“Shit,” I whispered.
“I know it’s a lot to ask,” Sam said. “I know you have to figure out things with Max. But, come on. Fly down there and drive back with him. Or like I said, maybe he’ll just fly back when he sees you.”
“And you’re paying for this?” I asked with a grin.
“I have a plane ticket already bought, Willow.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’m not lying. He sounds rough. He wants out. And you need a break.”
“Don’t tell me what I need, Sam.”
“Fine. You want a break.”
“Yeah, maybe I do. And your version of a break is to send me to deal with Travis? Everything he went through. All I know about him. All he doesn’t know about me.”
“Meaning what?”
“Come on, Sam, it wasn’t like me and him were friends. He probably won’t even remember me.”
“Doubt that.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I already told him you were flying down there.”
“You did what?” I asked.
I felt like slapping Sam.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry. I had to say something to get him to calm down. I said you were going to fly down and ride back with him.”
“And what did he say?”
“Nothing. He was… calm.”
“You literally said that he might want to fly back when he sees me. You made it sound…”
“I know,” Sam said. “Willow…”
I swung my hand and slapped Sam across the face.
He side stepped and touched his cheek. “I deserved that.”
“You did. Idiot.”
“Does this mean you’ll go?” he asked.
I looked at the front door to the house. I knew what waited behind it. And I knew what was behind me. Sam was right, I wasn’t over a few things that had happened in my life. But time didn’t give people a chance to stop and breathe. It just kept moving on. Me hightailing it on a plane to California to make sure Travis didn’t do anything stupid wasn’t going to help that. Time would keep moving forward. Memories would stay alive. Things would happen.
“Willow?” Sam whispered.
I looked at him. I had tears in my eyes, for plenty of reasons.
I nodded.
“Yeah, fine… I’ll go…”
4
A Bunny in the Sand
TRAVIS
My favorite part of the flat was the small balcony. The railing was a little shaky, so it was advised not to lean on it, unless you could handle those first two seconds when it moved, and you saw your life flash before your eyes because you were sure that you were going over. I’d been leaning on the railing for a long time and it hadn’t failed me yet.
The view was almost worth the insane cost to live here.
I could see right to the water. Where the world seemed to end, and the ocean began. The allure of escape and freedom, a place to disappear and maybe never be found. That, of course, was the poetic way of looking at it. In reality, I liked to stand there, have a morning smoke, and check out the waves.
Hell, I had nothing else to do, right?
There was no practicing today. No studio sessions on my horizon. If anything, I could burn my drumsticks as a way to make some heat because that’s all they were worth now. I figured I would give it a little time before reaching out to Adam or Ronny. Maybe extend an apology. Maybe be stubborn and have them make Dez apologize to me. I knew I wasn’t technically in the band, but I had ever-so-slightly allowed myself to get close to them. Nobody quite understood what it all meant to me. The truth. What I knew. What I felt. What I didn’t want to talk about, even though I should have.
I looked to my left, and down on the small, circular table was the notebook. The pages fluttered with the gentle late morning breeze. A pen rolled left to right on the table as I finished my smoke.
I’ll get to you next. Relax.
I stared out to the beach one more time and nodded.
I called Sam because he was supposed to be my best friend. He was supposed to be the one who would jump in a car, chase down a plane, do anything to get to me and help out when I needed it. One thing about Sam though was that he didn’t lie. The second I called him in a drunken stupor and said I wanted to road trip and forget about life, he said that Luke was having a rough time. I laughed and said fuck Luke. Luke had been in love with Julie, but never had the nerve to do something about it. He was too afraid of me and too afraid of his own shadow.
Shit, maybe if Luke had been with Julie…
I shut my eyes and swallowed the thought.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
Bottom line was that Sam wasn’t coming my way. There was no road trip on the horizon. He told me that someone else was going to come down and check on me.
Willow.
Believe me, I knew all about Willow. I had seen her enough times in my life to never forget her. I probably knew more about her than she realized. Sam said that she was going through some personal stuff and could use the break herself.
Break.
That’s the word Sam kept using.
Break.
As though we were working hard and needed a vacation. As though all our hard work had somehow paid off and we deserved a chance to step away to breathe and smile. And celebrate our fucking lives.
Break.
I exhaled the last breath of smoke and crouched, reaching for the notebook.
I flipped through the messy pages of messy handwriting to a clean page. My hair fell in my face but I didn’t give a damn.
I wrote one word.
Break.
The pen in my left hand shook a little as I felt the wave starting to crest. The outside world was so perfect and so beautiful. The rustling from the breeze. The random honk of a horn. The faded noise of the ocean singing its eternal song.
Inside my body though… hell was having a party.
Break
The wind, struggles
The heart, feels the same
Break
The silence, between all of us
The stare, it’ll eventually fade - we all know that
Break
The leg, stumbling is what we know
The hand, you cannot stop the fall once it begins
I shut the notebook and thought about throwing it over the railing. With a decent aim, it would hit the bushes and be hidden for a long time. Long enough that a few good pounding rainstorms would bleed the ink off the pages and fold the cardboard backing, leaving it as nothing but a piece of fucking trash waiting to get tossed.
I gritted my teeth and went back inside.
In my head, I already had the day playing out. Exactly what was going to happen moment by moment. And it already pissed me off. My plan had been to recapture something inside me by cruising along the coast, hitting up small towns, getting lost in time, distance, and the horizon.
Instead, someone I had no intention of seeing was coming to check up on me and probably convince me to get on an airplane and fly north. To home. Well, the place I used to call home.
It was a strange moment as I looked around the flat, realizing that even this place wasn’t home. This was a month to month rental for me. A temporary place to hide out and think about life, which turned into months and had been now collecting years.
This kind of reality wasn’t my thing. This kind of reality took me back to dark places where I had no flashlight to navigate through, which meant it wasn’t good for anyone.
I should have stayed put and waited for Willow to get there. So I could figure out how to get her straight back home and leave me the hell alone.
But I wasn’t going to waste time, pacing the flat like a hungry animal, swallowing regret, scribbling notes, smoking my brain silly.
I was going to catch some waves…
… and with any luck, maybe one big enough would sweep me away.
It had been a good day in the water.
It wa
sn’t too hot, the breeze not too bad, and the waves were strong. It kept a lot of the more amateur surfers out of the water, which gave me plenty of space to chase down the biggest waves I could find.
Some of the battles I won, some of them I lost.
But as I sat on the beach with my ass planted firmly in the sand, elbows on my knees, hair stuck to my forehead, staring out at the never-ending ocean, I thought about nothing and everything at the same time.
My notebook was next to me, making a not so rare appearance at the beach.
I flipped it open to the page I had been working on this morning.
“Break,” I whispered.
Break
There’s a wave lifting its arm to say hello
A nod to the day behind it and reaching for
the stars we can no longer see
But that’s the thing…
We can’t see the stars, but they’re there
The perception is they sleep
They wait for night to come and they
come out and play
The universe’s fireflies, but they don’t dance
They don’t need to dance because they contain worlds
But they’re never gone
We wait for something to come that has never truly left
The same wave slaps its hand to the water,
a child calling for attention
It pulls itself back and does it again
Because nothing is really gone…
it’s just what we can’t see.
My pen froze in place.
It was messed up. Sometimes things could make perfect sense, but still feel like shit wrestling inside the pit of your stomach.
The next line came to me in perfect fashion.
I moved the pen to write the word break one more time when a shadow slid over me like a blanket.
“Travis?”
The voice rippled through me and I had no fucking clue why.
I turned my head and looked up.
She stood right in the path of the sun, leaving a bright outline around her body. She was wearing a white t-shirt that danced in the breeze, lifting up a couple of times, showing off a sliver of skin that made me half grin. She wore freaking jeans that were rolled up to just below her knees. She looked and screamed tourist as she stood there with a bag on her shoulder and her shoes hooked around the pointer and middle fingers of her left hand.
My eyes moved up and down her a few times.
She definitely looked a little different than the last time I saw her. She gave the term late bloomer a new meaning. Not that I was looking for anything messy like that. She was here to escape her own problems and I needed a smoke and a way to get her out of here.
“Willow,” I said, her name sliding coolly off my tongue.
“I stopped by your place,” she said. She threw her thumb over her shoulder. “You weren’t there.”
“Obviously,” I said with an even bigger grin.
I put my notebook down and climbed to my feet.
I towered over Willow as she looked up at me with an almost innocent doe-like look. As though she had never seen the beach before. As though she had never seen a shirtless man before.
She looked terrified of me.
Which was probably a good thing to be.
“Sorry,” she said. “That was stupid to say. I meant, I stopped by there and your neighbor told me where to find you.”
“Right,” I said. “Mr. Bunkley, huh?”
“I didn’t catch his name,” Willow said.
“He’s a pain in the ass around the building. Sticks his nose in everyone’s business. But he’s not all that bad.”
“He helped me find you.”
“True. Which bears the question… what the hell are you doing here?”
Her face turned a deep shade of red. She swallowed hard. “I, uh, well… Sam said…”
“Sam told you to get on a plane and come and save me?” I asked.
“Something like that.”
“And you listened, huh?”
“I was doing him a favor. He was my best friend growing up.”
“Best friend. Nothing ever happened there, huh? You really put him in a corner for a while, huh?”
“What?” she asked.
I laughed. “Nothing. Just figured that eventually you would throw him one. A freebie for being by your side.”
Willow gasped. “You’re an asshole, Travis.”
She turned.
I quickly grabbed her arm and spun her back around. She dropped her shoes. Her hair whipped across her face. I let her go and lifted my hand, gently moved the hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear. I caught a whiff of her fruity shampoo and took the liberty of taking a deeper breath.
She has no idea what she’s walking into here, does she?
“Don’t just show up and try to be my friend, bunny.”
“Bunny?” she asked.
I winked.
Her face burned even hotter.
“Sam told me straight up that you were going through some tough shit yourself. That’s why you’re here. So, don’t walk onto this beach and up to me like we go back ten years and we’re going to catch up and laugh. I can probably figure out why you’re here. And you know exactly why I’m here.”
“Yeah,” Willow said. She stepped back, out of my reach. “You know why I’m here? Really? Tell me then. Come on, Travis. Tell me.”
I curled my lip and stepped toward her. “Maybe calling Sam was a big mistake. I thought my old best friend would be able to help me out. Not send me a project.”
“Oh? I’m a project to you? Maybe if you were around, you’d understand better. If you saw Luke…”
“Fuck Luke,” I growled. “He was weak back then and obviously still is now.”
“You’re a real asshole, Travis. I’m sorry I did this. I thought I was helping everyone out, including you.”
“I didn’t ask for your help,” I said. “So, tell you what, bunny. Why don’t you camp out here at the beach? Look at the water, smile, cry, find yourself. Does that sound good?”
I didn’t give her a chance to respond.
I crouched down, picked up her shoes, and handed them to her.
Then I walked away.
“I’m not a project,” she called out to my back.
I paused and glanced over my shoulder. Her hair danced around in the moving air in a way that made me hate the breeze. She was all woman, and still had those lingering features that were surprisingly burned into my memory. Her cheeks had freckles on them, more on the left side than the right. Her eyes were beautifully colored as though someone threw honey and chocolate together and made a rich, sweet color to stand there and stare at me. When her shirt pressed tightly against her body, there were curves that caught the attention of more than just my eyes.
“I’m not a fucking project, Travis,” Willow said. “I don’t know who you think you’re dealing with right now. You weren’t there. Okay? Sam asked me to do this as a favor. He said that when you saw me, you’d more than likely just end up flying back anyway. So just fly back home and do whatever you have to do.”
I slowly nodded. “What else did Sam tell you about me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why did you actually come here?”
“He said you’d got into some trouble,” she said. “And that you called him. That you were feeling lost. You wanted to take a road trip.”
“Yeah, well, forget what I said. Forget that I called Sam. Forget that he talked to you.”
I turned again and could feel her staring and trying to hurry through the sand to get to me. I could see her shadow wobbling on the hot and uneven sand. She was already getting on my nerves, yet I was stupid enough to pause again and let her catch up to me.
She took a big risk when she put her left hand onto my right arm. A chill worked its way through me that made me growl under my breath.
“I know how hard it is,” Willow said. “What
you went through and still go through. It’s okay to feel…”
“You done yet?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“You didn’t come here to talk me off the ledge, did you now? Because I’m not standing on the ledge, Willow. I’m standing on the beach. Doing my thing. And now you’re here trying to hide from your thing.”
“I’m just doing a favor for a friend,” she said. “Someone who didn’t leave when things got hard. That’s all.”
Willow lifted her hand off my arm and gave this little bitchy wave to me. She lifted her left eyebrow too.
That’s when I realized that maybe I was the one who had no idea what I was walking into…
“Smoke?” I asked as I put my back against the bed of my truck and stuck the cigarette between my lips.
“No thanks,” Willow said. “It’s kind of disgusting not that you’re older and you think about it.”
“So, don’t think about it,” I said and winked.
She looked away.
At the water.
We were far off the beach, standing in a parking lot. She had this little bright blue rental car. It looked like a car I used to play with when I was a kid, racing them around in circles on the throw rug just inside the front door of the house we grew up in.
I lit up my smoke and stretched my neck.
My stomach growled with hunger.
That was a great thing about hitting the water the way I did. I worked up a killer appetite and could now spend the rest of the day eating and drinking until it was tomorrow.
I ignored the hunger for a second and watched as Willow kept her eyes on the water.
“I guess you get used to the view when you live this close,” I said.
“What?” Willow said, snapping her head back to look at me.
“The view. The beach. The waves. It’s different when you see it all the time. I mean, we were used to the water smashing against the rocks. Always being cold and dreary, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You definitely found a nice spot to be in. This is really amazing.”
“Gets old fast though, bunny,” I said.
What You Don't Know (True Hearts Book 6) Page 4