had reacted when he got home that night from running the Castle Gate. Their mother had borne the brunt of his anger. She always had—and they’d been too young to do anything about it.

  Back then, anyway.

  As always, when Rory thought of that time, the nape of his neck turned hot, wire seeming to stretch his fingers, curl them into fists. When he’d gotten sentenced, his mother and father had still been living together in the house. Jamie had been a senior in college, on the brink of earning his degree in Education, Andrew was beginning to take over the family business and working constantly. That left eighteen-year-old Rory alone with his parents in the house. By then, he’d grown taller and broader than his father. It went unspoken that he would protect his mother and win.

  Until the night on the beach when he’d given in to his anger.

  Hard to protect anyone from inside of a cell.

  The door of the house opened, saving Rory from his darkening thoughts. When both of his brothers emerged barefoot in sweatpants and hoodies, Rory ignored them, continuing to stare out at the horizon in stony silence.

  Jamie sat on the bottom step. Andrew took the one beside him. No one said anything, except for the neighborhood, which spoke its own language of cars rumbling to life, seagulls calling to each other on the breeze, the Atlantic Ocean waking up in the distance.

  Finally, Andrew broke the silence. “I’m sorry about what I said yesterday. About not being able to afford you. Especially after you’d just been through a rescue. A tough one.” He scratched at his morning beard. “I was just pissed off.”

  Rory waved a dismissive hand, even though a shift took place in his chest. “It’s fine, man.”

  “No, it’s not.” Andrew shifted on the step. “Look. This girl Olive is obviously important to you and she overheard—”

  “I said it’s fine.” Hearing her name out loud cracked him straight down the middle, so it took him a few seconds to continue. “My brother bitching about me and saying I’m unpredictable wasn’t the deal breaker.”

  Jamie turned to face them with a curious expression. “You told her about prison?”

  His jaw clenched “Had to be done.”

  “I assume you told her how it happened.” Jamie prompted. “Why it happened.”

  “It doesn’t make a difference, Jamie.”

  “Sorry, but fuck that. It makes a difference to me.”

  A stone lodged itself in Rory’s throat. “I didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t important. Only that the outcome is the same, no matter what prompted me to almost kill a man.”

  No one spoke for a moment, all of them probably recalling the day he’d been cuffed and thrown into the back of a police car. The guilty plea that followed, despite being advised otherwise by his court-appointed attorney. He’d done the crime, hadn’t he? So he’d pay for it.

  “So was it a deal breaker?” Andrew asked, easing the building tension with a half-smile. “Because she came to your defense pretty hard in the Hut. If she’d had a bat handy, I’d be limping behind the bar tonight.”

  Half of Rory wanted them to stop talking about Olive. The other half? Didn’t want to talk about anything but her. The latter half won by a landslide. “I’m not sure it broke the deal. I think I might have crushed it before she got the chance.”
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  Jamie’s sigh was long suffering. “I didn’t even get the opportunity to judge her.”

  “You’d have loved her,” Rory said, pressing his thumbs into his eye sockets to try and stop the images of her walking away over and over again. “She almost got hit by a fucking bus because a book distracted her.”

  “Which book?”

  “I think I’ve seen you read it before. Something by Vonnegut.”

  “How dare you mess this up for me,” Jamie deadpanned. “I kind of hate you.”

  He laughed, but it lacked authenticity. “Join the club.”

  The three of them watched as a group of joggers ran past down in the middle of the street, moving in the direction of the boardwalk. Not an unusual sight in Long Beach, but groups of joggers that size didn’t usually route themselves through a residential area—especially one on the lower end of the income spectrum.

  “You ever seen them pass through this way before?”

  “No,” Andrew responded with a head shake. “And I’m always up at this time working.”

  Jamie and Rory traded an eye roll.

  But when they eased back into silence, Rory couldn’t stop thinking about the joggers. They got up every morning, same as him. Odds are, most of them didn’t love their jobs. They were probably tired, needed vacations. But despite all of it, they woke up every morning and achieved a goal. They took different routes to reach it, changed, adapted to the terrain and worked toward something that satisfied them.

  All right, so maybe the joggers weren’t the first to shake these new revelations loose. He’d spent a lot of time staring up at the ceiling last night. Thinking of Olive, yeah, but he’d also done a lot of wondering about himself. How long could he expect to continue in this same repetitive holding pattern of lifeguarding and bartending with nothing to show for it? He was already tired of it at twenty-four. He never reached a goal, like the joggers did.

  Hell, like his brothers did. Little by little, Andrew improved the Castle Gate, turning it from a dive to a respected neighborhood staple. No longer the kid who’d one day inherit the landmark bar, he was now a legitimate businessman. Jamie would receive his teaching tenure soon. Sometimes Rory thought their middle brother fell back into their patented routine of lifeguarding and bartending every summer because it was a family custom. Really, though, with his intelligence and college degree, he could do anything.

  That left Rory. He couldn’t do anything he wanted.

  But maybe it was time to try something.

  To set a goal and jog for it.

  Rory cleared his throat. “I know it’s not the best time to ask, seeing as how I fucked up yesterday, but, uh…” Striving for casual even though his pulse was ticking his ears, Rory shrugged. “You’re stressed out, A. Between the bar and the beach, you’ve got at least sixty employees to juggle.” No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make eye contact with Andrew, afraid he’d see wariness there. “I’ve been around long enough to know how to place liquor orders for the bar. Receive deliveries. Make sure the kitchen and bar are stocked. You can show me how to do payroll.” He swallowed. “Let me help.”

  Rory stared out at the horizon and held his breath, waiting for a response. He could feel Jamie trading a silent look with their older brother, probably shocked out of their minds. That made three of them. As he waited for the verdict that suddenly seemed like the most important one of his life, thoughts of Olive crept in. Chances were slim to none that he’d ever be a college graduate. Or someone who read a ton of books. Odds were he’d never have a nine-to-five.

  Still. He couldn’t help but wonder… If he changed his route and worked hard enough, could Olive be proud to be with a guy like him?

  “Can you get to the bar early tonight?” Andrew asked, squinting one eye over at him. “Payroll is a little tricky, but it shouldn’t take you long to pick it up.”

  “Yeah,” Rory said thickly, relief filtering in, warming him with something that resembled hope. “I can do that.”

  Several heavy beats passed before Jamie put a hand over his heart and spoke. “Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment—”

  “Christ,” Rory muttered, coming to his feet and turning before Jamie could see his smile. “Shut up, Jamie.”

  His middle brother stood, too. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m quoting Vonnegut.”

  Jiya chose that moment to arrive at the bottom of the stoop, an apron dangling from her hand. “What did I miss?”

  “Nothing,” all three brothers said at the same time.

  It didn’t feel like nothing, though. It felt like the beginning of something.

  Chapter Seven

  Olive sat in the window of a coffee shop sipping an iced coffee and skipping around between her favorite scenes of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, her go-to comfort read. Every person who passed by the glass storefront were jovial, relaxed. On their way to the beach. She wanted to follow in their wake and warm herself in the sunshine again, but she remained glued to the chair, shivering in the air conditioning. She reached the part in the book where the reader meets Zaphod Beeblebrox, a two-headed, three-armed former president of the Galaxy—and ship thief—dismayed when she didn’t experience her usual sense of solace.

  She hadn’t been back to the beach in two weeks. Two weeks since she’d been pulled from the ocean, had a sexual awakening and been cast aside. All in a matter of hours. It was impressive, really, how many peaks and valleys she’d managed to cram into one afternoon. Maybe she should call Guinness and apply for world record status.

  Olive grimaced into a sip of watered-down coffee. It wasn’t like her to be so negative, but she’d taken a lot longer to recover from Rory Prince than expected. As in, she hadn’t recovered. Hardly at all. Every time she left her apartment, she swore he would be waiting outside, that serious, this-is-a-bad-idea expression cemented on his gorgeous face. Walking through Long Beach, she always had the fresh sense she’d just missed seeing him. Which was crazy. She was crazy.

  Her focus should be squarely on acing her summer class and beginning a sterling college career. And it had. She’d been more meticulous than usual when writing papers and studying for quizzes, mostly in the name of distraction. She only allowed herself to pine for Rory after she finished her homework, and she almost always stuck to that incentive/reward system.

  Just kidding.

  This cavernous feeling in her stomach refused to be filled, no matter how many food truck dinners she fed it. It would, though. It had to, because Rory obviously wasn’t coming back. Nor was he going to call the number she’d scrawled on the straw wrapper. Was it still in his locker?

  For the millionth time in the last two weeks, she wondered if she’d walked away from Rory too soon. He’d just told her something serious. A majorly serious thing. That he’d been in prison for putting a man in a coma. A smart girl such as herself was well within the parameters of common sense to run away and never look back. Except for two things.

  One, he’d practically tripped over himself to make sure Olive knew he was bad news. Would someone with a conscience do that? Or would they act selfishly, take what they wanted and let the other person suffer in due course?

  And the second reason she should have checked herself before turning away?

  The way he made her feel wasn’t going to come around again. At only eighteen years old, people might laugh at her for being so positive of that notion. Well, so be it. She absorbed a little more knowledge with every book she read. Olive had walked in a million sets of shoes, throughout dozens of unique genres, living through the heartache of others and combing through the world’s philosophies while hidden away on the second floor of her parents’ house. She’d only lived for eighteen years, but her soul held the weight of lifetimes. If she never saw Rory again, she would wonder what they could have been until she grew old. She just knew it. That’s why she’d shouted at him to come back the day they’d met. It’s why she couldn’t sleep anymore.

  And God, wasn’
t that terrifying? All of it. It was so scary, she didn’t think the air conditioner was responsible for making her shiver anymore.

  Rory, this person she’d felt drawn to so entirely since laying eyes on him…had blown her off. Two weeks later, there was no denying that. The day they’d broken up—because a break-up is exactly how it had felt, even if they weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend—she’d compared Rory to her parents. It had been an emotional response and she’d regretted throwing it in his face.

  Now, though? She wasn’t so sure she wanted Rory to show up again.

  One afternoon at age fourteen, after finishing her schoolwork early, she’d gone out to see a movie. When it didn’t hold her interest, she’d left the theater early and come home to find her parents shooting a video with her siblings. They’d turned to find her in the hallway, guilt written all over their faces. Her brother and sister had been covered in finger paint, laughter frozen on their faces. They’d deliberately left her out of a filming session. And that had been the beginning of the family division; Olive on one side, everyone else on the other. She’d tiptoed through her own house so as not to disrupt their progress, chest panging over the distant sounds of giggling, the pride and encouragement in her parents’ voices. Sure, her mother and father had made an effort to engage her after the videos had been filmed, edited and uploaded to YouTube, but those conversations never stopped seeming forced.

  If they’d left her out of the videos at a younger age, Olive probably would have been relieved. But by age fourteen, they’d been entertaining the masses for years and she’d already become known among people in town as that internet girl. They’d seen her sleeping, brushing her teeth, crying, getting haircuts and having her tonsils removed. To suddenly have that identity taken away after working so hard to live within it…was hard. Really hard.

  It seemed as though abandonment came in more than one form. Rory dropping her like a bad habit wasn’t on par with her parents losing interest in her. But it left Olive with the same hollowness and uncertainty. She and Rory had only known each other for three days when he’d left her reeling. What would a relationship with him be like? Constantly waiting and worrying for the next time his conscience flared up? She should be grateful he’d ended it sooner rather than later.