Wild Love

by Lauren Accardo

  The left side of his mouth curved into a grin, and he trailed his thumb across the palm of her hand. “Maybe not just yet.”

  “Okay, well I’m going to go get a beer. And maybe while I’m gone you could ugly yourself up a little. Otherwise, being around you in public is going to be really difficult for me.”

  As she turned toward the bar, his hand brushed against her ass. She sent a shocked look over her shoulder, but he just winked. “Whoops. Sorry. I think my watch got caught on your dress.”

  She leaned over the bar and caught Hank’s eye, nodding when he asked if she wanted an IPA. She hadn’t had a drop of alcohol all night, and now, in light of her success, she felt a celebratory drink was in order.

  “Where is she?”

  The single question floated over the crowd without discernment like a leaf on the wind. But since the disappointing end to the first book-club meeting, Sydney had been on high alert for that voice.

  “Oh, nobody knows, huh? Where the fuck is she?”

  Upon the voice repeating, Sydney stood up straight and turned slowly over her shoulder toward the entrance. The crowd quieted, but Sydney couldn’t see over the groups of tall men to the distraction.

  “There she is!”

  Heads swiveled toward Sydney, most blinking in confusion. A path cleared. Just inside the front door, wearing a stained white T-shirt and ratty jeans with no coat, her hair hanging in limp strands around her blotchy face, was Liv.

  “Liv?”

  “Yes, hello.” Liv’s eyes floated in their sockets, and the dank scent of booze wafted off her as if she’d been soaking in it.

  “Are you okay?” Sydney asked. Everyone in the bar turned their attention to the spectacle at the front. Even the music seemed to lower.

  “You’re a bitch,” Liv spat. “Did you know I don’t get to have my kid?”

  Red-hot shame sliced through Sydney. Liv couldn’t know what had been going on between her and Sam—could she? And yet the weight of responsibility sat heavy on her shoulders.

  “I heard,” Sydney said. She was desperate not to have this conversation in front of the entire town, but Liv’s awareness of others seemed nonexistent. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re not sorry. You’re not sorry one tiny little bit, are you? Because all along you’ve been out to get Sam, and I was the only thing standing in your way.”

  “Liv, honey,” Jorie said, appearing from the crowd and approaching Liv. She placed a hand on Liv’s wiry arm. “It’s not Sydney’s fault.”

  Liv swatted her friend’s hand away and pinched her chapped lips together until they went white. “What, she’s won you all over? Everybody’s Team Sydney now? Screw you, Jorie. You haven’t been a real friend to me in years.”

  Jorie sent Sydney a helpless frown, as Liv was beyond reason. Whatever was on her mind, she had to get it out. Sydney gritted her teeth and prepared for the worst.

  “Maybe we should go somewhere quiet and talk,” Sydney said.

  “Oh yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Because you don’t want anybody to know what you did.” Liv’s face settled into a challenge, and Sydney swallowed. What was she talking about?

  “I haven’t done anything,” Sydney said, while scenes from Sam’s garage, her bedroom, and the office of the Loving Page flashed through her mind. She shook the tremors from her voice. “Liv, please. Let’s go outside and talk.”

  “No!” Liv screamed. She pushed a hand through her stringy hair. “No. We’re not going outside. I’m done trying to be nice to you. Everything was fine until you showed up. But you know what, Sydney Walsh? You fucked up. He’ll never want to be with you now. Not after you slept with his brother.”

  A collective gasp stole the oxygen from the room, and for a moment, everything stood still. Sydney’s neck prickled, and her eyes went dry.

  “What?” Sam’s voice hit her in the chest with the force of a Mack truck.

  “I did not.”

  “You did!” Liv shrieked, her eyes wild.

  Sydney turned to Sam, terrified of what she’d see. His face was still. Waiting.

  “That is not true,” Sydney said. Her voice trembled and cracked.

  “What the hell?” Sam’s voice squeaked, breaking Sydney’s heart in half.

  “I did not have sex with Jared,” Sydney said, every molecule in her body pulsing like a bass drum. Panic swelled.

  “I have a picture.” Every head in the room swiveled back to Liv as she held her phone high above her head. Sydney’s mind reeled. Was it possible Jared took advantage of her, snapped a photo, and then lied about it? Her memory after they left Utz’s was nothing but static.

  Liv dropped the phone into Jorie’s timidly outstretched hand. Jorie frowned at Sydney before craning her face toward the phone screen, squinting. When her gaze lifted, Sydney knew. Something on that phone incriminated her, and she’d never get out of this unscathed.

  Jorie handed the phone to Sydney, and a sick sense of dread brewed. She looked down, and staring back at her was a grainy photo, possibly taken through windows with dirty screens. The woman and the man were most certainly she and Jared, both still in winter coats, reclined on the guest room bed.

  An almost imperceptible huff of relief escaped her lips. Jared had set her down on the bed. Nothing more. She knew it.

  Tingling began in her legs and crept north until the entire expanse of her skin prickled. Hot breath on her neck brought her back to life.

  “You gotta be kidding me.” Sam’s voice floated over her shoulder.

  “See, it’s nothing,” Sydney said.

  “Nothing? You’re at his house. On a bed. At night.” Sam’s face contorted into a mask of disgust.

  “No,” she insisted. “I mean, yes. But we didn’t sleep together. This is nothing. Nothing sexual.”

  The words rose up but stopped in her throat. She couldn’t explain. Remove the sexual element and still, it sounded absurd. No, he just took me back to his place, and I was incredibly drunk, but nothing happened.

  “You have to admit this doesn’t look good,” Jorie said. Her jaw set, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. A thousand questions etched on her face. “Why were you at his house?”

  “He was taking care of me,” Sydney said. The hot flush crept up her neck and into her cheeks. What did happen that night?

  “Taking care of you?” Jorie said. “Why? What happened?”

  “I don’t remember.” Sydney’s voice bordered on manic.

  “You don’t remember?” The vein in Sam’s neck pulsed, his words scraping across her skin like prickers.

  “No, I remember . . . well, I remember part of it.” She remembered tequila and crying and Jared’s strong arms and the John Stockton poster. She remembered the way Jared looked at her when she stumbled out of his guest bedroom, the frown of pity on his lips. “I know we didn’t sleep together. I know nothing happened.”

  “You know but you don’t remember?” Sam said. His voice raised an octave, his lips parted. “Sydney, give me something here.”

  Fury and chaos crashed over her, the murmurs of disbelief rising out of the crowd. Where was Jared? He could tell them. She searched the room, gazing at every face hoping to see his, but Jared was nowhere to be found.

  In one last desperate attempt at easing Sam’s distrusting mind, Sydney blurted out, “Even if something did happen, which it didn’t, it was before you and I had even kissed.”

  The words slipped out before she saw them coming, and as soon as they landed, she gasped. Sam’s eyes flew open, the emotion intensifying with a violent rush of blood to his neck.

  “Kissed?” Liv’s shaky voice asked.

  The room spun, becoming a swirling mass of confused faces. Her breath stuck in her throat, unmoving and cutting off all air supply to her lungs.

  “Whoa,” Greg said, “you guys are
banging?”

  “Ah,” Sam said, raking a hand through his hair. “This is bullshit.”

  “No, Sam, it’s nothing,” she said, taking a step toward him. She needed him to understand. It was a moment of weakness, a product of too much tequila and fear of losing all control over her life. “Jared was just taking care of me because I was drunk.”

  As if the key had turned in the lock, his face fell. Those magic words, I was drunk. She regretted them the second she’d said them.

  His eyes blazed, wilder and filled with more pain than she’d ever seen. “You were drunk, you don’t remember, but you’re sure nothing happened? Where have I heard that before?”

  The words drove a stake through Sydney’s heart. She’d been stupid and careless and now she knew what he really thought of her. Just another person in his life who’d chosen alcohol over him.

  “I can’t take this.” He shoved past anyone standing between him and the exit, disappearing through the front door and leaving Sydney trembling. She pressed her full beer into the hand of someone next to her and raced out after him.

  The snow had slowed to a delicate shower of lazy flakes, but she relished the cold. It shocked her back to life.

  “Sam.” She called out after him as he jogged across the street, her voice nearly swallowed by the heavy snow drifts. She struggled to keep up in her high-heeled boots, determination urging her forward. “Sam!”

  A few feet down the road, in front of a cluster of white-trimmed pine trees, he spun around, and the undisguised sadness on his face knocked her backward. Deep creases were etched on his face, and his lips pressed into a thin line.

  “I don’t want to talk to you.” His words dripped with disappointment. “I’ll say something I’ll regret. Just leave me alone.”

  “No.” She wrapped her arms tightly around herself in a futile attempt at warmth. “This is insane. You know me, Sam. You know I wouldn’t sleep with Jared, and I especially wouldn’t sleep with Jared and then lie about it.”

  “Do I know that?” He stepped toward her, dropping his chin and huffing out a short breath. “All right, fine. Maybe you didn’t sleep with him. But how many more times am I expected to put up with this? How many more times can I be put in the position to believe one person’s word over another because of fucking alcohol? I can’t. I can’t do it anymore. I’m exhausted.”

  Her chest ached. If she could, she’d go back in time and save him from everyone who’d hurt him, everyone who had made him feel small and unimportant. But she wasn’t one of those people. And she deserved better, too.

  “Please don’t let this ruin everything that’s happened between us. It’s too special.”

  “Don’t let this ruin everything?” His red-rimmed eyes widened. “So this is on me? If I let this ruin everything, then it’s my fault?”

  “No,” she said. Her voice betrayed her. She sounded like a whimpering mouse. “No, it’s not on you. It’s on me. It was stupid. When I first got to Pine Ridge, I had no idea how to handle anything, and I drank too much that night, but . . .”

  “When was this exactly?” he asked. “What night was it that you needed somebody to swoop in and save you?”

  Damn it. The night you were supposed to fix the shelf on the bookcase you made me. The night you offered to set me up with your friends on the radio to promote my event. The night you spilled your guts to me about your alcoholic father.

  “Early November,” she said.

  He nodded slowly, and she could see the wheels turning. He was searching for a date. “The night you met him, right? The night you did tequila shots at Utz’s?”

  The tears pooled in her eyes. She was a fool. Every time she seemed to pull it together, one mistake sent it all crashing down around her. She’d always be the lawyer one panic attack away from losing it all. The woman who turned to alcohol when she needed a break from reality.

  “Yes.” She tried to swallow, but her throat was as dry as summer dirt. “But you had Liv. At that point everyone, including you, told me I should stay away, that nothing could happen. I was barely allowed to hang out with you unsupervised. I didn’t do anything wrong, Sam. I made a stupid mistake. People are allowed to make mistakes. I didn’t sleep with Jared, and even if I had, it wasn’t against the rules.”

  The lines on his face smoothed, and now he looked at her, slack-jawed and still. His calloused hands that had once touched her skin so gently now clenched and released into tight fists.

  “Right. You’re right. I’m being overly sensitive. You didn’t do anything wrong. I thought we had feelings for each other at that point, but it turns out I was just another idiot crushing on the new girl.”

  “No, Sam, stop.”

  “Nah, I’m not doing this again.” His lips pursed, and for a brief moment, she thought he was going to walk toward her. Touch her. Give her any shred of hope she hadn’t messed this all up. Instead, he shook his head. “I think I need to be alone for a while. Try to figure out why I keep doing this.”

  “Keep doing what?” The icy wind sucked her breath away, and she struggled for air.

  “Giving too much to people who don’t deserve it.”

  With one last blistering glare, he turned and walked away. She watched with deepening sadness as his figure got smaller and smaller, eventually rounding the curve of the street and vanishing from view.

  And suddenly Sydney had the unquenchable urge to disappear.

  chapter twenty-two

  Jorie reached over the chipped Formica countertop and tipped the carafe until the steaming dark-roast coffee poured out into Sam’s waiting mug. The solemn look she’d worn all morning deepened as she replaced the carafe on the hot plate and leaned against the counter with her arms crossed.

  “Donut?” she asked.

  Sam exhaled, the dripping plastic bag of ice crinkling as he adjusted it against his throbbing eye socket. Fine, he deserved it. The lecture, the screaming curse words, the sucker punch. But damn if it didn’t hurt all the same.

  “Nah.”

  He sipped the hot coffee and grimaced as the bitter liquid burned his tongue. Great. A busted eye and a burnt tongue. Might as well chop an ear off while he was at it.

  “Don’t you dare go feeling sorry for yourself.” Jorie trailed a hand over her still-flat belly. She needed to be careful with that particular gesture if she wanted to wait the full twelve weeks to tell everybody the good news.

  “Practicing your mom voice already?”

  She raised a single eyebrow.

  “Jesus, Jorie. I just got punched in the face. Can you cut me a break?”

  She released an audible breath before snagging a plate from the counter, plopping a plain donut on it, and shoving it toward Sam. She never stayed angry for too long. The lack of frosting seemed to be the best she could do today.

  “So Jared was pretty pissed, huh?”

  Sam shook his head, immediately regretting the motion as the pain pulsed in his cheek and spread briefly to his temple and forehead. “Beyond pissed. Besides that one time he kissed my girlfriend when I was thirteen, he’s never given me a reason not to trust him. He’s an idiot, but he’d never go after a woman I was interested in. Even in these, the most absurd of circumstances.”

  Jorie sighed, her face finally softening. “Oh, Sammy. I don’t blame you for reacting the way you did.”

  He lowered the bag of ice and stared at her with raised brows. In the ten days since the showdown at Utz’s, he’d barely heard from her. Any friend of Jorie’s knew that meant she was unhappy.

  “Oh, you don’t?”

  “No, I don’t. You were well within your right to question something you felt uneasy about. Were you well within your right to insult her by holding her past against her? Or demanding she share every bit of herself with you while refusing to do the same yourself? No. No, you were not.”

  There it w
as. He lifted the ice to his eye again, mostly because it hurt but also so he’d have to look at her disapproving face with only one eye.

  “I tried to see her the morning after,” he said. “She’d already left.”

  Jorie nodded. She knew. She’d been there when he showed up at her door, hat in hand, and asked to speak with Sydney so he could apologize. Jorie’s face had twisted up as she explained that Sydney had already packed up her stuff and taken a train back into New York, claiming she needed a break from Pine Ridge.

  The knife had twisted in his heart. The night of Liv’s big reveal at Utz’s, he’d been so heartbroken, split wide open after watching her hit rock bottom, that he couldn’t expend a single ounce of energy more in kindness toward Sydney, a woman who held his heart in her hands. Years of pain built up over his father, his mother, and Liv spilled out over Sydney. The one person who didn’t deserve it.

  But Sydney hadn’t even given him the courtesy of letting him explain himself. Instead, she’d simply up and left. As if what they’d had never mattered at all.

  “Have you tried calling her?” Jorie asked.

  “Yes.” He didn’t want to have to say out loud that most of his calls went straight to voice mail, and every text he’d sent went unanswered. Maybe it was still too soon. Maybe she was still too angry.

  “So, what now?” Jorie asked.

  The doorbell over the bakery door jingled as the Cruz family entered, their seven-year-old twins bouncing around the shop, proving they didn’t need any more sugar. Sam slinked backward to avoid an awkward inquisition about his busted eye and took the opportunity to think things over.

  What now?

  The easy thing would be to forget Sydney Walsh had ever existed. Return to his life without anyone or anything tying him down. Maybe he could meet somebody new.

  His eye pulsed with fresh pain as he realized he’d applied too much pressure on the ice bag. A bitter laugh escaped his lips. Sure. Meet somebody new. Easy as that.

  Visions of Sydney played in his mind—her skin, her hair, her lip-press-into-smile—and his anger melted like the ice on his face. He didn’t want to forget her, didn’t want to move on with someone new. He wanted her. No substitutes.