The older woman waved her off. “Accept it now.”
“He’s not bad,” Jennifer insisted.
“What is he?”
Jennifer didn’t have to search for the word. She’d already figured that much out. “Complicated.”
“Exactly.” The Duchess nodded. “That’s another word for dark, my dear.”
The Duchess’s words ran through Jennifer’s head a month later, but she pushed them aside. Maybe Paul didn’t share everything, but he was good to her. Understood her. When she talked about all she wanted to do in the world and how she had to leave home to do it, he played along.
“We should pick a time in the future for us to get everything done and then get back together.” Jennifer delivered her suggestion as she munched on a handful of chips. “You know, when we’re old.”
His knees pressed against hers where they sat next to each other on the steps outside her father’s office. “Give me a number.”
“Thirty.”
He peeked into the near empty bag before scooping out some crumbs. “That’s a long time from now.”
“You need to play your music and get the band started, then tour.” She ticked off his dreams because she knew them as well as her own.
“True.”
“I want to travel and learn everything I can.”
“About what?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Okay. So we agree on thirty.”
She loved that he didn’t get all twitchy when she talked about the future. She assumed they’d stay in touch, and so did he. There was a strange comfort in that.
“But we’ll be together between now and then,” she said.
“Of course.”
She brushed the chip dust off on her skirt and handed him the bag. “Here.”
“What’s this for?”
“We’ll keep this until that day.”
He leaned over and treated her to a quick kiss on the lips. “Deal.” “Deal.”
Two
There’s a reason your first love is called your first and not your only.
—Grandma Gladys, The Duchess
PAUL COULDN’T TAKE ONE MORE SECOND OF HER cross-examination. All he wanted to do was walk her home. The whole ten-thousand-questions, give-me-your-life-story thing was pissing him off. They’d been dating for two years. She should be over this by now.
“Paul?”
He stopped in the middle of the abandoned railroad tracks that ran behind her house and stared at her. They were so close to the yard. So close to her family’s kitchen, where they could sit and get something to drink and he wouldn’t have to dodge the talk.
When she started talking again, he lost it. “Enough.”
Jennifer’s head snapped back as if he’d slapped her. “What?”
“We’ve been walking for ten minutes and you haven’t stopped screaming at me since.” By the way her mouth dropped opened he guessed he’d insulted her. “A guy can only take so much.”
He said the last part in a softer tone. He knew from experience getting angry only tipped off her temper. Then they’d fight and break up for a few days. They did it many times, and it ticked him off each one. She’d turn cold and distant, and he’d be the one left out until she agreed to talk to him again. Eventually, they’d get back together, but the cycle got old fast.
He rushed to calm her down. “Can’t we just walk?”
She pulled her hand away when he tried to hold it. “How can you say I screamed? I didn’t even raise my voice at you.”
“That’s not the point.”
She folded her arms across her chest and gave him that look he hated. The one that reminded him of a scolding teacher. “Where were you today?” she asked.
“Around.”
“Not at school.”
Looked like she wasn’t going to let up, but since he hated all the questions he wasn’t going to make it easy for her. “No.”
“Why?”
His mind shut off. He tried to come up with an excuse, but nothing popped into his head. His defenses shot up right after. “I didn’t feel like it.”
“What kind of answer is that?”
“You sound like your father.”
“Paul.”
“Look, I work. I’ve always worked. You know that.” She didn’t know the rest. About why or how much.
“What about school?”
“I prefer work.” Even that was a little lie. He worked because he had to and hadn’t been enrolled in school all year. He hung around because of her. To see her. To be with her.
“What aren’t you sharing?”
“Nothing.”
She looked about two seconds away from stomping her foot. “Paul!”
“You and your stupid sharing thing.” He mumbled the words under his breath but knew she’d heard him when her eyes grew wide. “Look, it’s not that easy.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He blew out a long breath. His skinned crawled with the sudden need to get out of there, but he ignored the instinct this one time and held his ground. “Years ago, before we met, I went to another school.”
“Which one?”
“Not important.” Telling her about a home for troubled boys would put that pitying look in her eyes, and he sure didn’t want that. “The point is that I was a kid and went on this school camping trip. While in the park, a friend and I got lost. We didn’t know we were lost until we were, and by then it was too late. It was one of those ‘just a few more feet’ things until we were so far from camp and everything looked the same that we had no hope of getting back.”
Her arms fell to her sides as she stepped in closer. “What did you do?”
“We yelled for help and circled around. I kept trying to look for something familiar, but I had never been there before and . . . well, every tree looked like every other tree. Nothing stood out.”
“What happened?”
“We wandered around for three days.”
She grabbed his hands in hers. “What?”
“There was a search, and a helicopter rescue team eventually spotted us.”
“Were you hurt?”
He shrugged off the memories of the cold and all those mosquito bites, of being afraid and terrified of showing it. “Nothing serious.”
“So what happened?”
“I learned that I have to be smart and fend for myself. That I can’t be in a position where I have to depend on help like that again.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“What?” he asked.
“That’s the wrong lesson.”
He shook his head. Only Jennifer would make a declaration like that. “How do you figure?”
“You should have learned that you need people. That sharing things—in that case, where you were—will keep you out of trouble.”
He thought about dropping her hands, but she held on tight enough to crush his thumb. “Uh, no.”
“Sounds like the right lesson to me.”
“You’re such a girl.”
She smiled. “Thank you for noticing.”
He threw an arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight against his side as he started walking. “Oh, I noticed.”
Her hand rested on the top of his belt at the small of his back. “I’m sorry you got lost.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“But still.”
He kissed her forehead. “We’re all lost sometimes.”
She tilted her head back and stared up at him with the sun lighting her face. “That sounds pretty deep.”
“But true.” He kissed her then, taking his time even as they stumbled over the uneven railroad ties beneath their sneakers.
When he finally lifted his head she continued to stare up at him in that way. The one that made him feel invincible and important.
“Are you lost now?” She whispered the question against his neck.
“Not when I’m with you.”
/> Jennifer sat in her small university apartment and stared at her closed textbooks on the mattress in front of her. Business classes. English classes. She tried to think about anything except the man hovering in her bedroom doorway.
The years had passed. He’d filled out across the shoulders and still wore that sexy smile that made her heart thump until she thought it would pound right out of her chest. Seeing him made her doubts disappear and her judgment cloud.
So much had happened, yet little had changed. He held back information, important information, and then ducked when confronted. They kept moving, but she feared they were racing in different directions. She still wasn’t sure where she was going or what she wanted from life, but she was even less sure of him. Not of her feelings but of the world he wanted for himself and how she fit into that.
Paul pushed away from the door frame and stepped into the room. His hands stayed in his back pocket and his jean jacket hung open to show the tee underneath. “How did you find out?”
“Of all the questions you could ask, that’s the one you pick?” She threw her pen against the desk and watched it bounce then roll. She didn’t even try to stop it when it fell off the edge and hit the floor.
He didn’t back down. “Where did you hear it?”
“A friend told me.”
He balanced a hand against her desk but didn’t move in closer or lean down. “And that’s why you’re angry. Because you got it through a third party.”
She looked at him then. Really looked. Saw the locked jaw and blank stare. For all the maturity he shouldered in working so hard and paying his own way, he remained clueless about simple relationship dynamics. “Do you really not know why?”
Paul shrugged the way he always shrugged when he wanted to avoid a conversation. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“You got in trouble and thrown in jail.” To anyone else, it would be a tragedy. To Paul, it wasn’t even worth mentioning during a dinner date.
“One day. And I’m out.” He scoffed. “It’s fine.”
It was the exact opposite of fine in Jennifer’s mind. “It’s one more thing.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You never told me you dropped out of school to work full time. I had to find out about it later, well after the fact.”
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Or that you were on your own in that basement all those years ago. That you weren’t living with your family.” She used her fingers to tick off the list of the facts he never shared and only admitted after she confronted him.
“I’ve been emancipated since I was fifteen. It’s—”
She threw her head back and groaned before staring him down again. “Another ‘no big deal’ thing, right?”
Clear emotion passed over his face now. Anger. “Why does any of this matter? You think not having the official degree makes me less of a person?”
She pointed at him. “Don’t do that. I’ve never judged you like that.”
“Fair enough.”
“It’s not about what’s happened to you. It’s about your failure to communicate.”
He shook his head. “Women always say that.”
“In this case, we’re right.”
“So what are you trying to tell me?”
The one thing she never wanted to say but kept saying. They’d broken up several times. They’d been apart long enough to date other people before finding their way back to each other again. The scenario stayed the same. And so did their issues.
She was ready to move on and figure out what she wanted from life. He wanted to stay where he was and hide the things he never wanted to say. It was a combination destined for a raging explosion. They needed space before they blew apart, never to come together again.
“We need to see other people.” It actually hurt to say the words, as if each one was sliced out of her.
He didn’t look any better than she felt. He closed his eyes on a long exhale. “You’re doing this again?”
“Tell me what’s changed.”
“Damn it, Jennifer.” He clamped his lips together.
She could almost see him counting to ten. She concentrated on that instead of the ball of anxiety splashing around in her stomach. When he walked out—and she knew from experience he would pick that over fighting to stay—she would crumble. Just fall to the floor in a puddle of tears.
Until then, she sat there with her hands clenched on her lap and tried not to break. Tried not to think about the sharp pains in her head and the stranglehold on her heart.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
No. “Yes.”
“Here.” He reached into his pocket and dropped an envelope on her desk.
“What are these?” By the time she unfolded the flap and looked up he was back at the door. She pulled out a stack of photos. “Paul?”
“I took those when we were at the park last week.” He swallowed hard enough for her to see his throat move. “They’re yours now.”
With numb fingers she flipped through the top few. All photos of her, carefree and smiling. The wind taking her long hair and the laughter fierce enough on the page for her to hear the faint memories of it in her head.
He’d captured the sunshine she felt inside. The moments of pure pleasure.
He saw so much and understood so little.
She slipped to the floor with the photos cradled in her hands. With each one, the tears fell harder. She leaned against the leg of the desk and let the pain wash over her. This time could be the end . . . and the possibility doubled her over.
Three
Be sure before you give up on anything.
—Grandma Gladys, The Duchess
PAUL HADN’T SEEN JENNIFER IN ALMOST TWO YEARS. Finding the old photo of her at the back of his drawer got his mind wandering. He tried hours of hard labor to drive it back out again, but it didn’t work. Her image played in his head until he couldn’t think of anything else.
He draped one arm over his eyes as he lay on the beat-up plaid couch in his apartment. After all this time, he still saw her face when he closed his eyes. There had been other women, but she wouldn’t leave his head.
Distance didn’t help either. She was in Toronto. He was almost four hours away in Windsor.
He worked, he played in his band. He lived his life, but still . . .
She’d spent her high-school years breaking up with him, getting back together, and then dumping him again. They tried for a few years after that before drifting apart. Somehow more than seven years had passed and everything they promised fell away. It was as if they never meant anything to each other.
She had been so rigid, wouldn’t listen to his side or let him explain in his own time and in his own way. Sure, he’d made mistakes and ran with a crowd that made her nervous, but he handled it, and she should have known it would be okay. Maybe he he hadn’t told her everything, but how did a guy tell his girl that he was out of the house and bouncing around on his own before hitting high school?
When you didn’t have anything, you had to do some questionable things to earn money, to survive. But Jennifer, with her close family and warm house, would never understand that. His life was so outside her experience. She was so perfect and untouched, and he’d been desperate not to suck her into his world.
And she threw him away.
Even as his brain built a wall against her, his body ached. She was so beautiful, with wide hazel eyes and a smoking body that drove him wild. The shoulder-length brown curls from high school had grown longer, straighter and darker the last time he saw her. The glowing smile, the hitch in her voice when he touched her—the memory of it all drove him wild.
He clenched his hand into a fist against his thigh and tried not to think about her and everything that had gone wrong. His head buzzed with the loss.
After a few seconds, his eyes popped open and he glanced around the room. The buzz came from outside his body. The phone was ringing.
He re
ached over his head and grabbed it. His greeting came out in a voice raspy with need. “Hey.”
“Paul?”
He blinked a few times. Not possible.
“Hello?” The uncertainty in her voice came through the line loud and clear.
He shook his head, trying to figure out how his deepest fantasies had sprung to life. “Jennifer? Is that you?”
She blew out a breath. “You remember.”
As if he could forget anything about her. Even the smile in her voice sounded the same. “Of course.”
“I worried that . . . well, it’s not important.”
“I was just thinking about you.” He blurted it out knowing she would never believe him. He still didn’t believe the timing. Her husky laugh vibrated through him. “You were thinking about me. I was thinking about you. How convenient.”
“Not the word I’d use, but yeah.” He didn’t want to question his luck in this moment, but he had to know. “Why are you calling me now?”
She hesitated, and the silence grew.
“Jennifer?”
“I missed you.”
The words knocked the breath out of him. “Me too,” he rushed out once he regained his voice.
“I wasn’t sure you’d want to hear from me. Because of how it ended.”
He bit back the words “Which time?” and went with something more neutral. Now that she had made a move and he had her talking, he wasn’t about to mess it up. “You were furious.”
“You lied to me.”
A familiar tension built in his gut. He clenched his jaw and mentally beat it back. “I didn’t tell you everything.”
“It’s the same thing.”
He refused to argue with her. Instead, he sighed, conceding this round to her. “I learned my lesson. Trust me.”
Losing her—again and again—had cost him something. As hard as he tried to wipe her from his head and move on, he was only going through the motions. He missed her like hell. Wanted her. Needed to see her, hear her laugh, watch her face as her mind ran in different directions and she rushed to get the words out.
He loved that about her. The fiery excitement with which she met every challenge. Every challenge but him.
But he didn’t want to rehash. Definitely didn’t want to run through the details on his rough home life or finally explain the stint in jail for a dumb prank.
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