“After what you did?” She flashed blue eyes in a flirtatious manner. “You owe me so much more than that.”
“No, Gayle. I really don’t.” He left her standing there, confused. He headed toward the exit to get some fresh air. The moment he stepped out of the building, he almost bumped into Ashley.
“What the heck!” she said. A moment later, recognizing him, her furious expression softened. “What are you doing here?”
Since everyone in the building knew why he’d come here today, Scott smiled at the obvious question, which revealed that Ashley felt somewhat uncomfortable in his presence. He couldn’t have asked for a better reaction. “How about you?”
“I was… helping out in the kitchen.”
“Did they need help burning a bag of microwave popcorn?” he asked, grinning while recalling how she’d done just that so many years ago.
A hint of a shy smile appeared. “I better go.” She went to grab hold of the door.
Scott moved to give her access, but he veered in the wrong direction, and she ended up grabbing his right hip instead of the door handle. “Kind of forward, don’t you think?” he asked.
“We haven’t seen each other in fifteen years, and you’re already trying to tear my clothes off.”
“Oh, please,” she said, removing her hand. “You did that on purpose. But your self-delusion doesn’t surprise me.”
“Living in LA with all those fake Hollywood types? Maybe that’s why you’re back in town. You wanted to see a real performance.”
She laughed. “Oh, you think I came to see you on stage?”
“It can’t be a coincidence.”
“Really? Because I’m invited home for the holidays every Thanksgiving and Christmas. And until now, I’ve been too busy working to take time off.”
“But you heard I was performing, so you had extra incentive to visit. I get it. No need to make up excuses.”
A smile broke free of her aggravation. “Come to think of it, you’re right. I heard you were performing a few hours ago, and I raced to the airport, waved my credit card at the airline employees, paid $1,000 to get a ticket then told the pilot to make it to Chicago pronto. I believe my actual words were, “‘Scott Mettle’s performing tonight. Do you know what that means?’ And because everyone knows the great Scott Mettle, the pilot disregarded the normal boarding procedures.” She scratched her temple, looking surprised. “I think he stranded a couple passengers at LAX, but could you blame him? One of the greatest musicians on the planet was playing a gig at a… restaurant.”
“Smart girl.” Scott enjoyed the melodramatic story and the frazzled way she told it. But he had to admit that the putdown stung. Yet, everybody stumbled in their career at one point or another. But nothing would stop him from clawing his way to the top.
She rolled her eyes, looking annoyed that he hadn’t created a similar long-winded response. “You’re as smug as ever.”
“You didn’t seem to feel that way back when. As I recall, you liked my confidence.”
“But you’ve turned into an arrogant ass.”
“It takes one to know one.”
Her mouth hung open like a drawbridge. “You just insulted me.”
“I did not. Unless you allowed me to.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, wait. You can’t have poor self-esteem. You’re an actress.”
“Correction: an actress with an MBA from Berkley, who knows when someone’s insulting her. But I’m not surprised that you’re hiding behind words. You do it so you won’t have to admit the truth in real life.”
“And what truth is that?” he asked, curious to hear how Ashley summed up his existence.
She looked into his eyes without judgment. And kept looking. Without saying a word.
And in those few moments, Scott saw the same tenderness he’d loved so much as a teenager. The kind that never failed to cut through a bad mood. The kind that made it known she’d cared more about him than anyone else in the world. That one expression contained so much empathy and power that whenever he saw it as a kid, he looked elsewhere and changed the subject to avoid telling her more than she needed to hear about his home life. And that same tactic rushed back to him quicker than he thought possible.
“So,” he said, “why did you really come back?”
“My show is on hiatus, and Kelsey needed help. So here I am.”
He didn’t expect an honest answer, and it persuaded him to respond likewise. “Maybe you aren’t so bad, after all.”
“Who said I was?”
Based on the way she’d blown him off, he chuckled at that absurd question. But she’d once been a great girlfriend: kind, considerate, thoughtful, affectionate, and selfless. Looking back, she’d been the perfect girlfriend. Of course, he probably felt that way because they’d only dated for a month. It left little time to discover her eccentricities and flaws. Nevertheless, he assumed that explained why it took him so long to get over her.
“Same goes for you, Scott. A long time ago, you were one of the good ones.” Her eyes misted up, and immediately upon recognizing that, she lowered her gaze, obliterating the sentiment that had come over her.
With their verbal sparring, Scott hadn’t expected her to get choked-up without warning. And instinct made him reach out to put an arm around her shoulder, but Ashley took that exact moment to shake her head.
Knowing that she would lift her gaze to meet his a second later, he retracted his arm and pretended to scratch the back of his head. Relieved that she hadn’t caught the affectionate gesture, Scott dropped his hand again.
“Well, it’s been a blast,” Ashley said, her eyes now void of moisture. Rather than head back into the restaurant, she turned around and walked toward the exit.
“Hey,” Scott said, shocked that some part of him wanted to console her.
Ashley took her time rotating toward him. When she faced him again, her downcast expression had disappeared. She now looked free of emotion.
“It was good to see you.”
She nodded, expressing that same sentiment without saying it, then spun around and followed the last few customers out the door.
Watching her go, Scott felt something deep in his chest ache. Residue from a relationship that should have taken his life in a different direction. It caught him off guard. After all, he no longer loved her. But he wasn’t stupid enough to believe that feelings that had clutched his heart with such devotion could ever dim entirely.
And although he felt a little melancholy from having revisited his past (and dredging up feelings that had tortured him for so long), he appreciated bumping into Ashley again.
That’s when a horrifying thought occurred to him: if he truly had no feelings for Ashley, he wouldn’t have given her a second thought. A person who reflected on his feelings only did so to convince himself that he’d moved on. So why was he still thinking about her?
CHAPTER NINE
Ashley spent the next hour and a half driving around, reviving memories from their relationship, unable to detach long-dead hopes and dreams from reaching her heartstrings. Then she drove into Bedford Falls and couldn’t believe how little the town she’d grown up in had changed over the past fifteen years.
Of course, new franchises had set up shop: restaurants, a bowling alley, a golf range, etc. But middle school kids still joked around outside an old ice cream shop, which seemed odd since the clock would strike midnight in another hour; couples poured out of the ’20s-era movie theater, holding hands as they strolled along the sidewalks under lamplight; and teenagers cruised around town in shiny new cars looking for something to do.
Having spent the last decade and a half in LA, Ashley felt as if she’d stepped through a portal that flung her backwards in time. She stared at the scene from the perspective of an outsider who had escaped this hum-drum existence and couldn’t wait to return to LA.
The moment she plugged her brother’s key into the lock on his front door, the door jerked open. Because she
held two somewhat heavy suitcases, Ashley almost fell into the threshold from the force.
Her brother, Alex, stood before her. He grabbed both suitcases from her hands. A large vein stuck out on his temple. “You just took off,” he said. “You just left Kelsey and Mom.”
“It’s great to see you, too, little brother.”
He disappeared around a corner. “You knew Mom needed your help. Where’d you go?”
“I couldn’t stay.” Ashley walked past an enormous flat screen TV, about to follow her brother, but thought better of it. As his guest, she didn’t want to impose. He might want to give her a tour. She also thought it best not to mention her run-in with Scott. Alex and her ex were on good terms. She didn’t want to mess up their friendship.
Then she remembered what could possibly damage (or even ruin) her career. “Do you know a reporter named Gayle Hart?”
Silence met her. That seemed ominous. The idea that a small-town reporter might destroy everything she’d worked for over the past fifteen years made her more than a little uneasy.
Alex placed her luggage against the wall in a den and came back to greet her. “Did you see her?” Anger flashed in his eyes. “Was Gayle at the restaurant?”
Ashley nodded. “She acted friendly and because I felt kind of loopy, I told her something I shouldn’t have.” Ashley still felt a little off. She missed dinner, and other than a few glasses of water to swallow a Valium when she reached O’Hare and a second one a few hours later…
No wonder why she had a difficult time concentrating. And having almost nothing in her stomach enhanced the effects of her medication.
“What happened?”
His panicked expression concerned Ashley. Based on his questions, she got the impression that the reporter had also targeted her siblings. “Why? Did she hurt you? Or Kelsey?”
“She almost sidelined my promotion. And after that, she reported that Kelsey’s employees quit by giving readers the idea that Kelsey was unethical.”
Would Gayle have reacted that way if Ashley hadn’t “stolen” the guy she’d longed for… way back in high school? It sounded ridiculous; a grown woman seeking retribution against Ashley and her family for dashing her hopes fifteen years earlier. Then again, a mature person wouldn’t consider wreaking vengeance on anyone. An adult would let go of the past. But it seemed Gayle didn’t take Adult Relations 101 in college, although she wanted to fake it with Scott before she graduated from high school.
“It seemed like she wanted to hurt Kelsey,” Alex said. “Like she took pleasure from it.”
Ashley tried not to blame herself for Gayle’s vindictiveness, but how couldn’t she? If it hadn’t been for her, Gayle may not have exploited Kelsey’s poor fortune. And although Kelsey would have still lost those employees, Ashley bet that information wouldn’t have hit the mainstream for quite some time–if Gayle hadn’t reported that information.
The residents of Bedford Falls wouldn’t purposely hurt their fellow neighbors. If the papers discovered that employees at Kelsey’s establishments left her employ to work elsewhere, no one would have considered that very newsworthy. But based on the way Kelsey rushed around ensuring everything went smoothly tonight at The Witching Hour, Gayle must have done her best to dramatize the bad news.
“What did you two talk about?” asked Alex.
Ashley had a difficult time meeting his gaze, so she brushed past him, hurrying for the exit. But as she came upon the front door, she reached for the doorknob at the same moment a spell of dizziness overwhelmed her. Missing the knob, thrown off balance, she fell backward.
“Whoa!” her brother said, cradling her in his arms and hoisting her back up. “Way too much to drink, huh?”
“No,” she said, placing a hand to her forehead, startled by the wave of unsteadiness that clutched her. She felt Alex’s arm around her shoulder as he led her to a brown leather sofa. “But Hart thought I was drunk.” She fell in a swoop on the couch and lay against the seat cushions. “That was before I told her that my character is getting killed off.”
“They can’t kill you off. You’re the best thing on that show.”
“I’m a thing, huh? Exactly what every thirty-something woman wants to hear.”
“I’m just saying, older actresses always complain about never getting any good parts, but—”
“And the compliments keep coming!”
“So will you get eaten by a zombie? Bitten by a vampire? Ripped to shreds by a werewolf?”
“I have no clue,” Ashley said. “But the producers wanted to save this plot point for February sweeps, although I get the impression the scene has already been filmed.” Nowadays with CGI, she didn’t even need to visit the set in order to experience her untimely death on the show. “If they get word of this, they’ll have to do damage control. And people in the industry might have a hard time trusting me.”
“Well, you can bet that Gayle will do her best to skewer you.”
“That’s something to look forward to.”
“Consider it an early Christmas gift.” He sat down beside her. “But seriously, you’re about her age. Did you go to school with her?”
Ashley didn’t like where this was going. But she wasn’t going to lie. “Yes. I think we graduated the same year.”
“So you knew her?”
“We weren’t friends, but I knew who she was.”
“Any idea why she has it in for us?”
“I found out tonight that she, sort of, had a thing for Scott. And she blamed me for getting in her way.”
“There has to be more to it than that.”
“Well, she pined away for a couple years. Then I apparently stole him from her.”
“So what? That happens to everybody. I mean, get over it.”
“Well, apparently she didn’t.”
“Let me know if I can do anything to help,” he said.
“You know anyone in the mob? They could swing by her place with a couple hammers.”
“To bust her knees?”
“Come on, I’m not that mean. They’d just smash her fingers. That way, she won’t be able to type up her story.”
Alex smiled, shaking his head.
She pulled out her phone and pretended to hit a number on her keypad. “Yes, hello, operator. Could you give me the directory of Mafia associates in Bedford Falls? Yes, I realize that they don’t just give out their numbers to just anyone. But tell them Ashley Lawford, former resident of Bedford Falls and soon to be unemployed actress, would be grateful.”
“This from a woman who changes her phone number every month or so,” said Alex.
“It’s precautionary. I’m not talking about fans harassing you, but other people do: advertisers and that sort of thing. But I’ve never given a false name at a hotel. I’m not popular enough. If someone said, ‘Hey, isn’t that Ashley Lawford?’ The person next to them would say, ‘Who?’”
Alex sat down next to her. “It’s good to see you… finally!”
She grinned, but if she said anything, her brother would ask her why she left.
“Why did you leave without telling anyone? Just leaving a note on the kitchen table? That’s really cold.”
It seemed she didn’t even need to say a word before her family began seeking an explanation. Then again, what did she expect? “I didn’t have a drink tonight,” Ashley said. “I accidentally took two tablets of Valium with only an hour in between. I’m dizzy and kind of nauseous and a little jetlagged. Anything I tell you either won’t satisfy every question you have or it won’t even make sense. Can we do this later?”
“I’ve waited fifteen years,” said Alex, “so what’s another day.” He got up from the couch to leave, but thought better of it and faced her, resting his palms on his hips. “On second thought, I’m not going to do this later. I never saw Dad cry before. And I haven’t seen him cry since the morning you left. But that’s all Mom did. For weeks. She cried at dinner. She cried at the grocery store. And she cried on her birthday.
Her birthday, Ashley. She tried to be strong, but the tears kept coming. You left us.”
A deluge of guilt made Ashley’s chest tighten. Her throat constricted. She was shocked to hear that leaving made her father cry. Like Alex, she’d never even seen her dad tear up. The strong, silent type, her father only let his emotions betray him when his tone wavered, which she’d heard only a handful of times. She tried to ignore the onslaught of emotions that rushed to the surface but failed… until she considered what Alex said about their mother.
Ashley opened her mouth to speak, but feeling her voice about to quake, she steadied her nerves by slipping her fingers between the seat cushions and clenching her hamstrings. “Mom was ashamed. She cried from guilt.”
Alex snapped his head back as though struck. “Why? What did she do?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
“But there’s two sides to every story. So I’m asking you.”
“That she didn’t tell you… tells me that I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Huh? What does that mean?”
Ashley got to her feet. Aggravation cleared away most of the effects of inadvertently taking too much anxiety medication. “It means that she should’ve told you the truth within days of getting the note I left. That she didn’t, tells me one of two things. Either she believes that she handled the situation the right way, or she was ashamed of how she treated me.” She reconsidered. “Or maybe both.”
Alex stared at her, confused. “But—”
She retraced her steps to Alex’s bedroom.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving.”
“What? You just got here.”
“And now it’s time for me to leave.” She grabbed both suitcases, walked past Alex who’d joined her in the hallway, and headed towards the front door.
“Might as well stick with what you’re good at.”
“You deserve the truth from Mom and Dad. Not me.”
“They wouldn’t tell us until they cleared things up with you. It’s been fifteen years, and Kelsey and I are still in the dark.”
“Now you know how I felt.” Then she opened the door and walked out on him. Again.
One More Chance (A Bedford Falls Novel Book 3) Page 14