by Vivian Lux
In the eight years since I left this town, I’d lived my life with no regrets. But that was because I had left my biggest regret back here, in Reckless Falls.
I was eighteen and stupid. So fucking far up my own ass about being the first in my family to go to college that I let my ego get in the way of love.
Autumn had too much dignity to beg me to stay. She waited for me to choose her.
And when I didn’t, she didn’t let me see her cry.
It was only by chance that I looked back and saw her eyes filling with tears and I’ve carried that picture in my head every day since.
I wonder if she still hates me.
Fuck it, I still hate myself.
Yeah, it would be a fucking mistake to track down Autumn. She probably left here a long time ago too. I never heard from her again after that day, so for all I knew, she’d joined the Peace Corps or maybe was doing that Teach For America thing she’d talked about.
I hoped she was okay.
I hoped she was happy.
But maybe it’d be best if I didn’t ask about her. There was no reason to open up that old wound. I was here for business, not pleasure. Although, if I needed pleasure there was always Brynn Reese, the pretty wild child with the flowers in her hair and loose attitudes about nudity and sex. She’d always been properly impressed with me and she probably still worked at her dad’s bar...
“Wait, stop here, please,” I called, purposefully derailing that train of thought with a sudden realization. “I need to run in to the liquor store.”
“Stop where, exactly, sir?”
I looked out the window. “Wait, isn’t Lolly’s Liquor Barn right there?”
“I see no barn, sir.”
“Shit. Did they knock it down?”
“Appears that way, sir.”
“Well, where the hell am I going to buy a bottle of something to help me deal with my brother?”
“I have no idea sir, I have never been here before,” he repeated. “There appears to be a convenience store up on the right.”
“Yeah, that’ll have to do. Fuck, nothing else is open? Christ, I forgot what a sleepy little shithole this place turns into in the winter.”
“Yes sir,” the driver replied. I couldn’t be certain if he was agreeing with my plan or with my assessment of Reckless Falls. I bristled at the thought that it might be the latter. I was allowed to make fun of this place. But no one else was.
“I’ll pull in here, sir.”
“Thanks... uh...”
“Langley, sir.”
This man had been driving me for the past six hours, but I only thought to ask his name now. I wondered why I noticed that and I wondered why it bothered me. It wouldn’t have back home in New York. “Want me to grab you anything, Langley?” I asked, hardly believing the words coming out of my mouth.
Langley looked like I had asked him if I should drop my pants and go running through the town square. “No, sir. I’m fine sir.” His eyes darted up to meet mine. “But thank you, sir.”
“Yeah, no problem,” I grunted as he opened the door for me and some weird little instinct made me duck my head just in case someone was driving by and saw me in some fancy-ass car. All the rest of the cars in the lot, all two of them, were modest sedans with snow tires and spots of rust around the wheel wells. I felt a tinge of embarrassment over my shiny luxury car.
Another thing I would never worry about in the city. There I wanted to be seen. I had an image of success to maintain and, as exhausting as it was, image was everything.
I inhaled sharply, taking in the smells of wood smoke and pine — the smells of my home in winter — before I shook my head to clear it and headed into the store.
Chapter Two
Autumn
Egg nog is disgusting.
There. I said it. Maybe this time I’ll remember and not try to gag it down when it’s offered to me.
But my mother believed that Christmas wasn’t Christmas without a cup of her homemade eggnog in hand. After a marathon cookie-baking session, she opened her fridge and let out such a cry of despair over the lack of eggs for eggnog that my oldest-daughter-guilt kicked into overdrive. “I’ll go grab some,” I promised her, shoving my arms into the oversized parka I inherited — or to be more accurate, stole — from my father.
“Really? Oh, Autumn thank you!” She stole a worried glance out the steamy kitchen window. “But it’s getting worse out there.”
I kissed her cheek. “Didn’t you teach me how to drive in the snow? I’ll be fine. Drink your noxious potion and I’ll be right back.”
My mother’s eyes gleamed at me from over the chipped candy cane mug that was her nog-receptacle of choice. The rum was already coloring her cheeks. “Would I be a bad mother if I told you to hurry?” she asked as she took a healthy slug.
I involuntarily gagged. “I won’t be a moment.”
The nog-gods must have smiled on my mother, because as I waited at the end of her drive, a plow went by, allowing me to jump right behind it and enjoy clear roads straight into town. Nice and Easy Mart actually had another car in the lot besides mine, which surprised me, and as I parked, I caught a glimpse of a really fancy looking car pulling in. Must be one of the vacationers, I thought. Coming in to spend the holiday at their lodge.
No one from Reckless Falls would have a car like that, that was for certain.
The flakes were falling thick and fast and everything was so silent and muffled I felt like I had cotton balls in my ears. I puffed my way to the door and pushed into the overheated warmth, immediately unwinding my scarf and unzipping my parka.
“Hey Mr. Foster!” I called out to the sad-looking old man behind the counter. “Thanks for staying open.”
“Hardly worth the effort,” he grumbled. “It’s just a few flakes, but people act like it’s a blizzard. I’ll tell you, back when I was a kid...”
“I know, right?” I said cheerily, breezing my way to the refrigerated back wall. “It’s terrible.” The jingle of the bell over the door made me sigh in relief that someone else was in here to absorb Joe Foster’s complaints. I just wanted to grab these eggs and get back....
“Autumn.”
At the sound of his voice, my heart skipped and I dropped the eggs. They splattered across the floor in front of me like a Jackson Pollack painting, but I didn’t even care because goosebumps had broken out over the whole of my body just hearing his voice again. Did I really just hear Cole?
I looked up and saw him standing there. Yes, my brain registered dully. That is Cole. He is here.
There was no emotion connected to this thought. Just a clinical observation of the facts.
Cole smiled his smile, the one I still saw when I closed my eyes. He stepped forward...
Wow, his shoes are really nice, I noted nonsensically. Then suddenly I stiffened as instinct took over. “Wait!” I waved him off.
But he didn’t listen to me. Like usual. He moved towards me... and stepped directly into the goopy, shattered egg yolks at my feet.
“Oh.” He looked down. “Yeah.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Yeah.”
“You dropped your eggs.”
“No kidding.”
“I feel like I should be making an egg joke here.”
I swallowed back my irritation. How in the hell is Cole Granger back from the fucking dead and standing in front of me trying to make egg jokes? Is this really happening?
“Please don’t.”
His eyes flicked up from his shoe. Goddamn. Those lashes. Goddamn. “Like maybe ask you how you like them in the morning?”
“Stop, Cole.”
“But I know that already. How you like your eggs. Fried over easy in an obscene amount of butter.”
Anger flashed in my veins. “You need to stop,” I said evenly, gritting my teeth.
His eyes softened. “Sorry, Autumn. I’m just... I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“It’s Christmas, Cole.”
; “Yeah. Uh, Merry Christmas.”
I waited for a beat. “I’m Jewish now. I converted.”
He looked mortified. Good. “Oh, shit, sorry. Happy Hanukkah.”
I could only hold out for a second before my lip twitched. “No I didn’t. I’m just messing with you.”
“Oh, so you can give me shit, but I can’t give you shit?” he challenged me, eyes twinkling. God, I always loved that dimple. It was only a certain smile that showed it, so when it appeared it always felt like a secret he kept, just for me.
Stop it, Autumn. Just fucking stop it. I lifted my chin.
“That’s right.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because you deserve to have shit given to you.”
It came out meaner than I wanted it to, and I could see that my words hit him like a blow. The cocky tilt of his head slumped forward and he kind of deflated. That wasn’t what I wanted to see, no matter how badly he’d hurt me. I took a deep breath. “Look, I didn’t mean...”
“No,” he exhaled through his teeth with a slight whistling sound. There were still snowflakes trapped in his hair, even in the extreme over-warmth of the store. I wanted to brush them out of his hair for him, but that would mean touching him and I wasn’t sure I could do that without wrapping my hands around his throat. He licked his lips, making them shine wetly, kiss-ably. “I deserved that.”
“Maybe you did at the time, but it’s been years.” I straightened my shoulders, proud of my diplomatic tone.
“I know. Too long.”
My diplomacy instantly wavered. “No,” I spat. “I wouldn’t say that.”
He deflated a bit more and a perverse part of me liked that I was hurting him. It was shitty and totally against the Christmas spirit, but fuck it. Cole Granger was an asshole and he’d broken my heart.
“You’re here for Christmas?” he asked, deftly changing the subject away from our whirlwind, doomed romance.
I nodded. It was too complicated to get into it much more than that. “Christmas and family stuff. But I live just outside of town now.”
“Really?” The shock of this revelation was evident in his voice. I guess he figured I was serious when I told him I was joining the Peace Corps.
I nodded. “Sometimes you just need to be by the people who love you.”
He winced again, and even though I hadn’t been trying to hurt him, I was glad I’d scored an unexpected point.
“So you’re like, a local again?”
“As local as you can get. I’m a teacher now.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
"Just like you wanted?"
"Just like I wanted," I said, folding my arms across my chest. Maybe my plans about marrying him had crashed and burned but that didn't mean I was going to let the rest of my life get screwed up too.
“What do you teach?” he asked, even though I could tell by the look in his eye that he knew the answer.
I nodded. “That's right. Sharing with occasional crowd control. I’m a kindergarten teacher. Just like I said I'd be.”
He blinked as he processed this new information. Was there sadness there, if only for a second? Fuck him. He didn't get to be sad about me moving on. He swallowed a little. "So Mrs. Hope retired. Finally. Good god, how old was she?”
“She was only sixty-five when she retired, Cole. She just seemed old because you were a kid.”
“She was ancient. Older than the dinosaurs.”
“And damned good at her job too. When she retired, they hired two of us to replace her.”
“Wow, really?”
“Me and Brynn Reese.”
This time when he winced I had no idea why. “There are that many kids in the school? Wow.”
“Town’s changing, Cole.”
“I noticed on the drive in. Not sure I like it that much.”
I had to laugh and I hated how he was still his charming self. It was impossible to stay mad at him and that was the problem. “It hasn’t changed that much. The core of it is still the same. Lots of people either stayed or are realizing that they missed home too much and are coming back.”
This time I had no idea what the look in his eyes meant. It seemed almost wistful, though I knew that Cole Granger had never been wistful in his life. Being wistful would mean he had to admit he missed something... and that he’d been wrong to leave....
Shit. Don’t think these thoughts. He knows you too well, he can...
“You thinking maybe I’m one of those people, Red?”
I’d forgotten how much I loved when he called me that. Loved and then hated it. I lifted my chin higher. “Well, you’re here at Christmas time. That’s a pretty good indication that you miss it here.”
I expected him to protest, but he just smiled his crooked smile. “Winter is the best season here.”
I nodded. “The frozen falls.”
“The smell of wood smoke from a far off chimney.”
“Ah, so poetic.”
“Oh, you like that? Is it turning you on?”
You know what turns me on, I didn’t say. I took a deliberate step back. Away from his maddening nearness. Being so close to him was doing strange things to my body. I felt like I’d lost my bearings, my internal compass needle spinning wildly, around and around. “Keep talking poetry at me, Slick.”
He grinned at the old nickname. The guy knew he could charm the pants off a scarecrow. It might be his only saving grace. “I also like fires when you’re inside too. The heat on your naked skin when you make love in front of a wood stove...”
“Jesus, Cole.”
“What? I’m telling you what I like about winter.”
My cheeks were flaming. “Well, stop.” Too many memories.
He leaned in, deftly stepping around the egg. “Sorry, Red.” I could smell the heat, the wet wool of his gorgeous peacoat, and him. He smelled the same as he did in my memories. “It was good to see you.”
“Good to see you too.” I bit my lip, trying to stop talking, to stem the tide of words, but my tongue just kept moving without my brain. “Where are you staying?”
“Derek’s.”
“How’s your brother doing?”
“Same. Chip on his shoulder the size of the rock of Gibraltar, so everything’s normal in Derek-land.”
I grinned. “Tell him I said hey.”
“I will.”
My tongue was moving again. “Cole?”
“Yes, Red?”
I grinned reflexively. “A couple of us are getting together at Reese’s pub tonight. I’m sure everyone would love to see you.”
The way he looked at me sent my heart racing. I could feel the blush spreading across my cheeks, even before he asked me, “Are you going to be there, Autumn?”
“I am.” My voice was remarkably composed, given the storm that raged inside of me.
He nodded once, as decisive as could be. “Then I’ll be there.”
“Okay,” I squeaked. My composure was cracking. “See you.”
I waited, staring at his broad back as he walked back up the aisle, grabbed something off the shelf and went over to the counter. I ducked behind an end-cap, listening to the rumbling, creaky sounds of Old Joe’s bitching. Then I waited some more, taking deep steadying breaths.
When the bell over the door jingled, I took a deep breath and began counting. When I reached sixty, I rushed blindly to the front and pushed the door open, hurtling into my car where I slammed the door shut behind me and sped off, my heart racing the whole way home.
It wasn’t until I was back in my mom’s driveway that I realized I had forgotten the eggs.
Chapter Three
Cole
My brother Derek was only two years older than me, but he wore those years like a funeral shroud, wrapping himself in his cares to the point where he was almost stooped over.
When I saw him standing there, on the porch outside of the secluded rented carriage house he'd sequestered himself in, I felt a small pit o
pen up in my stomach.
With it came the hollow feeling of regret. I should be here. Helping him. It wasn't exactly fair that he got stuck caring for our parents' place now that they'd fucked on out of here and into a Florida condo. It was just sort of how things worked out, proximity wise. And he was older too. So, that was sort of his job.
Or at least that's how I rationalized it to myself back in New York. But now that I was here, I wondered what kind of toll it was taking on him. Derek’s depression seemed to be on an uptick, or at least that’s what he’d been telling me whenever I bothered to call him up to check.
But his depression and alcoholism went hand-in-hand. And though he had quit the bottle — seemingly forever — two years back, I still worried to see the lines on his face. Something had happened. Something he refused to tell me about, and really could I blame him? The only contact we had these days was when I blew into town in my fancy hired car to judge the life he led up here and then left again a few days later. He didn't owe me the reason he'd stopped drinking, although I damn well wished he'd tell me anyway so I could stop worrying. Because with that worry came guilt. Would I always have to be suspicious of him? Was I always going to be left to wonder if he was off the wagon again?
And how would I even know? How would I even have the nerve to ask him, when I hadn’t seen him in so long?
"There's my little brother, the suit!" Derek called across the drive.
He was still an asshole. Guess I didn't need to be worrying so much about him after all.
"There's my big brother, the hick!" I snapped back smartly, grabbing my suitcase with my bare hand. I shoved my other hand in the pocket of my peacoat, cursing the fact that I’d forgotten my gloves back at my penthouse. I was risking frostbite out here. But where the fuck was I going to find gloves in Reckless Falls on Christmas Eve? Unless I maybe borrowed a pair from Derek.
But I had to give him more shit before then. “Hey, you got a couple coon dogs lying under the porch here, Derek?” I asked as I took the stairs up the front porch two at a time. “When did you go full-backwoods on me? This place is like something out of the movie Deliverance." It was actually really nice in a Reckless Falls sort of way. A rehabbed carriage house like this, located on the estate of some wealthy old guy, it was the kind of property I'd snap up and add to my portfolio in a heartbeat. Cole Granger, Director of Upstate Opportunity knew all about diamonds in the rough.