by Aubrey Irons
Welcome home.
Chapter Two
Silas
Fucking tourists.
This town is exactly the same as it was. The same Main Street full of kitschy shops, the same Commercial Street down by the piers with the touristy shit, and the lobster roll joints, and the booth selling whale-watching tickets.
And of course, it’s summer, which means fucking yuppies and day-trippers choking the place up, out to see the “historic old port” of Shelter Harbor.
They can drink Guinness and wear fucking Celtics hats and see the house where Whitey Bulger allegedly killed someone back in the eighties. And they can slum it at a cheesy dive bars by piers and feel like a local, even though the actual locals wouldn’t be caught dead in those places, and are busy drinking Bud Lights up the hill at the actual dive bar for half the price.
I left this place for eight damn years, and even just being back a week, I can already see that it’s exactly the same.
Well, except now I’m a ghost. Eight years away from anywhere will do that, no matter who the hell you are.
Why the hell am I even back here.
Well, I know why I’m here. I’m here because the one person in this town who managed to remember I existed asked me to be here for the park dedication in honor of his dad.
The man that told me to leave all those years ago.
And as much as Jacob probably still hates me for the what happened back then, he’s still the closest thing to a father I ever had after my parents died. Certainly more than my uncle who watched me after.
Blood runs thick in Shelter Harbor.
Thick like these fucking tourists.
I growl as I shove past a middle-aged couple in matching fanny-packs with the Red Sox logo and t-shirts with a portrait of Benjamin Franklin and something about the fucking Freedom Trail on them.
Oh, you’ve been to Boston. Good thing you’ve decided to tell the entire fucking world about it.
I’m trying to make it to the steps to the lower docks to see old man Conlin about the rental, but a ferry’s just come in from Boston, vomiting tourists onto the pier. I’m muttering and grinding my teeth as I get shouldered by some idiot tourist for the tenth fucking time, when suddenly something catches my eyes.
Something that looks fantastic in tight black leggings, heels, and that sleeveless top.
I stop for a moment, temporarily ignoring the flood of dumb yuppies swarming past me as I lock eyes on the girl with the soft golden hair tossed back over one shoulder.
She is every inch exactly the type of girl I make a point of avoiding. Fancy clothes, ridiculously nonfunctional shoes, hair that she’s clearly spent time on, and flashy, bangled jewelry.
And yet, I’m still looking at her, seemingly unable to look away.
She’s struggling with something, and I realize after a second that it’s her luggage, caught on the ramp from the ferry.
Her absurdly large, expensive looking baggage.
It looks genuinely stuck, too. She’s kicking it with her high-heeled toes, and yanking on the handle of the bag that doesn’t look like its going anywhere, all the while with her ear on her shoulder, yapping into her cell phone.
God, its like every tourist cliché I’ve ever seen rolled into one. Well, minus the fanny pack.
I roll my eyes at the city girl here with the rest of these stupid people, but for some reason, something stops me.
After all, I am here to try and at least start the process of making up for the crimes I’ve done and the hurt I’ve caused, right? I mean, that’s the entire reason I let Rowan talk me into coming to his father’s dedication ceremony.
I groan, glancing at the thinning crowd, and the steps to the lower docks that I can actually see now.
Oh, fuck it.
Might as well help.
I sigh as I move my way through the last of the crowds pouring up the pier from the ferry, until I’m right behind her.
“Yep, uh-huh, yeah. Nope, that shouldn’t be a problem.”
I roll my eyes again as she yaps into her phone, yanking fruitless on the suitcase, which I can now see has a wheel wedged into the side of the ramp.
“Hey, you need a hand?”
“Yeah, no, we can- hang on.” She half turns, flashing a frown I can’t even half-see behind those huge Hollywood sunglasses she’s wearing.
Of course she is.
“I’m good, thanks.”
She turns her back to me again as she kicks at the suitcase. “What? No, just some local.”
I frown, not sure if I should be more offended at being called “some local” like that, or at the fact that I’m not a fucking local. Not anymore.
“Look, do you want a hand with that bag?” I growl, stepping towards her.
“Ugh, hang on,” she mutters into the phone again. “I’m fine, okay?”
She puts her full weight into the handle as her body strains.
“Oh, this is fucking ridiculous, just let me get that for-”
“I said, I’ve got-”
I want to say it happens in slow motion, but it honestly happens so fast I don’t even have time to blink.
The handle on her fancy luggage gives way with a snapping sound, and before I can even move, her whole arm jerks back with the full weight of her pulling.
Right into my face.
I go sprawling backwards, knocked right off my feet onto my fucking ass right there on the pier, my hands clutching the elbow-mark on my cheek right below my eye.
“Oh shit!” she screams, gasping as she whirls. “Oh my God!” She drops to her knees right next to me. “Fuck, are you-”
And right then, she stops.
Because right then, two things happen. I pull my hands away from my face, because that tone in her voice has just changed, and she pulls her ridiculous sunglasses off.
And right then, we both know.
Oh what the fuck.
Somehow, I remember to breathe.
Somehow, I remember to grin as I look up into the face I haven’t seen in eight fucking years.
Ivy Hammond.
The girl I left behind.
The girl I’ve never managed to get out of my head or my damn heart.
Oh, right…
And the girl who’s my wife.
Chapter Three
Ivy
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
I can feel the pier itself swaying beneath my feet, my breath tight in my throat as I stare into the eyes of the last man on earth I ever expected to see again. Not outside my own head that is.
“I live here.” His voice is deeper than it was; older, more mature.
It has the same effect on me now that it did eight years before though. The same shivering tingle up my spine, the same tightness in my throat.
I quickly bury those thoughts deep as I frown at him. “No, you don’t.”
He grins, a flash of that gorgeous, roguish and cocky smile that hasn’t changed one bit from the boy I knew all those years before. The stubble on his jaw is a bit darker, the lines around his eyes a little deeper, but it’s like time and age have conspired to make him even hotter - even more attractive than he was even back then.
It’s unfair that he looks so good this many years later.
It’s unfair that he looks this good after what he pulled.
After he left.
He eyes me. “Well, do you?”
“Do I what,” I hiss, still blinking, still trying to process the ghost from my past standing in the flesh in front of me.
“Live here.”
“No,” I grumble.
“Well how do you know if I do, then?”
He’s goading me. Eight years after walking out of my life with my heart in his hand, he’s still teasing and needling me like we’re still kids - like nothing’s happened at all.
Like he didn’t destroy me when he walked away and never looked back.
This isn’t happening. I shake my head, sucking in a deep breath of ai
r as I try and steady myself. This is the double vodka I had on the ferry, not reality. I’m not actually standing in front of Silas Hart on the piers of Shelter Harbor.
This is a hallucination brought on by being home. It’s an apparition, and I’m eighteen again, and standing on the pier with those same piercing blue eyes looking right into my heart, knowing everything I’m thinking and letting me fall right into them, however wrong.
But that was eight years ago.
That was before he broke my heart.
“I didn’t think you were coming in until tomorrow.”
I narrow my eyes at him, focusing on his words. “You knew I was coming home?”
He shrugs, bringing a hand up and raking his fingers through his mop of hair. “Well, yeah.”
He says it offhandedly, as if of course he’d know I was going to be here. As if he’d know anything at all about me eight years after walking away.
“How,” I spit out.
Silas grins. “Think I’m supposed to know when my wife is going to be in town-”
“Do not say that!” I snap, the heat rising in my cheeks as I jab a finger at him.
“Why? It’s true.”
I can feel my hands clench into fists. “It is not-”
“Oh I distinctly remember a priest and something about ‘having and holding’, and then there was this bit with the rings-”
“Shut up, just stop talking,” I hiss, my eyes darting around as if someone might overhear.
“You gave up that title when you left me.”
“I didn’t-” his eyes tighten before he scowls right back. “Didn’t take you too long to forget you had a husband, by the way.”
“Because I didn’t,” I snap back. “I had a criminal.”
“You knew exactly what I was when you said yes, sweetheart.”
I roll my eyes. “Nice, Silas.” I scowl at him, still standing there grinning at me, as if that fucking charm of his is going to fix this.
“I should have sued you for abandonment years ago.”
He barks out a laugh. “Never too late, darlin.”
I tighten my mouth, my gaze narrowed at him. “And by the way, were you just hitting on me?”
He snorts. “I was, before I realized who it was.”
“Oh fuck you,” I spit.
“I didn’t recognize you, okay?” He shrugs again, raking his fingers across that distractingly attractive shadow on his cheek. “You got hot.”
My eyes go wide as I feel the indignation boil up inside. “Excuse me?!”
Silas laughs. “No-no, hang on, that came out wrong. I mean you got hotter.”
“Keep digging, douchebag.”
His eyes flare for a second as they hold my gaze, his lips tight.
“You changed your hair.”
Yeah and my direction in life, and everything else about me since you walked away from us.
But I don’t answer him. Instead, we stand in silence right there on the pier of our hometown, right where we used to stand staring at each other under totally different circumstances. Under totally different stars.
My mind reels, trying to take in this man from my past - the man from my past. And I don’t know whether I want to beg him to kiss me the way he used to where my damn toes would curl, or if I want to shove him right off the end of the pier.
Or worse.
“You didn’t answer the question,” I finally say quietly.
“Which one is that.”
I suppress the growl in my throat. “What are you doing here, Silas.”
He shrugs. “It’s not every day Jacob Hammond gets a park named after him.”
I stare at him. “You came back for my dad?”
“Rowan invited me.”
I make a mental note to bury my older brother. Alive. In a very deep hole.
God he’s more attractive than he ever was. The boy I once loved became a man over the last eight years. He’s bigger all over - thicker chest, broader shoulders, more muscle on his arms. The smattering of teenage tattoos from when we were young have grown to full sleeves, and the smooth chin I used to kiss is now scuffed with a five o’clock shadow that was never there when we were young.
When I was eighteen and madly in love.
When we got married.
When he left.
“I thought you were in Ireland.”
I say it quietly. I don’t actually know that he was, just rumors and conversations overheard. I never wanted to know for sure where he’d gone off to, because it made it easier to stomach that he’d left. He wasn’t somewhere else –somewhere tangible - instead of next to me, he’d just disappeared.
Silas takes a deep breath, his eyes locked on mine. “I was.” His eyes search my face, though I don’t know what he could possibly be looking for. “Dublin.”
“For eight fucking years?” My voice is shrill, and I hate that it is.
“There-” he stops himself and shakes his head. “Yes.”
I’ve gone over a reunion with Silas Hart in my head nine thousand times in my head over the years. Every conceivable scenario, every variable outcome, every possible conversation. At first, they were silly, stupid fantasies - he’d tell me how he’d been kidnapped, or thrown into a secret jail for years, and how the thought of me alone had kept him alive.
God I was an idiot back then.
But they soon turned more real - more grounded in the reality that the man I’d loved and given my heart to had willingly walked away and stolen it with him. And then my dream-conversations changed to me being this confident, self-sustained woman who casually laughs at the silly boy from her past who shows back up looking for forgiveness.
And yet here I am, letting every insecurity come pouring out like the same silly little princess who married the thief and thought there’d be a happily ever after somehow.
“Ivy-”
“Do they have fucking email in Ireland, Silas? Phones?”
He sighs as he drops his gaze to the boardwalk beneath our feet, the ocean sloshing gently beneath it.
“Well, this is going well,” he finally says, looking up with that grin on his face and that token glimmer in his eye.
“Don’t,” I say testily.
“Don’t what.”
“Don’t try and be funny, or cute-”
“Oh?” He grins at me. “So you do at least still think I’m cu-”
“Silas.” My eyes flash, his name almost choking in my throat. “Stop, please.” I shake my head. “I’m not that girl anymore.”
The grin drops from his face as his sea-blue eyes narrow in on mine. “And what girl is that, Ivy.”
“The girl you used to know,” I say, summing every ounce of firmness from deep inside and keeping my voice even.
“I’m not anything like that girl anymore.”
He shakes his head, a pained look creeping into his eyes. “Ivy-”
“That girl died when you left her.”
I whirl before he can answer, walking away down the pier as the echoing sound of the wheels of my suitcase follow in my shadow.
Chapter Four
Silas
I blink as she storms away, that newly golden hair of hers blowing out behind her and that silly suitcase banging across the boardwalk in her wake.
“Wait a second. Ivy-” I jog after her, snagging her arm and pulling her back around.
“Hang on a sec-”
“I did, Silas!”
When she whirls on me, there’s fire and a pain in her eyes that I’ve never seen before.
It’s a look that kills me.
I never had to see the rage. I could picture the sadness and the anger, about a million fucking times over the years.
But I never got to see it right there in front of my face.
Not after I left.
Not after the night that changed fucking everything. The night that shattered the perfection I’d held in my hands for a brief second before it all streamed away like the blood and rain of that night. I
never had to look her in the eyes after that last time in the hospital lobby.
I left because of the heat, but also because I couldn’t bear to hurt the only real family I’d ever known any more than I had after that night. It was bad enough that I was dating Jacob Hammond’s daughter - me, the wrong guy from the wrong side of town with one of his princesses.
But after that night, and the crash, and Rowan?
Yeah.
I was nineteen, and stupid, and afraid. And I left the girl I loved more than anything in this world, three days after marrying her.
That was eight fucking years ago.
‘Course, the pain of leaving was bad enough, but seeing how fast she moved on hurt even more. Even with the letter I left her, a month after I’d gone, she was off at college like she’d planned. Three months after that, she was with someone new.
She never did write me back.
So I stayed away, and I buried myself in the life I always said I’d never dive into. Five fucking years pulling jobs for Declan’s people in Dublin, earning a reputation as the best lift-man in town.
I’d only thought about coming back about a hundred times, but the only things worth coming back for were her, and the rest of the Hammond family. The rest of them had written me off.
She’d moved on.
And just like that, I’d lost anything that would have brought me back, until now.
And now here I am, in the town I left fucking years ago, in front of the girl whose heart I broke.
The girl who shattered mine.
Goddamn she looks amazing. I mean, the hair, the makeup, the clothes - they might not quite be the “her” I knew, but damn does she look good. Besides, the girl I knew stopped being the girl I “knew” the minute I left.
I know who she is these days. Yes, Ireland has the fucking internet. I know about the seminars, the web series, the cookbook, the YouTube channel, the Instagram account full of fucking all-juice diets and holiday crafts and goddamn endless pictures of her looking just this side of sexy posing all over the damn place in yoga gear.