Guarded Dreams

by L. J. Evans

“He has his own muscles, Hot Shot,” she tossed out.

  I stepped closer so that she was forced to look up at me. “But I have something he doesn’t.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Training.”

  She pushed away from me, stalking toward the subway stairs with an energy that did remind me of the girl who sat on rails and rocks and tabletops.

  “What time on Tuesday?” I hollered after her.

  “Use your training to figure it out.” And she was gone. Down the stairs. I could have chased her—part of me wanted to chase her—but I didn’t.

  I looked around, the world that had turned bright with colors dull again. But I headed for the apartment, knowing that Mac Truck were waiting for me. Pissed. Wanting answers that I wasn’t sure I could give.

  ♫ ♫ ♫

  The TV was on when I walked in. Another Yankee game on YES. Truck had always preferred baseball while Mac had been all about football. It wasn’t even noon, and they both had beers in hand—hair of the dog.

  I wasn’t hungover. I should have been after the amount I’d drank last night, but seeing Ava had sobered me up more than ice down the spine.

  They both raised furrowed brows at me.

  I had pizza in my hand, and that won me some points. I set it down on the kitchen counter, and they both followed, grabbed plates, filled them up, and returned to the TV.

  We’d always been a silent group. Military training and quiet mess halls. We were used to it. But this quiet wasn’t really quiet at all. This quiet was screaming annoyance. No…not annoyance…anger.

  I grabbed my own plate, filled it up, and joined them.

  “She didn’t know,” I told them to the unasked question.

  “You say that as if it’s justification. She knew he’d react the way he did, and yet she stayed with us in the first place,” Truck slammed out with a mouthful of food.

  “It was my fault she stayed,” I told them again, like I had a million times when Abrams had started cracking down on us.

  “It wasn’t. You didn’t know him. She did.” Truck was always the first one to defend me and throw her under the bus, even when he was pissed at me.

  I lost my appetite and put my plate on the coffee table. “When are you going to stop blaming her and blame the real asshole—Abrams? Do you think he didn’t punish her as much as he punished us?”

  “Me!” Truck said, standing suddenly, pizza and beer flying. “Me! I’m the only one who got fucking screwed in this goddamn scenario. If I was going to get screwed, it would have been at least worth it to have screwed her first.”

  That pissed me off, and I was in front of him in two strides, shoving him in the chest. “What?”

  Mac stood, getting between us. “You know he didn’t mean it like that, Wyatt.”

  “Did you even fucking see her last night?” I demanded. Truck shoved Mac away, grabbing for the mess of beer and pizza.

  “Why the hell would I stay and look at the person who was responsible for destroying my life?”

  “Abrams was the one who tried to ruin you, not her. Don’t blame her. She’s hardly a shadow of the girl we met. I’d pretty much say he ruined her life way more than he ruined yours.” I winced even as I heard myself say it. Truck’s life had been pretty fucked up.

  “Bullshit. She’s here, singing her fucking songs, prancing around onstage. She doesn’t seem to have had even one dream squashed.”

  “Then you didn’t really see her.”

  “But you did?” Truck demanded. “Captain Dickwad always sees the truth before any of us. Must be nice to have twenty-twenty vision, asshole.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Mac pounded out. “Both of you, back to your corners.”

  I couldn’t eat. I took my plate into the kitchen and threw it into the fridge, eyeing the beers. I didn’t grab one because I had to be on duty tomorrow. I didn’t want to be hungover. Couldn’t afford to be hungover. Truck couldn’t either, but there was no way I could remind him of that now with the air between us so sour.

  I leaned against the wall between the kitchen and the living area, watching Truck drink.

  “She was heartbroken when I told her what happened.”

  “Why the hell would you even tell her? Why would you go see her at all?” Truck asked, glaring at me.

  This was the real question, right? I couldn’t tell Truck the answer any more than I had been able to tell Ava herself. Because my life was gray without her. It lacked color. It lacked that very word, life.

  I needed a new dream. I needed her.

  “Just come talk to her,” I said quietly, wanting my best friend to see the woman who was stealing my heart the same way I did. Not as some fucking meteor that had burst in and caused wreckage, but as a star that had fallen and needed help getting back into the sky where it belonged.

  “No fuckin’ way,” he growled.

  “Just once. Just so she can apologize. She wants to. To both of you,” I told them.

  “Words are easy,” Truck said.

  “You’re being an ass,” Mac told him, taking my side when he rarely took my side. Both of us sided with Truck more than each other. It had always been Mac’s and my way. Especially after that summer, once Truck had gotten the worst of it and turned inside himself.

  “What?” Truck was as surprised as I was.

  “Shit happened. She couldn’t have known that her dad would take it out on you. He got even more pissed when his demerits didn’t get the action he wanted. You were just the stupid ass who waited until senior year to take his goddamn class to begin with. Circumstance screwed you. He screwed you. But she never screwed you. You saw her. You knew her. She wouldn’t have hurt any of us on purpose. She was running for her own life. Think about what it must have been like living with Professor Dick for nineteen years.” Mac died off and slammed his way into the kitchen to get himself another beer. He was going to be in New York with them till Wednesday. He was going to be stuck in the middle of this.

  I was grateful he was there, playing referee when it was usually my job to do that. To be the calm in the storm and not the instigator.

  Truck took a swig of his beer before realizing the bottle was empty. Mac came back and handed him another one.

  “Look. You’ve had four years to sulk. To throw tantrums. You deserved it. You were handed one hell of a shitty deal. But you’re here, doing something you love, getting to hang out with Captain Prude every day. You’re in New York where there are approximately a million single, beautiful ladies to hit on, and you are back on track. Maybe it’s time to let the anger go and move on.”

  I looked at Truck to see his reaction. Truck looked at me, and we shared a smirk at Mac being all grown up and giving Truck a lecture. It was so opposite of what we knew of him. We both started laughing. Hard. It was good. Mac didn’t appreciate it.

  “You’re both asswipes.”

  “Studying up on your politics for a run for office, Mac?” I said between full belly laughs that felt good after all the intensity of my morning. Ava. Truck. Worry.

  “What if I am?” he asked, sitting down in the chair he’d vacated.

  “You’re too young to run for office,” Truck said with a smirk that was so good to see when it was so rare these days.

  “Technically, that’s not true, depending on the office I want, but you’re right. I need to burn some more wild oats, find a wife, kick out a kid or two, and look way more settled and responsible. But someday.”

  “We need to get you stationed away from fucking D.C. before you go all sleaze on us,” Truck said, shaking his head in disgust.

  “Go all sleaze? Hasn’t he always been sleaze?” I asked.

  “Go fuck yourselves,” Mac said, but he was smiling too.

  I was grateful, again, to have these two men in my life. Men who had become family. Whose families were my family. Who both considered my mom a second mom—Truck more than Mac. It was good. To have family I belonged to. I als
o knew now that I was missing something in my life. And I wanted to go after that something with the same dedicated focus I’d had when I had gone after the dream of becoming part of the Coast Guard. I just wasn’t sure that Ava would let me.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ava

  LOVE IS LOOKING FOR YOU

  “Maybe you're just jaded

  from some nobody's unforgotten words

  Maybe you're just faded a little gray from every time

  That you've been hurt.”

  —Performed by Miranda Lambert

  —Written by Lambert

  I had a small reprieve between my meeting Eli at the coffee shop, Brady’s and my classes, and his time in the studio before he could make it back to our dorm to harass me about Eli. To ask whether I was going to see him again.

  I was. Because there was no way that Eli wasn’t showing up at the Pink Poodle on Tuesday. I knew enough about him to know that he did what he said he would—except for calling me when my dad had screwed them all over.

  I was riddled with guilt for what my dad had done to them. The worst of it to Truck. The nicest, most easygoing guy you could ever meet. It made me want to cry tears that I rarely cried, even after years away from my father.

  I hadn’t cried when he’d tried to take my entire inheritance from me. Even when he’d said the same shitty words he’d been saying to me for years outside the courtroom where he’d lost and I’d won. My dad was never a good loser. Hated losing. He’d made his own bed, though, and I wasn’t opposed to him wallowing in it for a long time.

  He was lucky that he had a house to wallow in. I could have taken it all. Everything had been in my name, in the trust’s name. Every last dime he’d spent since my mom died had been done with the trust’s money. By the time he’d realized I was never going to be the subdued, obedient daughter he had fought to make me, he’d only been able to save some of it.

  I hadn’t wanted his house in Galveston. Or his car. Or the money he’d stuffed offshore.

  I did want the house in Rockport.

  In so many ways, it felt like that moment of time that Eli and I had had in Rockport was a bubble of fiction. It was a fleeting memory. But that memory… it had been one of the best memories of my entire life. There had been moments with Jenna that were like that… beautiful too. It was just that Jenna wasn’t a memory. She was in my life every day, for real.

  I picked up my phone and hit the call button.

  “Ava?” Jenna answered with surprise. We usually texted during the week, saving our calls for Saturdays when we both had more time.

  “Girlie,” I sighed and laid back on my bed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I said one word; how can you know anything’s wrong?”

  “First, you’re calling me at my lunch time when you know I’m always with Colby at lunch. Second, you never call during the week. And third, it was mostly in your tone.”

  “I saw him.”

  “You’re going to have to be more—holy shit! Eli, him?”

  I wasn’t surprised that she caught on so quickly. In the four years since Rockport, Jenna and I had gone around and around about Eli multiple times. At first, it was because she wanted me to text him or call him. Later, it was because she knew that I compared every other guy who came into my life to him, and she said it wasn’t healthy.

  “Yep,” I responded.

  “What’s he doing in New York?”

  “I guess he’s stationed here.”

  “And you just happened to bump into him?”

  I told her about the bar, and the coffee shop, and Truck. She said all the right things that a friend is supposed to say and then she got quiet.

  “So?” I asked.

  “I don’t understand why there is a so,” Jenna said with laughter in her voice.

  “I don’t know if I can do this again.”

  “What again? There was never anything to start. So, you kissed him once upon a time. So, you’ve only been saving yourself for him for years. So, he’s the only guy that ever made you go all girl crazy. So, just do it already!”

  “You’re no better than Brady. This isn’t about sex or not having sex.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure that Brady thinks it’s all about sex,” she snickered. Every time she’d come to see me, Brady had tried to make it with her, even though she was engaged to Colby and their wedding was scheduled for July.

  She read my silence.

  “What is it that really scares you most? The thought of actually allowing someone to love you, or the thought of loving someone and not knowing if they’ll stay?”

  “I spent four days with him four years ago. He kissed me once in the ocean at sunset when I was a stupid teenager. No one is talking love.”

  “You talk a good talk, but you know that if you’d stayed, your heart would have been a goner. You said it yourself. Now, you’re so protective of that little body part that I worry you’ll forget how to use it, and you’ll die a virgin, all alone, surrounded by ferrets or something.”

  “Ferrets, really?”

  “Well, cat lady seems way too stereotypical for you,” she said. When I just huffed a response, she continued. “Chick-a-dee, go for it. Meet him. See where it goes. If all you do is sleep with the guy, then you have one more experience for the story of your life.”

  “Why are you always using that line on me?”

  “Because it works on you.”

  “I hate you.”

  “You wish you hated me. I gotta run, but take care of you.”

  “Take care of you.”

  I made it to the kitchen before Brady came banging his way in. He tossed his stuff on the coffee table, causing everything to go flying in a way that he’d been doing for years but that I’d never been able to get him to stop.

  “The song went brilliantly. I think we’re just a couple short of a full album, but it’s too many for an EP,” he said, turning to me with his normal, brilliant Brady smile that always knocked the girls for a loop but just made me smile back.

  “I think we might have enough for a full album.”

  “Nah,” he said and then caught my glance toward my notebook. He dove for it, flipping the pages till he got to the new ones. He read, hand pushing his floppy bangs out of his way, and then raced toward me, picking me up and swinging me around like I was ten years old.

  “Shit. These are really good.”

  I shrugged.

  “Man, when you hit gold, you hit gold. Tell Eli that he can come screw you here any time he wants. I’ll even be a gentleman and leave.”

  I snorted. “You a gentleman? And you know it’s not like that with us.”

  “With you and me or with you and him?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “Tease.”

  “Slut.”

  “I really am,” Brady smiled. He picked up his guitar and started playing some of the notes I’d casually marked, the words being more important to me than the rhythm.

  He lost himself for a good thirty minutes in them. I watched, amazed as always at the way he could just see a few notes, a few words, and turn them into passion and emotion. Like he could live inside everyone else’s head and read their thoughts and feelings.

  He finally stopped and turned to me, putting the guitar aside.

  “You’re pretty over the moon for this guy,” he commented.

  “You’re incredible,” I told him at the same time.

  He grinned. “You know I am, but don’t change the subject.”

  I didn’t want to repeat my conversation with Jenna all over again with Brady. “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see.”

  “Ooh. That means there’s a follow-up date,” he said.

  “Coffee wasn’t a date.”

  “It’s the closest thing to a date that you’ve had in a year.”

  “There was Logan.”

  “Logan? Logan does not count.”

&nb
sp; I laughed. Logan was nice, a waiter at a bar we often frequented. Essentially, there had been nothing there, though. He’d tried to get in my pants backstage when he first asked me out, and I’d promptly put him in his place, and he’d promptly lost my number.

  “He’s going to show up at the Pink Poodle,” I said.

  “Nice. We’ll definitely have to play one of the new songs for him then.” Brady went back to my notebook and the songs that I’d jotted down there. It was his usual focus, even more than the girls that came and went.

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about Eli hearing one of my new songs, but I also wasn’t sure how I felt about Eli at all. That wasn’t really true either. I knew I felt too damn much for a guy that I barely knew. That was my real dilemma. Too many feelings in too little time.

  ♫ ♫ ♫

  By the time Tuesday hit, I was a basket case. I’d heard from Eli once. On Sunday. A simple confirmation of the time the open mic night started at the Poodle. I’d responded with a simple, “Your training has served you well,” and a Yoda GIF.

  He responded with a wink emoji.

  A wink.

  Eli didn’t seem like the wink emoji kind of guy. He seemed like a guy who didn’t use emojis at all. Like emojis were too much effort.

  I dressed in my normal apparel for open mic nights: dark, ripped jeans, a floaty top, my cowboy boots. I momentarily regretted cutting my hair three months ago, because I remembered how Eli had always stared at it, especially when it was down and flying around me. How he’d tangled his hands in it when he’d kissed me. But I also liked the jagged angles of my new look. It made me feel more grown up and less teenager.

  More new me. More realistic me. More practical me.

  Brady could feel my nervousness radiating from me while we set up at the Poodle. We usually helped Georgie, the owner, by moving a temporary stage in between the hairdressing stations. We set up the equipment and made sure the covered walkway between the Poodle and the coffee shop next door was arranged. People could flit back and forth and get drinks. It wasn’t a bar scene, but it was still an open mic night. It usually pulled a surprising number of industry people. Maybe because it wasn’t a bar. Maybe because they got to see the musicians and the songs in an alcohol-free zone. Either way, we liked being there, and we’d been helping Georgie set up ever since we’d started singing at it a year ago.