Falling for the Fling

by Lili Valente

  The heavy meaning behind that hits me square in the chest. At least now I know why she seemed to trust Mason even less than I did.

  “Okay, what if this were Liam instead of Mason we were talking about,” I say then. “What if Liam showed up here this afternoon and begged you to come back to him? What if he swore he was a different person and promised you the life you’ve always wanted? Would you pack up your things and give it another shot?”

  Aria is silent for a long moment. “Horrible as it is for me to admit, a weak part of me would want to. So badly. Even after everything he did. But…no. No, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.”

  “Then you understand why I can’t let myself listen to that weak part of me either,” I whisper, swallowing hard. “I won’t be able to survive that kind of pain a second time, Aria. I just won’t.”

  Aria’s eyes fill with tears again. “What about everything you said to me the other night? That there’s always hope for more. For better. You told me the best was yet to come for me. Why can’t that be true for you and Mason?”

  I’m suddenly tired, so tired that even shaking my head again feels like a Herculean effort. “I meant what I said. I truly do believe there’s someone better out there for you—not a huge leap considering the low bar Liam set. But for me, Mason was it for me.”

  I let out a long, pain-filled breath. “Hoping for that kind of happiness with him and never being able to have it just hurts way too much. I think…I think I’m done with hoping.”

  Done with love, I think to myself as I move around Aria and trudge up the steps into the house.

  This time, my sister lets me go, as if she can sense that the battle is finally over.

  And this time, everyone has lost.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Mason

  I don’t get wasted. Ever. Not even in college did I get remotely close to blitzing out my brain to pure oblivion.

  Sure, I’ll have a few beers during a game, maybe a single shot during happy hour to celebrate a friend’s good news, or wine with dinner, but I don’t ever drink to get drunk or to escape my problems.

  I had enough stepfathers who Drank with a capital D to know that getting smashed only creates new problems. When you sober up, whatever you were trying to escape is still there, and all you have to show for your trouble is a sour stomach, a pounding head, and an increased risk of liver disease.

  I know better.

  I absolutely do.

  So there’s just no excuse for my being at Buddy’s at eleven in the morning with a beer in one hand and a shot of whiskey in the other.

  No excuse at all, except that Lark shut me out of her heart—forever. The world is a dark, worthless place to be, and Buddy’s is the perfect place for feeling miserable.

  The bar is literally on the wrong side of the tracks, a squat wooden building next to an abandoned train station built in the early 1940s that, as far as I can tell, has never been renovated. The gravel parking lot is overgrown with weeds, the wood siding is cracked, and the foundation is so badly rotted it’s hard to believe it passed code.

  The inside is even worse.

  The faded old bar is patched in a dozen places, the floor has settled on a slant, it smells of sour armpits and stale nuts, and even in the middle of the day it’s so dark it’s hard to see into the corners. The single rectangular window above the door barely lets in enough light to maneuver your beer to your mouth.

  Which is good. I don’t want to be able to see the glass clenched in my hand too clearly. I have serious doubts about its cleanliness. Its surface is gummy against my skin, sticky the way the floor feels under my shoes.

  The thought that I’m drinking out of a used glass turns my stomach for the first few sips of beer, but after a shot of whiskey and a refill of whatever amber swill Buddy—the ninety-year-old bar keep, a cantankerous old man without a friendly bone in his body—has on tap, I find I’m not too worried about my dirty glass.

  I’m hoping by the third beer and second shot of whiskey, I won’t have any sober brain cells left functioning.

  Because I don’t want to think anymore. I don’t want to remember the defeated look in Lark’s eyes, or replay the hopelessness in her voice when she told me it was over.

  I don’t want to admit to myself that I’ve lost her for good this time.

  Don’t want to imagine a future without the love of my life.

  Don’t want to even think about leaving to go back to my condo in Atlanta tomorrow without her in the seat beside me.

  Yep, I was planning to ask her to move in with me tonight after dinner.

  Surprise.

  I had it all planned out. Romance factor of a thousand. I got us a reservation at the little Italian restaurant where we had our first date years ago and everything.

  With her catering business being equally divided between Bliss River and larger venues in Atlanta, her commute wouldn’t have been any worse from my condo, and I would have been only a few minutes from home when I got off work.

  I’d already been imagining coming home to Lark at the end of the day, imagining the two of us walking the streets of our new community, trying all the Chinese restaurants to see which had the best eggrolls, running in the park before work, hitting the Farmer’s Market on Thursday nights, and finding a new brunch place for long, lingering breakfasts and reading the paper on Sunday mornings.

  I’d already decided that I didn’t need a home office, after all. I could find a place for my desk in the living room. That way Lark and I could turn the second bedroom into a guest room for her sisters for now.

  And then a nursery for our first baby in the not too distant future.

  Our first baby.

  I was sure we’d have at least three.

  Now, I’m never going to know what it’s like to start a family with the woman I love.

  I’m going to live the rest of my life alone, wishing for something I can never have, knowing there’s no one to blame for it but myself.

  Hell, if I could go back in time and punch Younger Mason in the face, I would do it. In a fucking heartbeat.

  But I can’t, so I’ll have to settle for taking my self-loathing out on my liver.

  “I’ll have another whiskey, Buddy,” I call out in a firm voice.

  The bartender has massive, cauliflower-shaped hearing aids in both ears. Still, you have to talk loud enough for him to hear you over a train, even when you’re the only person in the bar and the jukebox is quiet.

  “Coming up,” Buddy grumbles with a heavy sigh, one that insinuates that I’m a pain in his ass, and that he could care less if I live or die, let alone continue to patronize his establishment.

  “Make that two,” comes a familiar voice from near the entrance.

  I don’t remember the door opening or closing, but it must have, because Buddy and I are no longer alone, and my day just got worse.

  It’s Parker. I’d recognize my uncle’s smug twang anywhere.

  “Thought that was your fancy new car outside,” Uncle Parker says, crossing the room to clap me on the back in a way that’s almost friendly. “Figured I’d stop in and see if you wanted to buy your uncle a drink.”

  “Sure.” I nod to Buddy as he sets my whiskey down in front of me. “Add whatever he wants to my tab.”

  “Well, ain’t that generous?” Parker settles onto the stool beside me with a happy sigh. “Very generous, indeed.”

  I glance at him out of the corner of my eye to find the old man grinning like the dog that crapped in the cat’s water dish.

  “You’re in a good mood. Somebody die?” I ask, drunk enough not to care if I pick a fight.

  But Parker only laughs, a long, high-pitched laugh that ends in a coughing spasm he quiets with his own shot of whiskey.

  “Nope, nobody died.” He clears his throat and slams the shot glass back on the bar. “Just glad to see people getting what they deserve.”

  I turn on my stool, watching my uncle over the rim of my glass as I take a drink
of lukewarm beer. I’ve never seen him so damned happy. Never, with maybe the exception of my junior year, when my team made it to the state basketball finals and I missed the winning free throw, dooming Bliss River High School to another year without a state championship.

  I’d come home exhausted and feeling awful for failing my team—despite the fact that not a single one of my teammates, or my coach, had blamed me for the loss. Parker had been sitting on the front porch with a shit-eating grin on his face, practically twitching with excitement over the chance to glory in my failure.

  Just like that, I know who gave Aria my old lease.

  “You went through my desk upstairs, didn’t you?” I set my beer calmly on the bar, determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing me angry.

  “Well now, it’s my desk, ain’t it? In my house, after all,” he drawls, smile still wide on his face. “And I figured that little girl had a right to go through your things after what you put her sister through.” His eyes narrow as his smile grows thinner, meaner. “Guess she must have found something, or you wouldn’t be drowning your sorrows, now would you?”

  I let my eyes drift over his face, imagining what it would feel like to smash my fist into that smug grin or blacken one of those hateful eyes, to fully unleash, taking vengeance for all the times he dragged me down instead of lifting me up.

  But I’m not drunk enough to start throwing punches.

  Or maybe I’m already too drunk, buzzed enough that it doesn’t seem worth the effort. Nothing seems worth the effort. I might as well stay right here on this stool for the rest of my life. At least I’d be sure never to see Lark again. She doesn’t come to places like this. She probably doesn’t even know Buddy’s—the cheapest, shit hole bar in Bliss River—even exists.

  “So what is it?” Uncle Parker smacks his lips, as if savoring the taste of my failure. “I thought those old poems were pretty embarrassing, but girls like shit like that.”

  “The lease,” I say, unable to tear my eyes away from my uncle’s mouth as he smirks and smacks, lapping up his only nephew’s misery the way he licks his fingers after fried chicken. “I signed it before I asked Lark to marry me.”

  “Ah.” He nods, grinning so hard his jaw creaks. “Well then, that would do it all right. She must have wanted to shove a pole up your lying ass.”

  I nod slowly, triggering low laughter from him. But for the first time since I was a fifteen-year-old kid, my uncle’s obvious enjoyment of my failure doesn’t make me angry. It only makes me…confused.

  “Why do you hate me so damned much?” I ask.

  “What?” Some of the humor goes out of his eyes, but his smile stays in place.

  “Why do you hate me?” I ask again, genuinely curious. “I’m your only relative left in Bliss River, and I was a star when I was a kid.”

  He snorts. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do,” I say, refusing to let him off the hook. “Most uncles would have been proud to have their nephew playing first string on the basketball team, and graduating at the top of their class. Why not you?”

  His smile curls, becoming something closer to a snarl. “You really think you’re something, don’t you?”

  “A lot of people thought I was something. But not you, not Don Parker. Why not? Were you jealous?”

  Uncle Parker’s eyebrows lift. “Of you?”

  “Of me.” I stare him dead in his cold, flat eyes.

  “I ain’t jealous of jack shit. I was you, boy,” he says, his smile returning. “I had a scholarship to play ball, but I gave it up to stay here and keep your mama out of trouble. God knows our mama couldn’t be bothered.” He laughs a bitter laugh. “If it were up to her, we’d have been out on the streets by the time I was seventeen. I worked my ass off after school to get the things me and Tanya needed, while Mama sat on her ass in front of the T.V. I paid for.”

  “Did my mom ask you to give up college?” I try not to seem too interested. In all the time I lived with my uncle, he never talked this much about his childhood.

  Or my mother.

  He scowls. “Of course not. She didn’t have to. A real man doesn’t have to be asked. I gave up my chance at a better life to stay here and protect her, but she managed to get herself pregnant anyway.” He turns to his beer. “I saved up the money to help her get rid of it, but she said she was in love,” he continues with a sneer. “She and Mike Stewart convinced Mama to sign the papers they needed to get married underage. That lasted about six months before your daddy ran off and Tanya moved back in with us, bringing you with her. And then I had two more mouths to feed again and one ass to keep in diapers.”

  His hands tighten around his glass as he looks back at me. “I could have been something. I could have played professional ball or been a doctor or whatever I wanted to be. Instead I got you, and your little nose in the air and that look in your eye that made it clear how much better you thought you were than the rest of us. Truth told, I think that’s why your mama ran off. She couldn’t stand to stay here and be looked down on by her own damn kid anymore.”

  I blink. That should hurt. All of it. Everything he’d just said.

  But it doesn’t. Not a word. I don’t feel hurt or angry, only numb and sad, and surprisingly, a little sorry for him.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, taking another long drink of beer.

  “What?” His face pinches, all his features bunching closer to the center.

  “I’m sorry I fucked up your life,” I repeat. “Wasn’t my intention. Doubt it was my mom’s, either. She was only fifteen.”

  He scowls. “I don’t want your apology.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I don’t want shit from you. Never have, never will.”

  I lean in closer to my uncle. “Now you’re lying, Parker. You’ve been dying to watch me fail the way you did ever since I was a kid. But guess what? I’m not going to roll over and play dead. Never. No matter what you do to me, no matter how you gloat when I fall short of what I reach for. Never.”

  Never, I think again to myself, resolve banishing the whiskey haze.

  I’m never going to be like my uncle.

  And I don’t belong in this bar.

  Parker starts cussing, but I barely hear him. I reach in my wallet and toss a couple of twenties on the bar for the drinks, then step off my stool.

  “Thank you,” I say, cutting through the stream of obscenity. “If you hadn’t come in here, I would have spent a lot more time feeling sorry for myself.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” he growls.

  “You’re going to need a new hobby,” I say, clapping him on the back in the same chummy way he’d greeted me on the way in. “You can’t touch me anymore.”

  He has a few more choice words to say to that, but they drift in one ear and out the other, becoming a nonsensical hum that buzzes harmlessly around my head as I walk to the door and push out into the sunshine.

  Outside, it’s quiet except for the soft rush of traffic a few streets over and the chatter of birds nesting in the ruins of the train station a hundred yards away.

  It’s a beautiful day and I’m alive to walk around in it. No matter how foul I feel, no matter how miserable I am over what happened with Lark, I’m alive when so many aren’t. It seems like a simple thing to be grateful for, but it isn’t simple, not really. There are so many people in the world who waste their aliveness, who hang back when they should reach out, who sit out when they should join in, who hang on when they should let go, and I don’t want to be one of them.

  It took years of hard work on myself to feel like I’m living my life right, and I’m not going to give up on that because a dream has died.

  Even if it is the brightest dream, the best dream, the one thing I most want in the world.

  I’m not going to waste the gift of being alive. I’m going to get up, brush myself off, and move on.

  Even if I have to do it with a broken heart.

  Chapte
r Twenty-Five

  Lark

  Two months later

  There’s nothing more miserable than a blazing Georgia afternoon in late July.

  All day it’s been as hot as Satan’s kitchen. The bugs waged war against the appetizers (and nearly won) and the humidity pressed in on the wedding party like a dog’s hot, damp breath.

  The bride spent half the reception rushing to the bathroom to spray more hairspray on her up-do in a vain attempt to maintain control of her naturally curly hair, and the guests consumed twice as much water as wine to keep from passing out on the dance floor.

  “Thank goodness that’s over.” Melody dumps a load of empty serving trays in the back of our new Ever After Catering van, the one we bought after booking four mega weddings in August, and two in September.

  Business is good. Very good.

  I can’t complain, even when grilling T-Bones in hundred-degree heat.

  “Why any woman would plan an outdoor reception in July is beyond me,” Aria agrees, collapsing onto the grass by the truck and shrugging out of her tuxedo vest.

  We were one server short tonight—Natalie called in sick—so Aria suited up to fill in. She finished the last minute touches on the wedding cake, then spent the rest of the night circling with drink and hors d’oeuvre trays. I offered to take over after the meal was served, but Melody insisted that Aria should stay on duty. She said something about Aria having a sunnier smile or something that I hadn’t paid much attention to.

  I have a hard time paying attention to anything these days. It feels like I’m drifting through my life, going through the motions, but not plugging in the way I used to.

  I don’t get a rush when I walk into the kitchen to start a job anymore. I don’t get nervous around fussy brides; I don’t even care when the old people complain about the gourmet salad dressing and ask for a bottle of Ranch, instead. The job just doesn’t seem to matter as much as it used to.