“Great. You’re commending me now. Are you going to give me some kind of pin to wear or something too? Are you proud of me, Jett?”
He finished what was left of his beer and walked across the deck.
He paused next to me and reached down for my beer.
“Finish that up, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ll go get us another.”
“What makes you think I want you to have another?” I asked.
“The food’s not here yet. And we’re just getting started with this mess.”
“It’s not a mess when it’s the truth.”
“Oh, Julia, you’re cute when you act innocent. The truth is always messy. Because it’s always from different sets of eyes.”
I rolled my eyes. “Is that your tough guy, romantic, poetry kind of crap?”
“No. It’s the truth.”
“Okay. New rule for tonight. I never want to hear that word spoken again.”
“Done,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
He went inside.
I walked to the end of the deck where he had been standing.
I wasn’t irritated that Jett was in my house.
It irritated me that it felt okay. That it almost felt normal.
I lit a cigarette and did my whole mental battle of swearing I would quit again soon. And then stay away from the damn things for the rest of my life.
All stupid lies to justify smoking.
I took that first drag and then drank the rest of my beer.
Jett came back outside with two fresh beers.
He put one down on the railing and looked out to the ocean.
“What are you really doing here, Jett?” I asked.
“There it is,” he said. “Getting right down to it.”
“Yeah. We should.”
“I have no idea what I’m doing here, Julia. I’ve been waiting and watching things for so damn long… maybe I’ve been too much like you.”
“Like me? How?”
“Waiting for a sign,” he said.
“Shut up.”
“I’m serious. You remember when you’d stand with your toes touching the water? And you’d be in silence. I always wondered what it meant. Then you finally told me what it meant. You were waiting for some kind of sign. A shooting star. A seashell. And that meant a lot to you.”
“Yeah? So?”
“Well… you rubbed off on me I guess. I’ve been waiting for a sign.”
“Did you get your sign?” I asked.
Jett inched closer and playfully elbowed me. “No. Because it’s all bullshit. Like I told you all those years ago.”
I swallowed hard and squinted my eyes. “That’s what you think? All these signs are bullshit?”
“What signs?”
“Everything I’ve guided my life with, Jett.”
“Where has it gotten you?”
I pushed from the railing and wanted to slap him. “Excuse me? Did you really just say that?”
“What? Hey, you have no problem shitting on your life.”
“Yeah, because it’s my life. You don’t get to show up and shit on it too. It’s not like you’re living large.”
“I’m not?” he asked.
“Oh, please. Excuse me then… you did whatever it took to make a ton of money. Just like the rest of the people in this town. And, what? You bought a big house? Good for you, Jett. Who goes to your house? Huh? Nobody. Aira swims in the pool. I bet you only use the house for the goddamn bedroom.”
I watched the way his jaw tightened. I had hit a weak spot.
And it felt pretty good.
Because there wasn’t much on Jett that was weak.
“Fine,” he said. “You’re right. You win. You win at everything, Julia. We can’t have a conversation about life then. Whatever I did to make money was…”
“Oh, here we go,” I said. “Come on. Tell me it was for me. Or for us.”
“It was!” Jett growled. “And you know it too.”
“You never gave it up after we… you know.”
“Right. Just throw all the money away that I worked so hard to make.”
I snapped my fingers. “See? I was always right. It didn’t matter if I was around. You were going to do what you wanted. It all worked out, Jett. You got your rich life. I got my beach house. So what the fuck are we doing here? Standing on my deck, arguing about the past?”
“I don’t know about you but I’m waiting for some pizza and garlic knots,” he said.
“I could smack you right now,” I said.
“Then smack me, sweetheart. Wouldn’t be the first time you slapped me across the face.”
“I’ll make a fist this time,” I warned.
Jett lifted his beer bottle to his lips. He looked around.
He nodded.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“No, Jett. By all means. What?”
Jett looked at me. “Why’d you fucking marry him?”
I gasped.
Whoa.
Things just went from real to holy shit real.
I curled my lip and threw on a face of disgust and anger. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“The guy who was supposed to marry you, Julia,” Jett said. “It was my job to do that. To marry you. To sweep you away for good. To spoil you for the rest of your life. You took that from me. From us.”
I sucked in all the emotion that was ready to explode.
I knew if I walked into the storm Jett was playing in, we’d both get hurt really bad.
It had become way too easy for me to swallow it all down.
So I did that.
I moved toward Jett when I saw the glare of headlights coming toward my house.
Our food was here.
I put my hand to his chest and I threw the biggest smile I could afford across my face.
“You really want to know that answer?” I whispered.
“Yeah. Why the fuck did you marry that guy?”
I made the smile just a little bit bigger. And I went for another low blow on Jett.
“Because you never asked me.”
* * *
I walked off the deck and Jett was right behind me.
He turned me around and his hands cupped my face. “I never asked you?”
“No,” I said. “You never asked me.”
“So you married the next man standing in front of you?”
“What did you think was going to happen?”
“Really? That’s what you think of yourself? You just run back to what you know? That was it? Not even a simple conversation with me, Julia. There was…”
“Our dinner is here, Jett,” I said.
He gritted his teeth as I stepped back away from him.
His hands stayed in place, leaving him frozen like a statue.
Trust me, I knew what I did to him. There were very few times in my life I ever felt like I had any kind of control or power and being near Jett was one of those few times. It was strange though because in the same breath he had the same power over me too. We were forever struggling to overtake one another yet at the same time falling for the other. It was all we knew and all we did.
I met the delivery driver out front and went through the front door with the food.
I hadn’t had Millie’s in forever.
The smell brought back ten thousand memories.
I tossed the food onto the counter and reached for the cabinet where I kept something stronger to drink.
Because if Jett wanted to walk down memory lane, I was going to need the strength to survive it.
He came into the house from the deck and whistled when he saw the bottle in my hand.
“That kind of night, huh?” he asked.
“With you here, what did you expect?”
Jett flipped opened the top box and grabbed one of the perfectly cooked garlic knots.
“Asshole,” I said as he took a big bite.
“Rest is yours,” he said.
I twisted off the cap of the vodka bottle and knew how much I hated the taste of it. And what it did to me. And I drank anyway, like I had no choice in the matter.
I put the bottle down and walked right by the delicious food and went to Jett.
Who also was delicious.
“I loved him too,” I said to Jett. “That’s why. And it doesn’t matter what happened after you. Or why. And I don’t owe you a thing for it. It was my fucking life and my fucking decision to make.”
Jett stood stone faced.
I backed off, feeling good.
I grabbed one of the boxes of garlic knots and went back to my corner with my carb loaded food and bottle of booze.
Look at me now, Aunt Bea… are you proud?
“You didn’t make the decision though, sweetheart,” Jett said. “You and I both know that. Someone else made the decision for you. And that was your escape. You faked it. All of it. At least I lived in it. I owned it.”
I felt my eyes go wide and I reached for the bottle, wondering if I had the strength and aim to throw it and hit Jett right between the eyes.
Jett got a slice of pizza and left the house.
I shook my head, not sure where we were. Or what was happening. That he chose now to do all of this. Because I fucking ran out of gas like a moron. But he had been waiting all this time for a moment… knowing there would never be a moment… because all we had were moments…
I drank out of the bottle like it was water.
I stuffed an entire garlic knot in my mouth and shut my eyes.
I reminded myself it was my house and my night. And if Jett wanted…
“Fuck this,” I whispered.
I jumped off the counter and went out to the deck.
Jett always folded his pizza up like it was a damn sandwich and it always pissed me off. He would make fun of me for eating it like I was a rabbit or something. Taking little nibbles, eating right to left.
I hated that we knew that kind of stuff about each other.
“There’s only one person being fake here,” I said. “One. And I’m looking right at him. You stayed with Pop. That’s the only part of it that’s real. But you bought the big house, right? And you have the collection of cars, trucks, motorcycles, all that. You go hide out wherever you go so you could buy some half-drunk woman a few drinks, ease your way into her pants, and then find the perfect excuse by sunrise to make sure you never have to see her again.”
“I’d rather that than get married,” Jett said.
I nodded. “You’ll never stop, Jett. It’ll always go back to that.”
“Because I still don’t understand it, Julia. How we could fall apart so fast. And you just fell into his arms so fast.”
“It wasn’t fast to me,” I said.
Jett finished his slice of pizza and his beer and closed in on me.
“Everything you just said is true, sweetheart,” he said. “And it all points back to you.”
“To me? It’s all my fault?”
“Yeah, it is. Anything I’ve ever had has been to forget. Like a quick drink. To forget. Or to remind myself I could feel something.”
Jett took the bottle of vodka from my hand and took a big drink from it.
He groaned. “Why do you drink this shit?”
“I hate it,” I confessed.
“Why are you drinking it then?”
I blinked fast. “Because I want to forget you.”
Chapter 13
NOW
Jett
Because I want to forget you.
The one thing I had tried to do each day of my life since things fell apart. And all I was handed from then was a sense of torture I wasn’t sure I’d wish on anyone. Seeing Julia move on but not move forward. And I let it all happen.
“Drink up, sweetheart,” I whispered to her. “This was a mistake. You’ll never look in the mirror and tell yourself you fucked up. Or that you’re hurt. You’ll never see something real. And that’s not always a bad thing. It keeps your heart protected. And you’ve a lot here with the bakery and making sure Aira is okay after everything that happened to her. You can stop drinking that garbage water because I’m leaving.”
I walked off the deck and around the house.
I grabbed my chin to rub it but honestly had no idea what to do. We were a fucking saga. That’s what everyone always called us. Scotty was the first to say it and he got a bloody mouth for it. But damn he was right when he said it that first time. For someone swearing they’d never get swept in the bullshit romance routine, I really sucked at it.
It all made my house and the life I lived a little bit more bearable. Where there were no conversations about feelings. It was just about the moment between me and someone else. And that moment would arrive, leave, and nobody would be hurt.
Unlike Julia.
It hurt.
That’s the feeling.
Hurt.
A million reasons to be hurt but the one hitting me hardest was her wanting to forget me. Wanting to turn me into a phantom memory. A piece of her life that she would never talk about and eventually take with her when her time was up in life.
Then what?
Our story would be gone.
Never to be spoke of again.
“Jett, wait,” a voice yelled behind me.
I touched the leather seat of my motorcycle.
“If you get on that motorcycle I’ll call the police,” Julia yelled.
I laughed. “Do what you need to do, Julia.”
“I’m not lying either. You’re drunk.”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
I wasn’t drunk. But I wasn’t sober either.
I was in that horrible in between stage. Unable to leave but still able to think straight.
“You’re drunk. And you promised… after what happened…”
I stepped toward Julia.
She gasped.
I hated myself for whatever look I had on my face that made her gasp.
“Don’t talk about the past, sweetheart,” I whispered.
“I thought that’s why you were here,” she said.
“Maybe you should stick to your past,” I said. “And maybe I didn’t come here for the past.”
“Then what did you come here for, Jett?”
The first time I kissed Julia there was no hesitation. There was no do or die moment. There was realizing my life would never be the same after my lips touched hers the first time.
It was just the moment.
And that same damn moment reared its head again.
And I did the same thing as I did the first time.
I fucking did whatever my heart told me to do.
* * *
My hands pulled at her hips as I kissed her.
There was no hiding why I was really there.
We had all the time in the world to dig through the past and look for all our mistakes like the missing key to a lock that would open forever.
But right then…
I kissed her hard.
I turned my head a little, the tip of my tongue cutting along the slit of her lips, tasting that shitty vodka one more time. Then again, if that’s how her lips tasted, I was instantly addicted to vodka.
My hands moved to the small of her back and I hooked my fingers together and pulled her even tighter against me. There was so much to feel… and there was a decision to make. And I wasn’t going to be the one to make it.
Julia put her hands between us, her nails scratching over my shirt, working up to my chest. She spread her fingers wide and pulled away from the kiss. The sound echoed into the night, audio evidence of what was happening again between us.
“Jett…”
“It’s a simple answer, sweetheart,” I said. “No waiting for signs. The stars are out, Julia. The ocean is throwing waves. I’m standing here. You’re in my arms. What else do you need?”
She swallowed hard. “You have to sleep on the couch.”
“What?”
“That’s my rule. I’m not… just sleep on the fucking couch.”
“Done,” I said.
I swooped down to kiss her again.
Her hands moved up to my shoulders and she grabbed, jumping off her feet. I caught her and my hands cupped her ass. I carried her to her house. She reached back so beautifully and opened the front door for us.
It hit me that I was carrying her across the threshold of her house, wondering if anyone else had ever done that for her.
Doesn’t fucking matter, Jett.
I kissed down to her neck, turning, finding a wall to put her against.
There was being with other women and there was being with Julia. They were two very different things.
Her back hit the wall and she let out a groan.
“Yes,” she purred as my tongue slid along the curve of her neck.
I kissed to where her shirt covered her skin and I let out a growl.
Our clothes were pissing me off.
Julia bucked her hips at me, trying to push me back.
I moved from the wall and walked through the house that wasn’t mine.
I kissed from one side of her neck to the other, taking split second breaks to navigate our journey as she called out breathless directions.
Which was good.
We were either going to end up in a closet, the bathroom or a bedroom.
And whatever door I kicked down first, that was the room where I was taking her.
When I stepped into the bedroom, Julia’s body still against mine, the taste of her skin lingering on my lips and tongue, I placed her down on the bed and fell to my knees on the floor.
She quickly sprang up and grabbed at my shirt.
I didn’t think I’d be the first one with a missing piece of clothing, but so be it.
Julia then moved from the bed to her knees, facing me, her hands tracing lines down my chest.
She bit her lip and looked me in the eyes for a moment before lunging at me.
I loved this side of her.
She was on top of me, right there on her bedroom floor.
My hands eased up her shirt, fingers sliding against her back and along the curves that had made me lose years of my life. Curves that had found a way to change, that only served to make her more beautiful. The way time danced along her body was going to fucking ruin my life some more. And definitely take what was left of my heart and stomp on it for good.
HIDDEN CREEK THEN: a hidden creek high novel Page 10