Mom doesn’t look convinced but then drags her lips up into a smile. “Well, just keep me posted and be sure to have fun. You’ll be home for dinner, won’t you?”
I’m about to say yes when Kate asks, “Is he coming here?”
She’d missed her chance at seeing him this morning.
“I’m meeting him out front,” I say.
He alluded to the fact that he wasn’t quite ready to face my family, something about not wanting them to feel sorry for him because of the breakup. I didn’t tell him that I’d so far only confided that to my mom.
“Well, that kind of sucks,” Kate says like she’s personally offended before getting back to stirring.
After telling Mom I will in fact be home for dinner, I borrow her vintage duffel coat and wait outside, walking the periphery of the snowy front yard in my boots before Garrett arrives a few minutes later. All is well as we head downtown, run into a few little shops and walk around for a bit. We even bump into Ben and Beth who are holding hands, and while there is a momentary uncomfortable silence between Beth and Garrett, I can tell that he’s happy for her.
Next, we head to the town park and have a mini-snowball fight before going to Pamela’s for hot chocolate and warming up. The setting of the sun is the only thing that reminds me that I’ve spent close to four hours with Garrett, hours that passed quickly because of a rekindled friendship.
“I’m so glad we had this time,” I say as he drives me back toward home. “You really look good, Garrett, and I can tell that WSU is the right place for you—you’ve got so many friends there, and that redhead who offered me a spare room looked like she might be crushing on you.”
“Her? No, I don’t think so.” Even in the darkness of his truck cab, I can see him blush.
He drives up to my house and turns the ignition off.
“This has been a good day,” he says, turning his body toward me.
“Totally,” I agree. “I don’t think we have to worry about staying friends—”
Out of nowhere, Garrett’s face is less than an inch away, and then he’s kissing me. It’s not a friendly peck, but a full on, hungry lip kiss. I push against his arms and yank my lips away from him.
“I thought you were okay with us just being friends!” I’m trying to catch my breath, blindsided.
He lingers close to me, but eventually pulls back seeing as I’m basically glued to the door. “It’s harder than I thought it would be,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m still in love with you.”
“But I…” I’m about to tell him I love him too, as a friend. But that word has a very different meaning for him, and I’m regretting all of the times I’d said it, wanting to comfort him but perhaps just leading him on.
“I’m sorry, okay?” He lowers his head and scoots further away from me. “But we had an amazing day, Paige, and I just don’t see why we can’t be together. I mean, are you not attracted to me or something?”
“It has nothing to do with that,” I say. He’s sweet and gorgeous, but he simply isn’t Evan. And then there’s that whole lying thing that makes a return to the front of my mind.
“I just don’t know what to think anymore,” he says. “I really don’t.”
I risk putting my hand on his shoulder and hope he doesn’t see it as anything more than a friendly gesture. “You need more time,” I say. “Maybe we shouldn’t see each other until you’re really ready.”
“No,” he says immediately. “I’ll keep working on it, but it would be worse not seeing you before you go back.”
“Okay,” I say, uneasy. I start to open my door, and Garrett is already out of the truck before I can tell him I can certainly get out myself. But there he is, holding the door open and walking up with me to my front porch.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I really am, Paige. Maybe if you take the time to think about it, you’ll see—”
“No, Garrett.” I shake my head with resolution. “There is someone else, and I love him.”
His face seems to crumple, and I wish I could take the words back, but I know that they needed to be said, just like I knew I had to break up with him when I did. But ripping the Band-Aid off is never easy.
“Oh,” he says before turning and walking back toward his truck.
I want to cry as he drives off, unsure if we’ll ever really be okay again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
PAIGE
Evan’s Return
Evan flies in today.
I’m excited, but I’d be up in the clouds if things with Garrett hadn’t veered off course the way that they did last night.
“You were kind of restless last night,” Mom says, joining me on the couch with a mug of coffee. “Heard you get up two or three times at least.”
“Sorry, Mom.” I’ve been up for an hour, nursing a cup of coffee that has long since lost its warmth and wishing the ground wasn’t covered in snow so that I could go for a run and clear my mind. “Did I keep you awake?”
“No,” she says. “It’s just me being a light sleeper, but I went right back into la-la land. You know, you were awful quiet at dinner. Did something happen with Garrett?”
Moms just have an instinct to know stuff like that.
“He tried to kiss me,” I say. “I told him I was in love with someone else.”
She nods knowingly, as if expecting it. “I’m so sorry for that boy, but it’s probably for the best, honey. It was time he knew about Evan.”
“I didn’t tell him that part,” I say. “There’s a lot of things Garrett and I should have talked about but didn’t.”
Mom sighs. “I always wondered about a girl with two boys for best friends. I kind of imagined this might happen someday.”
“You did?” I look at Mom like she’s nuts. She’d been pushing me toward them for as long as I can remember.
She laughs. “Well, yeah, honey. You won’t ever admit it, but you’re the prettiest girl in this town, and Evan and Garrett aren’t bad to look at either, so I always had this fantasy that you’d fall in love with one of them while the other remained unscathed. But as soon as you and Garrett got together, I had a feeling something wasn’t quite right.”
“Yeah, well… mother’s intuition, huh?”
“Perhaps. And I’m sorry if I pushed you toward them, but I never quite understood why you chose Mike when I could see Evan and Garrett always eyeing you.” She shakes her head. “His interest always felt put on.”
“For good reason,” I say.
“Yes, for good reason,” she agrees. “At any rate, plenty of time has already been wasted, and I think the sooner Garrett knows about you and Evan, the better. He’s flying in today, isn’t he?”
My phone is clutched in my hand—I’ve been checking to make sure his flight will be on time and texting back and forth with him all morning. “Yeah. He asked me to pick up his old car at his house and drive it to the airport—his Mom already said I could as long as you can drive me over there?”
“Oh, of course,” Mom says, “but I’d feel better if you let me drive with the snow and all. I think Claire, Kate and Grandma will get along okay for a few hours without me, don’t you think?”
Although I just want to be alone with Evan, it’s probably for the best. “Sure, okay,” I say. “And there’s something else I should tell you.”
“It’s confession time, huh?” Mom says.
“I found out something on Thanksgiving… about my scholarship.”
“Oh, don’t tell me it’s being pulled too!”
I shrug. “I’m actually not sure. Evan’s dad basically got drunk and told me there never was a real scholarship, just one in name only that he bankrolled because Evan guilted him into it.”
“But I called and checked on it,” Mom says, looking aghast. “It was perfectly legitimate.”
“I guess him being on the board made it look official. Even the apartment thing was kind of Evan’s idea.”
“What apartment thing?” Mom eyes me ca
refully.
It’s a little crazy to imagine that I’ve kept my living arrangement with Evan a secret for all of this time, and I’m not sure how I should feel about having gotten so good at skirting around the truth. “There wasn’t a studio waiting for me in Well’s Creek, or a dorm for that matter. It was a two-bedroom apartment, and I’ve been sharing it with Evan.”
“Oh, Paige.”
“I know, Mom. He said there weren’t any studio vacancies and that we got more apartment for our money and that we didn’t have to room with strangers.”
“Have you and he?”
I know what she’s asking, and I nod.
“Oh, I see…”
I’m going to be nineteen in a little over four months, so Mom had to expect I’d be losing my virginity at some point, if she didn’t already suspect it happened the night I’d stayed with Garrett in that hotel. I imagine it’s still a little hard to hear, even if she’d made a good show about being very liberal about sex and never having a problem talking about it.
“I hope you were safe?” she asks.
I tilt my head down affirmatively, though I suppose we could have been even more careful had we always used a condom in conjunction with my birth control pills. It just wasn’t something I worried about with him, though sometimes he’d bring it up, almost like it kept him up at night thinking about it.
“You could still get pregnant, right?” he’d say with a concerned look one night after we’d had sex. “It’s not a hundred-percent effective is it?”
“Close enough,” I’d assured him. “But we’ll use a condom next time, okay?”
But we never seemed to, and perhaps that was careless.
“And he’s good to you?” Mom asks. “I always knew Evan would be if you got together, but I just want to be sure.”
“He’s more than good.”
“Except for lying about the scholarship and the apartment,” she says as if just remembering this fact.
“Yes, there’s that,” I say. Of course Garrett has told lies too, but I decide not to tell her that now. “I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but Mom, I found something else out about Evan, about his horrible grades?”
Mom braces herself like she’s been waiting for this conversation to happen for a really long time. Moisture wells in her eyes. “I tried to help him,” she says with a hint of desperation in her voice, “but he put up a brick wall. I think his mother was exasperated, at the end of her rope, and his stepdad just went along with whatever she said, which at that point wasn’t much.”
“His dad is awful,” I add. “He said horrible things about Evan.”
“He certainly won’t be receiving any father of the year awards. It wasn’t hard for me to realize Evan just wanted his attention, any way he could get it.”
I nod. “I don’t think Evan’s got too many people in his corner,” I say. “It’s probably why I haven’t come down on him too hard. He needs me.”
“Just don’t forget about what you need,” Mom says.
EVAN
Paige told me to expect her mom at the airport, which I totally get. If I’d known it had snowed that much between Spokane and Basin Lake, I wouldn’t have wanted Paige driving on her own.
I get a warm hug from Mrs. Kessel, which is nice considering Paige had also informed me she’d told her about us living together. And apparently she’s fine with it. One less thing for me to worry about at least.
We sit together in the back seat, Paige and I, and the hour-long drive feels like an eternity because there are things I’m desperate to do with her. Relief finally comes when Mrs. Kessel drops us off at my house.
When she drives off, I wrap Paige in my arms and say, “I’ve finally got you to myself,” before I kiss her warm lips.
“How did I ever last all these years without you?” she asks after we reluctantly separate.
“No idea. I’m just glad we aren’t wasting any more time,” I say, taking her hand and leading her toward my BMW behind the garage—it looks ancient compared to the one back in North Carolina.
“Aren’t we going inside?” she asks as though I’d been looking forward to seeing either of my parental units.
“They said they’d be working, and McKenzie and Henry are at a friends. My mom said she’d leave the doors of the car unlocked and the key inside.”
“You don’t want to see your room or anything?”
“Not really.” I grip her around her waist. “I don’t want to have to be in that house any longer than necessary.”
“I understand, but it’s kind of sad, isn’t it?” She looks up at me with those big blue eyes like she wants to fix what is unfixable in my family.
I open the passenger door, grab a scraper and start to remove the snow from the front window. “My family isn’t like yours, Paige. Even if my mom or stepdad were here, they’d just be rushing around the house looking for something to do, then biding their time until they could go back to work or off on some weekend getaway.”
“That sucks,” she says, brushing some snow off with her bare hands.
I shrug, toss the scraper back in and keep the door open for Paige. With her in, I grab my carry-on, set it in the back seat, get in and crank the engine. I turn the heater on full blast to warm her up. “Should we go downtown?” I ask, putting the car in reverse. “You want to see Pamela or anyone?”
“Huh?” She looks like she’s silently fuming about my home life.
“You want to head downtown?” I repeat.
“Garrett’s back,” she says without hesitation.
I don’t speak, just drive toward town and have a sudden urge to hit something.
“If we go downtown, we might see him,” she says. “Maybe you just need to call him and talk to him, okay? I think it’s time.”
While it’s not something I’m looking forward to, she’s right. “I’m going to call him tomorrow and figure out when to meet,” I say, “but I wanted at least one day with you before all hell breaks loose.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Say what?”
“That all hell will break loose.”
“It might,” I tell her, figuring it’s better to expect the worst and not be disappointed.
She nods, not saying anything for a while before piping up. “Let’s go to the lake. Nobody will be there.”
The idea of going to the lake on a freezing cold day like today amuses me. “There won’t be any skinny dipping today, Paige, so if you want to see me naked, just say so.”
“Maybe later, but not too much later,” she says with a relaxed, suggestive flair.
“So what exactly are we going to be doing at good old Basin Lake?” I grip her thigh, thinking of a few things I’d like to do as we drive through downtown and head north.
“I don’t know… maybe just sit on the rocks, look out at the lake… you know, for peace and quiet?”
“The rocks are going to be covered in snow,” I remind her, only removing my hand from her thigh to shift gears.
“So we’ll brush it off and cover it with the emergency blanket you always keep in the trunk, if you didn’t take it out again?”
“No, it should be in there,” I say, “and if you want to go to the lake, we’ll go to the lake.”
At the next stop sign, I turn, hold her chin, look deep into those gorgeous eyes of hers and kiss her. She’s warm and sweet and serene, and I’d go just about anywhere she told me to.
PAIGE
Evan has to park by the main road because the gravel one is covered in snow, and he’s right to predict his BMW would just get stuck in it. He grabs the blanket out of the trunk, and we walk hand in hand with snow crunching beneath our boots for the quarter mile it takes to get to the beach that is covered in undisturbed white.
“It’s like a Christmas card,” I say. The lake is frozen over, and the sunlight peeking through gray fluffy clouds spreads over the ice, reflecting light along the shore, while the groves of trees nestled around the water have increa
sed two-fold in size with their snowy shells.
“Yeah, I’ve never seen it like this,” Evan says while he’s scraping snow off of one of the bigger boulders.
“Kind of makes me miss this place,” I say, always imagining my future being anywhere but in Basin Lake.
“The only way I’d ever miss this town is if you were still in it,” he says, spreading out the blanket. “Otherwise, I can take it or leave it.”
“What if we decided to come back?” I ask as he helps me up onto the boulder and then sits right next to me, putting his arm around me and pulling me close to his warm body.
“I’m not really sure what kind of job I could get here,” he says, “but if you wanted to be close to your family, I’d make the effort.”
“You would?” I look up at his handsome face, made pink by the cold.
“Of course I would,” he says with such a genuine smile that I know he’s telling me the truth.
The truth.
“Why did you lie about the scholarship?” I ask, not having planned to, not having wanted to ruin a moment. But I’m not sure there will ever be a right time to ask the question.
“Paige…” He shakes his head, and I’m not sure he’s ready to have this conversation.
“I need to hear it from you,” I say softly. “I need to know why.”
He sighs. “Like I said, you’ll hate me.”
“I won’t,” I promise. “Would you please just tell me?”
He loosens his grip on me and looks off into the distance. For several minutes, he just stares out at the frozen lake in front of us and says absolutely nothing.
“You know the reason I had to go to Well’s Creek now,” he says, turning back toward me. “My grades were seriously in the toilet, and I was at my dad’s mercy. And I hated that I’d be so far from you and Garrett, but I was planning on flying back… frequently. I said it was to see the games, but it was mostly just to see you.”
I smile knowing that was his plan.
“And you also now know that I’ve had feelings for you forever and that Garrett pretty much made it obvious to me you weren’t interested.”
“I do,” I say, though it’s still difficult to accept Garrett was capable of that. It’s another confrontation I’m not looking forward to.
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