Heartbreaker

by Melody Grace

  He’s mine.

  Finn leaves with another load for the truck, and I turn back to find Lottie watching me with an unreadable expression. “What?” I ask, then flush. “Sorry about all the PDA,”

  “It’s not that.” She shakes her head slowly. “I was just thinking, that’s all. I’m glad you guys found each other again. Watching you.” She gives a sigh. “I guess it reminds me what that kind of love is like, that’s all.”

  She turns back to Kit, bouncing him gently in his arms, but I can see the moment of wistfulness on her face. I don’t know whether she’s remembering the past, or hoping for the future, but I feel a pang for her.

  “You’ll find it, too.” I cross the room and hug her. “I promise. You’ll know what it’s like to feel this way, one day.”

  Lottie looks self conscious. She shakes it off, and gives me a big smile. “For now, you need to live it for the both of us. Promise me you’ll go crazy, stay out all night on romantic dates, and have sex all day, every day.”

  I laugh. “That won’t leave much time for eating, or sleeping.”

  “Who needs sleep?” She grins. “When you’ve got a superstar in your bed.”

  After the last box is stashed away in the back of the moving truck, I slide my arms around Finn’s waist and smile. “Almost done,” he says.

  “There’s just a goodbye party, three days’ drive, and all the unpacking to do.” I sigh, leaning in for a kiss. “Although I still don’t know why we can’t drive straight through. It wouldn’t take longer than a day.”

  Finn brushes his thumb across my lower lip. “I wasn’t thinking so much about the days as the nights,” he says, moving closer to murmur in my ear. “I want to fuck you in every state between here and New York City.”

  My blood races. “Well, in that case, why don’t we take the long way around?” I grin. “California’s on the way, right?”

  He laughs, and yanks the doors down. “What time is everyone coming over?”

  I check my phone. “Not for another hour. It’ll be pretty casual,” I add. “Just Delilah, Edith, some people from town. Everyone wants to say goodbye.”

  Finn pauses. “If we’ve got the time, will you do something with me?”

  “Of course. What’s up?”

  He gives me a shadowed smile. “There’s someplace I need to go.”

  I squeeze his hand. “Whatever you want. I’m here.”

  I borrow the keys to the minivan from Lottie, and Finn gets behind the wheel. We drive through town, past the stores and houses. I wonder where Finn’s taking me, until he pulls up outside the church that stands on a patch of land bordering the woods

  Beside it sits the graveyard, quiet and shaded with old oak trees.

  Finn turns off the engine, but doesn’t move. He exhales with a sigh. “I’ve been putting it off since the day he died,” he says quietly. “Bill said it was a good service. Proper, at least.”

  “It was.” He looks at me in surprise. “I thought I should be there,” I say softly, remembering that day and how few people showed up. “For you.”

  He squeezes my hand, then gets out of the car. I follow, but he stops me. “Give me a minute?” he asks.

  “Take as long as you need.”

  Finn nods, and then walks slowly through the small gate, down the pathway lined with headstones. I watch from the shade of the trees as he carefully picks his way through the graves, until at last he finds what I know is a simple black stone, carved into the granite. Hank McKay. 1965 – 2014.

  Finn kneels down beside the grave. I can see his shoulders tense, his lips moving. My heart aches for him. All my goodbyes will be later, full of laughter and good wishes, but for Finn, this is the one farewell he needs to make more than anything. We’ll be back, for holidays and visits, and I know he wants so badly to be able to enjoy those moments without feeling the pressing burden of the past.

  He deserves to be free from all that pain.

  Not for the first time, I wonder what I would have done if Finn hadn’t strolled back into my life again. How long would I have stayed in my limbo and let my darkest, weakest moments define me? It makes me shiver to think of it, how close I came to wasting all my chances and throwing my future away.

  I didn’t realize it, but I was still broken. He was the only one who could help me put the pieces together again.

  After a long while, Finn straightens up. He places a hand briefly on his father’s headstone, then turns and starts the walk back to me. I can tell already, something’s shifted. He seems steadier, his pace stronger, and when he’s close enough for me to see the expression on his face, there’s an acceptance there that fills my heart with joy.

  “Okay?” I ask, searching his eyes.

  He nods, and reaches for me, pulling me into a tight hug. “Thank you,” he whispers against my hair.

  “What for?”

  “Bringing me back here,” he answers, voice gruff with emotion. “Making me see, I need to let go.”

  We stand there a moment, just holding each other. Then Finn releases me. “Ready to go say your goodbyes?” he asks, smiling again.

  I nod. “Just so you know, Dee threatened to hire a stripper.”

  “A what?” Finn exclaims.

  “I know. I tried telling her. But she swears we’re going to elope, and this is her only chance for a bachelorette party.”

  Finn drapes an arm around me, and starts walking back to the car. “You tell her from me, when we get hitched, it’ll be with a white dress, and a church, and everyone watching.”

  When. I sneak a glance up at him, and the promise in his eyes takes my breath away. “You seem pretty certain for someone who hasn’t even asked me yet,” I say, trying to hide the butterflies dancing in my bloodstream.

  “Why, am I wrong?” he arches an eyebrow, looking too sexy and smug for words.

  “No.” I nestle against him, perfectly content. “You’re not wrong.”

  In the end, half the town turns out to celebrate us leaving, spilling into the backyard until our intimate BBQ becomes a real party. Finn mans the grill, Lottie rules the playlist, and we dance and party as the sun sets, everyone full of good wishes for the next chapter in our lives.

  “You have to go to all the cool bars and shows, and tell me everything,” Delilah orders. “And get a place with a spare room, so I can come visit all the time!”

  “I promise.” I hug her tightly, feeling emotional. “I’m going to miss you!”

  “You too, babes.” Delilah squeezes me. “Work won’t be nearly as much fun without you there to talk to all day.”

  “You’ll do fine without the distraction,” I reassure her. “I bet you’ll have Marcie pushed out and be running your own empire before we’re even back for the holidays.”

  “True!” Delilah brightens. “And remember to line me up a hot rock star for when I come visit. I want a full run down of all Finn’s sexy friends.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I laugh.

  “I’m happy for you,” Delilah says, sincere this time. “You two belong together. It even gives some hope to commitment phobic lost causes like me.”

  “Don’t say that!” I protest. “I’m not exactly a role model. It took us long enough to find our way back to each other.”

  “You can say that again,” Edith agrees approvingly from behind us. I smother her in a hug.

  “Good luck to the both of you.” She nods.

  “But what about you?” I ask, feeling a pang of guilt. “How will you manage at the shelter on your own?”

  “I’ll find a way.” She reassures me. “And Sawyer will stop by, help me keep the litter in check.”

  I see him across the yard, talking with Dee and Lottie. I say goodbye to Edith and head over, meeting Sawyer with a hug. “So, Broadway awaits?” he says, offering me a soda.

  “I don’t know about that,” I laugh. “But my old drama school is happy for me to re-enroll and finish out my degree. We’ll see,” I say, excited at the thought. “Ma
ybe it’s not the right dream for me anymore, but at least this way I have a chance to figure it out for myself.”

  “Well, Chester and I will miss you around the place,” Sawyer says.

  “You’ll keep an eye on Edith?” I check. “She’s getting older now, and with her back—”

  “Don’t worry,” he reassures me. “I couldn’t stay away from that place if I tried. She’s got me scheduled to give all the dogs their booster shots. Last I heard, she was drawing up a list of blind dates, too.”

  I laugh. “Sounds like her. Watch out though. She has interesting ideas about what makes people compatible.”

  “I’ll consider myself warned.”

  Finn joins us, and Sawyer holds up his hands in mock surrender. “We were just talking,” he grins, and Finn laughs.

  “Hey man, I’m sorry about before. I can be pretty possessive when it comes to this one.”

  “No hard feelings.” Sawyer shakes his hand. “I hope you guys will be happy in New York.”

  “What do you think?” Finn looks down at me.

  I smile, full of love and possibility. “I think we’re going to find out.”

  I hold him tight, thankful that the years and distance only brought us closer together again.

  Our adventure is just beginning.

  THE END

  Thank you so much for reading! I’d love to share more great romance books with you. Keep scrolling for the first chapter of my next release, THE PROMISE.

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  Coming in 2016, a heart-wrenching new stand-alone from Melody Grace.

  THE PROMISE

  One.

  Fall in Cambridge, Massachusetts was like nothing I’d ever seen before.

  I’d spent my life in a small town outside San Antonio, where the trees let out a vague shrug late in the season, and just like that, it was winter. But here, summer died out in a long, blazing victory dance.

  Sunburst gold and persimmon orange, witch’s scarlet and deep, bronzed ochre. The colors bragged and jostled loudly under cloudless skies, so bright, it almost hurt to look. I wasn’t on the best terms with God those days, but strolling to work under that shimmering canopy, I was almost ready to make peace. It was the kind of day that felt like a fresh start, and made me want to run right out and blow my first paycheck on a basket of new supplies: luscious inks, textured canvas and thick, rich oil sticks, the kind that stain your fingertips for days.

  “What’s got you all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?” My new co-worker, Kelsey, was unlocking when I arrived at the café. She had sunglasses on, and the hood of her sweatshirt pulled low over her sleepy glare. “Don’t tell me you’re a morning person,” she added, before I could reply. “Just so you know, I don’t even become human until I’ve had my third coffee. I can’t be held accountable if I’m a bitch before ten.”

  “Noted,” I followed her inside. “How about you handle that beast of a machine, and I’ll make nice with the customers until you come back to life?”

  “I like you already.” Kelsey headed for the back, and I started to take down the chairs and set the tables straight, getting ready for the first customers of the day. I’d only been working here a week; a lucky break, I thought, but I know Hope would have called it providence. I could hear her voice when I walked in dragging my duffel bag behind me, the opposite of fresh off that three-day bus ride, and found the sign pinned up by the register. Help wanted. No hipsters, assholes, or dilettantes.

  “See?” she would have said, giving me that excited nudge of hers. “Everything works out exactly the way it’s supposed to be.”

  I wish I could have that kind of faith. It would make life easier, to be able to jump and just believe there’ll be something waiting to break my fall. But if she was right, then why was she buried under a bouquet of lilies at the graveyard out past Parson’s Gully, while the rest of the world just kept spinning, unconcerned?

  The rest of the team arrived, toting sweatshirts and backpacks, and armfuls of books to study on their breaks. Cambridge was a college town, and we were in the thick of it: from the clusters of startled freshman slurping down ice-blended mochaccinos, crammed onto the faded blue velvet couches by the windows, to the upper-classmen hiding in the loft space, building forts of their study materials and eking out a black coffee to last all afternoon. I loved the buzz of it already, a crackling shot of electricity as new customers piled through the doors the minute it turned seven AM, offering their orders with a pleading note in their voice and sleep still in their eyes.

  “Welcome to Wired, what can I get for you this morning?” I must have chirped a hundred times.

  “Look at you, Miss Congeniality.” Mika drawled, when finally the rush slowed to a trickle. He was on the register with me most days: a tall, rangy guy with a mop of auburn curls and the edge of an accent, Dutch, or German, maybe. “You know they won’t tip you either way.”

  “I don’t mind.” I shifted, restless in my sneakers. I looked around. “I’ll go clear up a little until the next wave hits.”

  Mika quirked an eyebrow. “By all means, be my guest.”

  I grabbed a tray and went to bus the tables. I knew the rest of the staff were amused by my eagerness. They’d been working long enough for it to be a chore; they didn’t understand. Waking up each morning, I half expected this new adventure to be a dream that would dissolve with every yawning breath; and when it didn’t, I treasured it all over again. My small, shared apartment with the roommate who hogged the bathroom and a shower that always ran cold; the long walk to work along unfamiliar streets, even wiping down the cracked formica tabletops: this was freedom to me. No rules, no parents hovering over my shoulder, no childhood photos lined up on the mantel in a long procession of guilt. I was anonymous in a city that didn’t know my name, a thousand miles from home.

  And the people… I wanted to draw every last one of them. Mika’s cut-glass cheekbones and permanent smirk. The barista, JJ’s thoughtful stare and smooth-shaven head, midnight black. He was a math whizz, on scholarship at a college nearby, and the rest of them would delight in yelling out the problems whenever the register glitched.

  “Two fifty-nine, plus sixty-seven cents, plus three eighty-six, plus tax!” Mika would whip at him. But the kid never faltered, just answered with a steady smile.

  “Seven dollars and ninety seven cents.”

  The customers loved it, but Mika would just scowl. The two of them bickered all day, a low-level frequency hum of irritation so steady it took me by surprise when I stayed late after closing after my first week and saw them leave together, Mika’s arm slung around JJ’s shoulder, pausing at the stop-light to tilt his face up for a tender kiss.

  “I didn’t know they were a couple,” I told Kelsey the next day, feeling more like a small-town girl than ever before.

  She made a vague back-and-forth motion with her hand. “We’ll see,” she said with a sigh. “Either that, or the shit will hit the fan real soon.”

  As for Kelsey, she slouched around the café in lace-up boots and thin flicked eyeliner more precise than any ink drawing I had ever mastered. She played in a punk-rock band, and seemed utterly unshakeable. I was a little in awe of her. To be honest, I was in awe of them all. They were the lead characters in their own lives, living out stories of drama and intrigue of which I only saw a glimpse, and meanwhile, I’d barely worked up the courage to tip-toe onto the edge of the stage.

  All of this is my way of trying to explain that on the afternoon in question, that perfect, clean chalk-board of an afternoon, I wasn’t looking for a man to walk through the door and change my life. I wasn’t that girl at all. My life had already been changed in ways too sharp and devastating to describe, and the idea of another disrupting force – another reckless wild-card to send my life spinning off course �
�� would have made me run for cover had I even a moment’s warning. I could have called to Kelsey that I was taking my break, ducked out to sit on the back steps in the morning sun, and felt an inexplicable shiver rippling over my skin as the storm passed me by.

  But that’s not how this story goes.

  I was refilling the sugar canisters when he walked in. I remember, because the glass facets were catching the light, reflecting rainbows back against the sun-drenched windows. I twisted them one way and another, painting shards of color over the walls, and tables, and squinting faces in their path. I heard the faint ‘ding’ of the door, but was still lost in the kaleidoscope of colors when he rested his elbows on the counter just out of the corner of my eye.

  “My heart leaps up when I behold/ A rainbow in the sky.”

  He told me later, he felt like a pretentious idiot, quoting poetry at me out of nowhere. But I’d loved those lines ever since my fifth-grade teacher had pinned them over the art wall.

  “Wordsworth.” I was already smiling when I glanced up.

  There are some faces that burn into your memory, and others that change every time you look in their direction. A new slant of light, a passing shadow, they can either rearrange someone into a stranger every time you meet, or etch their features even deeper; carved into stone.

  Somehow, his was both at once.

  Eyes that dipped from hazel to umber and back again; the dark lashes and faded golden tan, like Midas coming up for air. His features shifted as if they couldn’t decide what mood to form, those broad planes stroking out a twist of a smile under a disheveled mop of ash gold hair. He had his collar half up, that battered navy peacoat crushed around him, and even when I clumsily knocked the sugar canister aside, and the rainbows scattered into sunlight, he was still the most vivid thing in the room.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, grabbing for a napkin. I watched him push the spilling sugar back into a neat square, contained, and felt an overwhelming itch to draw his hands. There was a grace to them, a linear sense maybe, and just like that I realized how Da Vinci could have spent a year sketching the same thing over.