by Katee Robert
But then the moment passed and Adam kept walking.
Jules’s breath whooshed out, and it took everything she had not to crumple into a ball on the street and start crying. When the heck had she started to care about that man so much? She was an idiot, and quite possibly insane. She turned, feeling like she was walking through molasses, and looked straight into Grant’s gray eyes. And I thought today couldn’t get any worse.
He smiled. “Trouble in paradise?”
Did he think she cared about what he thought when her heart was walking away from her, the pain cutting deeper with each step he took? She’d thought herself in love with Grant back in the day, but it hadn’t been a drop in the ocean compared to what she felt for Adam. So Jules lifted her chin and stared down her nose at her ex. “Here’s a tip, Grant—fuck off.” She marched into her café and shut the door behind her.
It was clear from the expressions on the handful of customers around that they’d seen and/or heard everything. She tried for a smile. “Does anyone need a coffee refill?”
Mrs. Peterson walked over and took her hands. “I’m so sorry, honey. But after Grant, you really should have known better.”
The walls around her seemed to be moving closer. She carefully extracted her hand. “Adam is nothing like that…that…douchecanoe. How dare you even compare them? He’s stubborn to the point of idiocy and proud and in pain, but that’s no reason to put him in the same box.” In a distant part of her mind, she knew she was ranting, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “And for God’s sake, I’m twenty-six. Just because I’ve been dumped unceremoniously twice in my life doesn’t mean I’m doomed to be alone, and I’ll thank you—and everyone else in this town—kindly to remember that. At the very least I should have three shots to get it right before you regulate me to the shelf!”
She strode across the room and through the door into the back, not looking at anyone for fear of seeing more pitying looks. Jamie jumped about ten feet when she barged in, but Jules ignored her cousin and just kept walking, up the stairs and into her apartment. Aubry jumped nearly a foot in the air when she walked through the door, but her surly expression disappeared the instant she saw Jules. “What happened?”
It took two tries to get the words out. “Adam and I are over.”
Aubry straightened, her amber eyes narrowing. “You were fine three hours ago. What did he do? Do I have to get out my body-burying kit?”
She was only half sure Aubry was joking. It didn’t make her feel any better that her friend was willing to go to such lengths for her. “If you go to jail, I won’t have anyone.”
“That’s not true. Your parents love you very much, even if they live a million miles away, and your extended family is as meddling as they are numerous.” She huffed. “Though I guess they’re pretty cool, too.”
“Aubry…” She stumbled over and sank onto the couch. “Something happened—something bad. I knew he was leaving—I couldn’t escape that fact—but I thought we had more time. Maybe I’m asking too much. I just want him to let me in, but it feels like he shuts me out of anything that isn’t the good parts of him. What kind of relationship is that?”
“I’m not going to pretend I know a damn thing about relationships, but even I know that wanting the whole of someone isn’t a bad thing.” She glared out the window as if he was standing right there. “He’s an idiot. A big-headed, knuckle-dragging, troublemaking idiot. He doesn’t deserve you.”
That was the problem. She wasn’t sure it was the truth. She took a deep breath. “I should have known better. It shouldn’t matter so much what the town thinks of me. Instead of coming up with some crazy plan with my fake boyfriend, I should have done what every normal single woman in her twenties does and joined an internet dating site. There’s a world outside Devil’s Falls, and I’m sure I could find someone who isn’t a troll or a serial killer to love me.”
“Jules—”
She stood. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“Too goddamn bad.” Aubry grabbed her elbow and yanked her back down onto the couch. “Life is about risk—don’t you look at me like that, I know I don’t follow that rule—and you took one. And for the last fucking time, you’re not boring. A boring woman would have married Grant and been his little wife with no identity of her own. You don’t have to be a wild child or fuel for the gossip mill to be unique and amazing, and I’m stopping now before we both start to cry.”
She shook her head. “But everybody—”
“I know for a fact that the only person who thinks less of you for the choices you’ve made is Grant. That’s why you get your back up when anyone else says anything remotely close to you being a cat lady or on the shelf or whatever other hot-button terms you don’t like.”
Aubry had a point. She knew Aubry had a point, but it was so hard to agree with her with Adam’s words ringing in her ears. Stability. That’s what she’d always sought for herself. She’d known Adam wasn’t the most stable guy around, but… “He just walked away. He wouldn’t even talk to me.”
If there was one thing she learned from her parents’ twenty-five-year marriage, it was that people had to be able to fight in a relationship and still have the security to know it wasn’t the end of things. She didn’t have that with Adam. She wasn’t sure she ever would, even if their fight hadn’t happened today.
“Adam’s a broken individual. Trust me, it takes one to know one.” Aubry hugged her. “And, just like me, you can’t fix him through sheer force of will. The world would be a better place if your sunshine could drown out other people’s rainstorms—it just doesn’t work like that.”
But she didn’t want to change him. Not really. She liked all of Adam’s hidden depths and a thousand other little things about him. The only thing she wanted was for him to let her in, to let her help him shoulder the burden. If his mom really was terminal, then he’d need someone to lean on. He couldn’t do it alone, not without breaking, not when he obviously loved Amelia so much.
But he wouldn’t take help from her. She suspected he wouldn’t take help from anyone.
Or maybe he would…
Jules straightened. “I have to make a call.” She disentangled herself from Aubry and pulled her phone out of her pocket. It took all of a second to find Daniel’s number and call it.
He answered almost immediately. “Yep?”
“Adam needs you.” Her voice broke, but she charged on. “He won’t talk to me, but something happened, and he needs to talk to someone.”
“Does he know you’re calling?”
“No.”
Daniel was quiet for a long ten seconds. “We don’t talk about some things, Jules. It’s just the way it is.”
What was it with the men in her life who couldn’t deal with emotion? She took a deep breath and tried to keep the strain from her voice. “I know you have unresolved issues—all of you do—but if you let him shoulder this alone, it’s going to kill something inside him. Please, Daniel. Please at least try to talk to him.”
Her cousin sighed. “I’ll try. That’s all I can do.”
It would have to be good enough. “Thank you.” She hung up and turned to find Aubry staring at her. “What?”
“You really fell hard for this guy, didn’t you?”
Too hard, too fast, too much all around. She slumped back into the couch. “I really did.”
“I think this calls for a tea party.” Aubry stood. “And by tea party, I mean we’re going to drink vodka out of teacups and eat our weight in ice cream while we bitch about the men who’ve done us wrong.”
“I don’t deserve you.”
“Aw, Jules, that’s where you’re wrong. You’re better than all of us—you’re just too good of a person to see it.” She disappeared into her room and came back with two fine china teacups on saucers. “Now, do you want to shoot some noobs, or is this the kind of hurting that require
s a sappy romance movie?”
Jules’s eyes burned. “You’re the best friend anyone could ever ask for.”
“Just don’t go around telling people that.”
“Your secret is safe with me.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Adam didn’t have a place in mind when he started driving after grabbing a six-pack from the market, but he ended up in the cemetery, winding through the narrow paths until he stood in front of his friend’s headstone. He opened a beer and finally made himself read it.
John Moore
Beloved son and brother
December 16, 1981—December 16, 2002
It’s been too long.
And somehow not nearly long enough.
He opened a second beer and, after a self-conscious look around, upended it on the grass covering his friend’s grave.
Adam sighed. His mama wasn’t talking to him, and Lenora had practically ripped out his throat when he tried to push the subject. As much as he hated to admit it, she was right—they both needed time to cool off. The problem was the truth wasn’t going anywhere, no matter how many laps he drove around town.
She’s really going to be gone for good, long before I’m ready to let her go. I don’t know that I’ll ever be ready to let her go.
His mama was the closest thing to roots he had in this life. What was he going to do without that? It didn’t matter that he didn’t see her all that often normally—knowing she was carrying on life in Devil’s Falls had always steadied him, just a bit.
“So what’s brought you out here looking for answers?”
He took a long pull of his beer and turned to where Daniel approached. He wasn’t ready to talk about it. He didn’t know if he’d ever be ready to say it aloud. So he went with something easier to bear. “You know, John was one of my best friends, and I’ve never come out here to visit him.”
“He’s gone. Visiting his grave doesn’t make him any less gone.”
The words didn’t sit well with him. There was nothing more final than a gravestone, and the thought that in too short a time he might be standing in front of a different gravestone made his throat burn. “Have you been out here?”
“Yeah.” Daniel tipped back his head and closed his eyes. “I share a six-pack with him once a month.”
It was becoming startlingly clear that Adam had well and truly fucked up when he left town—and he’d been fucking up ever since. “I should have come back sooner. I should have been here for you and Quinn.”
And for Mama.
“We were all fighting our own demons in our own way. You did the best you could.”
But that wasn’t the truth. He could have done better. Oh, he’d spent the last decade telling himself that no one expected any different from him. He was just like his old man. The bad egg. The hell-raiser. So when he blew out of town, restlessness driving him like a leaf before a hurricane, it was only the last in a long list of things adding up to him being the piece-of-shit leaver he’d always known he was.
He’d never once considered that he could change.
“My mama’s dying. Cancer.”
Daniel finally looked at him. “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“No one did. The only reason I know is that I bullied my way into her doctor’s appointment.” And suddenly the words were there where there hadn’t been any before. “I should have been here. All this time, I should have been here.”
“You had your reasons for leaving.”
Adam suddenly hated that everyone was so goddamn willing to give him a pass. “What could possibly be more important than being here? All these years wasted, chasing some adrenaline high while I was missing the shit that really mattered back home.”
“Fuck, Adam, what do you want me to say? Was it shitty that you left right after graduation? Yeah, it was. And, yeah, it would have been nice to have you here instead of passing through town like a fucking tumbleweed. But you made the decision that you made. I wasn’t willing to lose another friend over it.”
Especially not after they’d lost John.
“I’m sorry.” He felt like he’d been saying that too fucking much lately. What did sorry really mean if he didn’t do a damn thing to keep this shit from happening again?
“There’s nothing to be sorry for. We all did stupid shit when we were eighteen and full of more come than common sense. If you keep beating yourself up about it, you’re never going to get past it.” He looked at Adam. “But you’re not eighteen anymore. So what are you going to do?”
About his mama.
About Jules.
About his goddamn life in general.
He rubbed a hand over his face. That was the problem—like Daniel said, they weren’t eighteen anymore. He’d spent so long running from the idea of settling down, he wasn’t sure what it’d be like to stand and fight. But he already knew that chasing down his favorite adrenaline rush was only a temporary solution. “I don’t know.”
“Here’s a hint—apologize. Your mama loves you as much as you love her.” Daniel pushed to his feet and finished off his beer. “And, Adam, none of us knew she was sick—not like you’re saying. If no one in Devil’s Falls could tell, how the hell would you be able to? Do you have some sort of X-ray vision that you’ve neglected to tell me about?”
“No.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” He awkwardly squeezed Adam’s shoulder. “Just be there for her. That’s all she wants.”
That seemed to be all anyone wanted from him. Except Jules. Jules fully expected him to leave at some point and had plans to eventually settle down with some future guy.
Something must have showed on his face, because Daniel hesitated. “I hate to even ask, but what the hell happened with Jules? One second you’re making googly eyes at her, and the next she’s calling me upset and telling me to track your stupid ass down.”
Of course she’d been the one to call Daniel. It didn’t matter that he’d said some awful shit to her—she was still trying to take care of him. “It never would have worked. I don’t deserve her.”
But he wanted to.
Daniel leveled a long look at him. “Yeah, well, not with you being own self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re not your old man. You never were, though you’ve been determined to prove otherwise since you were a kid.” He set the empty bottle back into the six-pack. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help with your mom.” And then he was gone, striding across the cemetery to where his truck was parked at the entrance.
The possibility that he wasn’t his father 2.0 had never really occurred to Adam. Oh, he’d fantasized about making different choices when he was too young to know better, but when push came to shove, his instincts were always to walk away. To pursue the next adrenaline rush. Adam glared at the horizon, waiting to feel the pull for the next ride, the next highway to nowhere.
For once in his life, it didn’t have the same siren call as what was behind him—Devil’s Falls, his mama, and Jules.
“Better late than never.” He headed for his truck. He wasn’t sure where to start, but he owed his mama an apology. He’d mishandled things, and having the best of intentions didn’t change the fact that he’d pissed her off something fierce.
The drive back to her place passed in a blur, and then he was striding into the kitchen, where his mama and Lenora were puttering over of pot of what smelled like chicken noodle soup. Lenora took one look at his face and said, “I’ll be in the living room if you need me.”
He wanted to tell her that his mama didn’t need her for a conversation with her son, but it was right that Lenora stood with her against the world—even him. His mama had stood alone for far too long, and he was honestly glad that she’d found happiness in the midst of everything. “Mama.”
She braced her frail shoulders like she was going to war and turned to face him
. “Son.”
He didn’t want to fight. Fuck, he was so tired of fighting. “I wish you would have told me.”
“That was my choice to make.”
“Mama—”
“I don’t know if it helps or makes it worse, but I haven’t known nearly as long as you seem to think.” She shot a look at the doorway Lenora had disappeared through. “She wouldn’t take no for an answer when it came to contacting you.”
He exhaled. She hadn’t hid it from him. Not really. That was just his knee-jerk reaction upon hearing that she had stage-four cancer. It had never occurred to him that it had surprised her as much as him. Great job being sympathetic, ass. “I’ve made a mess of things.”
“You’re overprotective.” She smiled. “There are worse things, especially when I can’t blame your bullheadedness on your father.”
He managed a smile, though it felt brittle. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to be there for you without stepping on toes and trying to fix things.”
“Oh, baby.” She crossed the tiny kitchen and took his hands. “Some things you can’t fix, no matter how hard you try. I was never going to make it out of this life alive. None of us are.” She hugged him. “Give me the benefit of choosing how I’m going out. I don’t want the chemo. The cancer is doing enough to me, and I can’t bear the thought of my body wasting away any faster than it already is.”
Stubborn to the very end.
Just like me.
It struck him that he’d been so focused on his old man that he’d never really considered what he’d inherited from his mama. If his father was a leaf on the wind, his mama was as steady as the sunrise. I could have learned a thing or two from her if I’d just held still long enough to realize that. He didn’t know how to prove to her that he was determined to change, but there was only one place to start. “I’m going to buy a house.”
His mama’s eyes went wide. “What?”
“It’s time. If you don’t want chemo, I’m not going to push you. It’s your decision. But I’m going to be here every step of the way and I’m going to help how I can.”