He must’ve felt my intense glances at him, because when he looked up from his menu, his eyes landed directly on me. Like the psychopath I was, I didn’t do the normal thing most people did when they were caught staring at a complete stranger.
I didn’t turn my head away.
I didn’t pretend to look past him.
I didn’t scramble to make a run for it.
Nope, nope, nope.
I simply smiled and parted my lips.
“Hi,” I said on an exhalation, loud and clear as he narrowed his eyes.
He blinked three times.
He looked back at his menu, refitted his baseball cap, and rounded his shoulders forward once more, making me feel completely psychotic for even speaking to him. But still, I kept freaking staring.
What was wrong with me?
I’d recently binged the Netflix series You, and I was showing some strong Joe tendencies by watching this complete stranger. If I were Joe, this would have been my current stalker thought process:
You stare at the menu completely uncertain about what you’re going to order. Will it be the green smoothie for you? The pancakes? The oatmeal? No. You look more like an omelet guy. You wear a hat to hide your face, but I don’t know why, seeing as you have a very nice, defined jawline. Even though they are still cold and uninviting, your eyes are worthy of being seen and—holy crap, look the heck away, Kennedy.
What had gotten into me?
I watched as he removed his hat, set it down on the table, and raked his hands through his hair.
Marty came back to the table, did his quirky routine, and placed my food down. I inhaled the amazing aromas arising from my meal. I didn’t wait for Marty to walk away before I started shoveling the food into my mouth in a very unladylike fashion.
“So what brings you to town?” he asked with a bit of wonderment in his eyes, probably in response to how quickly I was stuffing the food into my mouth.
“I’m renting a place from my sister and brother-in-law for the next few months,” I said, taking in a forkful of eggs.
“Oh, with your…boyfriend? Husband?” Marty asked.
My stomach knotted up as I glanced down at my ringless finger. It had been a few hours since I’d thought about my past. Leave it to nice Marty to prompt those emotions to come rushing back at me.
“No. Just me.”
“You’re single?” he said, his voice filled with hope.
I smiled his way, trying to push away the thoughts of my past relationship that he was pulling out of me. “Yes, single and happy about that. I just got out of a long-term relationship and am focusing on me for now.”
He grinned, understanding. “Well, if you need a friend in town, I’m more than willing to not hit on you, seeing how you’re not really my type.” He nodded toward the gentleman sitting at a table directly across from me. “I’m more interested in Kens than Kennedys.”
I laughed. “Well, I could probably use a good friend here, that’s for sure.”
My eyes moved back to Mr. Personality’s table. He looked my way once more—and guess who didn’t look away again? Good ole creepy me. He blinked a few times before turning back to staring at the menu. I felt my cheeks instantly heat as I lifted my glass of orange juice to my lips, and Marty followed my stare.
He snickered. “Most people look at Jax Kilter that way,” he said, making me spit out my juice in an instant, ruining my new plate of food.
“Wait, what?” I exclaimed, completely baffled by Marty’s words.
He looked at me as if I were completely insane—and, well, okay, that was a fair judgment—but I still couldn’t shake off my nerves.
“Did you say Jax Kilter?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
No way.
It couldn’t be him…
It had been years since I’d last seen him, and hardly anything about the man in front of me resembled the boy I’d once known—except for those eyes. Those deep, dark eyes pulled me in the same way they had when we were children.
Marty scratched at his nonexistent beard. “Do you know him?”
“Yes. I mean, I did, I think…a long time ago. Gosh, it’s been years.” My eyes moved back toward Jax, and my heart tightened in my chest as tears welled up in my eyes. Could that really be him? It had to have been over fifteen years since we’d last talked. We were only children back then, yet seeing him now and knowing he was the same Jax from my childhood made my mind fly into a tailspin. For the shortest period of time, he had been my person. My summer camp companion. My best friend. We’d spent two summers growing up together, building a strong connection, right up until he disappeared from my life without a word.
“You know him?” I asked Marty before my teeth chewed into my bottom lip.
“Oh yeah. It’s a small town, so everyone is quick to know everyone. If I’m honest, I already knew everything about you before you sat down—all but your Social Security number,” he joked.
“Is he…nice?” I asked, ignoring the fact that Marty said he knew all about me. I was too concerned with knowing all about Jax. My question seemed idiotic, because based on my interaction with him, I knew the answer: No, he wasn’t nice. Well, he was kind of nice? A little…I thought? From what I’d observed, his actions spoke differently than his words, and I wanted Marty’s input on who Jax had become.
“Jax is…he’s…well, I’m not one to gossip. People already talk enough crap around these parts to give Days of Our Lives another decade of episodes, but Jax is an interesting fellow. A bit of a loner, minus his random relationships. He recently got out of a two-year relationship with Amanda Gates—not that they really seemed close. He’s a bit EU.”
“EU?”
“Emotionally unavailable. I’m surprised Amanda stuck around that long with him. His looks don’t hurt. I’m sure that and their bedroom affairs was enough to keep her attention. If I had the smallest indication that he was into Kens over Kennedys, I’d let my Marty wave his way because those eyes will swallow any human whole. But, alas, he plays for your team, not mine.”
I smiled. The more Marty talked, and the more comfortable he became with me, the more I liked him. His personality was beginning to shine through the clouds of his nerves.
“I heard he’s the town jerk,” I said.
“He is…but like the good kind.”
I laughed. “What does that even mean? The good kind of jerk? That’s an oxymoron.”
“No, it’s not. You know…he’s a jerk to the people who deserve it. At first, if he comes off as cold, it’s just because he doesn’t know someone. He has his shields up high, because he’s been hurt a lot. I can’t really blame him with the shit people in this town have put him through. I’d tag people as guilty until proven innocent too if I’d lived half the life Jax has lived, and I’m the token gay guy in this place plus I have OCD. Trust me, I’ve lived a life, but I wouldn’t trade it to walk in Jax’s shoes for a minute.”
My chest tightened at Marty’s words. If anything, Jax didn’t sound like the jerky villain in this town’s story. What it seemed more like was that he was the broken hero, the one who’d fallen apart so much he’d retreated toward the darkness over the light.
Very much like I had after tragedy found me.
“His life has been that bad?” I asked, hopeful that Marty would shake his head and say no.
Sadly, he nodded. “Jax has kind of a dark past. He spent a lot of years keeping to himself while caring for his asshole of a father, up until his father was placed in a hospice center a few weeks ago. Now, if you want to talk about assholes of this town, Cole Kilter was the head B-I-T-C-H. But Jax? Nothing like his father, not in the least, though he does come from asshole genetics.”
“What about his mom?”
Marty frowned. “Like I said, he has a dark past.”
Those words alone broke my heart. I knew how much his mother meant to him, and the idea that she wasn’t around anymore was devastating.
Marty crossed his arm
s. “Between you and me, I think Jax is the nicest guy in this whole town.” He rolled up his shirt and showed me a scar on his skin. “A few years ago, I got jumped by Lars Parker and his group of jerks. They were coming out of a bar drunk when I was finishing setting up the diner for the next day. They started harassing me about making them some free food, and well, long story short, they jumped me.
“News traveled fast about the incident, and a few days later, Lars and his buddies had their own battle wounds, black eyes and all. I came into work after that, and there Jax was, sitting at his regular booth, reading his paper with both hands bandaged up. He said he had an accident while chopping wood in his back yard. To this day he swears he had nothing to do with kicking Lars’ ass, but I have a feeling he had plenty to do with it. Afterward, he told me to let him know if anyone bothered me. I still thank him for it often, and he always tells me to piss off and bring him his order to go.”
Lars Parker.
The same jerk from when we were kids. Of course it was that same monster who’d come on to me. I knew I had a strange feeling when I met the guy. I wasn’t surprised to see he’d turned out to be the exact jerk he had been on the path to becoming.
Marty headed back to work, and I looked back over at Jax. He shifted around in his booth, and when his head rose up, he turned in my direction. Our eyes locked, and my heart began repeatedly pounding in my chest.
Before I could say anything, Marty brought Jax his to-go bag then he was on his way out of the café, leaving his baseball cap on the table.
I scrambled to leave my money for my bill on the table, and then I hurried over to pick up Jax’s baseball cap.
I dashed out of the café to find Jax and give him his hat, and to…I don’t know…hug him? Cry? Ask him where he’d been all these years? Yet before I could do any of that, my feet froze in place as I stared forward at a little girl standing in front of the ice cream parlor with her mother. She held a cone filled with a double scoop of mint chocolate chip, and she couldn’t seem to lick fast enough to keep it from melting. His mother was rummaging in her purse in search of napkins to help clean up the mess.
I couldn’t look away.
The girl looked to be around five years old, maybe six.
All I knew was that she was young, adorable, and alive.
So very much alive.
I can’t be here, I thought to myself as my chest began to tighten. I wanted to turn on my heels and go the other direction. I wanted to run. I wanted to run so far away, back to the house, and bury myself in a place where the reminder of my loss wouldn’t be presented to me in every way, shape, and form.
Her favorite ice cream was mint chocolate chip.
She’d be talking so much the ice cream would melt down her fingers and make a massive mess no matter how often I tried to clean it up. I’d always have napkins in my purse because I was her mother, and mothers always have napkins in their purse, and…
Stop it, Kennedy. Go home.
But I couldn’t move. I was frozen in place as a panic attack began to sweep across my soul. I couldn’t look away from the child and the mother who was wiping the mess from her chin. I couldn’t turn away. I couldn’t breathe.
“What’s wrong with you?” a voice asked, snapping me out of my thoughts.
I turned to see Jax standing there with a perplexed look in his eyes. My body was trembling as my hands shook with his hat in my grip, and I parted my lips to speak, but no words left my throat.
I saw it in his eyes, too—the way he looked at me as if I were insane, the same way Penn had stared my way for the past year. He was judging me. He was baffled by my moment of unexplainable fear. He was…
Helping me?
“Walk,” he ordered, nodding once.
“I…I-I can’t,” I pushed out, still trembling. The little girl and her mother were no longer in front of me, but the shadows of their moment of love intermixed with the shadows of my own past in my mind. I was overthinking, overdoing, and over-feeling every single emotion that was hammering at my heart.
I couldn’t stop it, though. It was why I did my best to unplug from society. It held too many reminders of all the joy I’d lost.
“You can,” he disagreed. “You can walk.”
He didn’t understand.
No one understood.
His arm slid under mine, and he looped it with his own.
“Wh-what are you do-doing?” I stuttered, my voice hoarse.
“This,” he explained, stepping forward and taking me with him. “Now you do it.”
“Please, no, I ca—”
“Stop it. Stop saying what you can’t do when you can do it. Mind over matter. Come on, Sun…” His voice was low but nowhere near as cold as it’d been before. The nickname I hadn’t heard in so long hit me like a freight train. He knew. He knew it was me. He remembered. “Walk with me,” he begged.
One step.
Then another.
I was moving. That, or he was lifting me up and making me float down the sidewalk. Either way, he walked me all the way back to my house in complete silence as my heartbeats began to come down to a much tamer speed. I felt everyone’s eyes on Jax and me as we walked, and I hated it. I hated the embarrassment that came with the panic attacks, the way people stared as if I were a nutjob.
I remembered my first panic attack in a public place. It was at Penn’s real estate agency’s annual Christmas party. I had a full-blown meltdown while the speakers blasted my baby girl’s favorite holiday song, “This Christmas” by Donny Hathaway. I was mid-conversation with his boss when my knees buckled from beneath me and I hit the ground in a warp of panic.
He was humiliated to call me his wife after that.
I could only imagine how Jax felt walking me home in this moment. What was worse was he wasn’t even married to me. He was a complete and utter stranger dealing with the looks of the whole town. He didn’t seem bothered by it at all, though. He just kept walking with his arm linked with mine.
When we arrived at the house, I thanked him, and he shushed me and told me to sit down on the front step.
“I’m really okay,” I said, still feeling a bit shaky and lightheaded.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes before releasing his sigh. “Please,” he urged. “Sit down.”
Even though I wanted to argue, I decided to pick my battles. I sat, and to my surprise, he took a seat beside me. I didn’t know what to say to him, but thankfully, Jax wasn’t looking for words. He simply sat next to me in a complete silence that felt…comforting? Yes. I felt so much more comfortable than I had when I was walking into town, all because Jax was on that front porch step.
It turned out you didn’t need words to bring you comfort. Sometimes, all you needed was for someone to sit beside you in the middle of your panicked storms.
When the time came for him to leave, he rose to his feet and glanced down at me. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I am. Thank you for helping me.” I paused. “How long? How long did you know I was…me?”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “A few days. I saw your family car sitting in the driveway.”
“I… This…it’s crazy, right? After all these years, for us to meet up like this… I’m just trying to understand what it all means, how it all—”
“Nothing. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
I placed my hand against my chest and breathed in deeply. “But it could, right? It could mean something. I mean it almost feels like kismet, right? Of all the towns I could’ve ended up in, I ended up here. You feel it, don’t you? You feel how this feels…I don’t know…it’s just a feeling in my chest. What if—”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t try to make this something it’s not. Truthfully, we should probably keep our distance. To keep the past in the past.”
I stayed quiet because, I didn’t know what to say. To be honest, I felt a little crazy. My mind was still spinning from my pan
ic attack, and my heart rate was too high to decide if I wanted to hug Jax or yell at him for disappearing all those years ago. Before I could do anything, he was already walking away, leaving me alone with all of the thoughts and questions shooting through my brain.
After Jax left, I headed straight into the house with an overwhelming urgency. I rushed toward my bedroom, straight for a box I had yet to unpack. Ripping the tape from it, I tossed items out of the way until I came upon a golden treasure box. In that box was where I kept all my most precious items. Mama’s jewelry. Daddy’s favorite ties. Daisy’s drawings. Old photographs. And letters from Jax.
Letters he’d written to me so long ago. Letters I’d kept safely locked away throughout the years. I hadn’t read his words in the longest time, but now my heart was pounding wildly in my chest as I reached into the box and unfolded the notes to read the words ten-year-old Jax had written to me.
His words were scribbled across the pages in black ink, and I smiled at how he was always able to stay within the lines—the complete opposite of how I used to write my notes. While my handwriting was messy, Jax’s was always tame.
I collected the pieces of paper and headed out to the convertible to sit under the sun while I read the words from the man who once was my best friend.
I didn’t expect to get so emotional while reading them. I didn’t expect tears to form in my eyes as my stare dashed back and forth on the pages. We’d written each other for three years straight during the months we weren’t spending at summer camp together. We’d stayed in touch the best way we knew how. I remembered spending three years rushing out to the mailbox, hoping to see Jax’s perfect penmanship on an envelope.
I swore I had probably read those letters a million times back in the day. The edges of the pages were tattered and worn, but that didn’t take away from the odd set of butterflies that found their way to me. It was from little things that had probably felt so minor back then when I read them.
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