Willowleaf Lane

by Thayne, RaeAnne

  He looked rumpled and gorgeous, and she couldn’t believe five minutes earlier her hands had been under his shirt, splayed on the warm bare skin of his back. She remembered that incredible moment of flying and she wanted more.

  “Why not?”

  She sighed. She really, really didn’t want to talk about this, not when she was all loose and relaxed and feeling wonderful.

  “I was fat, Spence. You have to remember. So fat you couldn’t even bear to go to a girl’s choice dance with me.”

  “Whoa. What?” He raked a hand through his hair, and she saw genuine confusion in his expression. “I remember something about a dance, and you backed out at the last minute. You were sick or something, right?”

  Okay, happy feeling gone. “Right. I backed out.”

  He frowned at her tight tone. “Isn’t that what happened?”

  “Technically, yes. I canceled.”

  “What else happened?” he demanded. “If I did something, I’d sure as hell like to know.”

  Okay, apparently she could slip a notch further down on the humiliation scale. She was going to have to talk about the darkest moment of her adolescence—with the architect of her shame.

  All the remembered pain and hurt washed back, inky, bitter.

  She couldn’t have this conversation with him here in her bedroom, where a few moments ago they had been tangled together so deliciously on her bed.

  Without another word, she slipped from the bed and walked back to her living room. After a pause, he followed her.

  Oh, how she suddenly longed for the days when men still wore hats. It must have been so easy to just hand a man his hat when a woman was done with him and send him on his way.

  “I really don’t want to talk about this right now. It happened years ago.”

  “Why didn’t we go to that dance together, Charlotte? Tell me.”

  He wasn’t going to stop. Having grown up with six older brothers, she knew that implacable tone of voice and knew he wouldn’t rest until he had wormed the information he wanted out of her. She might as well just tell him, get it over with.

  “Fine,” she finally said. “We didn’t go to the dance because I...I heard you.”

  He gave her a blank stare. “Heard me what? Can you be a little more specific?”

  Amazing how one moment in time could have such a lasting impact on a person’s life. She had the entire conversation memorized, burned into her brain as if etched there by a soldering iron.

  “It was after school, two days before the dance. Thursday afternoon. You were working at your other job at the hardware store.”

  It had been a gorgeous April day, she remembered, one of those rare spring afternoons when it seemed the long mountain winter was finally done.

  She knew he had a baseball game at another school the next day so she wanted to talk to him Thursday to work out all the details of their date. Though she had looked for him all that day at school, their schedules hadn’t coincided.

  She had been so excited, she remembered now, beyond thrilled. Dreams sometimes did come true! Spence Gregory had actually said yes when she had summoned every nerve she possessed (and several she didn’t) and asked him to the final girl’s choice dance of his high school career.

  He was graduating in a month and was already close to signing to play major league baseball. This was her very last chance.

  She had built up so many plans for that one dance, had invested way too many unrealistic expectations, including the secret, most cherished dream, that he would see her in the awesome new formal dress she’d bought in Denver and declare undying love for her.

  She had decided at fifteen that loving somebody who only wanted you for a friend was just about the most painful thing in the world, and she had been desperate to come up with a way for him to see the real her.

  “And?” Spence asked now, and she jerked her mind back to the present, to find him watching her with an impatient sort of curiosity.

  “I needed to talk to you about what time I was picking you up for the dance. Well, what time my friend Patty was picking you up. We were doubling with her and Matt Barnes, and since she had a driver’s license, she was driving.”

  He doesn’t care about that, she told herself. Get to the miserable part.

  She let out a breath, amazed at how this memory still burned, years later. “When I showed up, Mr. Litchfield told me you were in the stockroom unloading a new delivery.”

  She could almost feel that moment, the metallic and rubber scent of the hardware store, the squeak of her shoes on the old wood floor, the cramped, tight aisles.

  “You were talking with Ronnie McCombs.”

  He blinked. “Wow. There’s someone I haven’t thought about in years. Wonder what he’s doing now.”

  “He joined some kind of survivalist cult a few years ago and moved to Montana, last I heard.”

  “The guy always was a bit of a whack job, as I remember. He was a good team manager but used to drive me crazy, always wanting to know every detail about my life. Parties I went to, classes I was in. He called me a couple years after high school to see if I could get him a job with the Pioneers but I had to tell him I didn’t have that kind of pull.”

  She wondered if Spence had any idea of all the people who had wanted to be like him. Even in high school, he had an air of command that drew people to him, made them instinctively want to be around him. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Ronnie McCombs had only taken a job at the hardware store in order to hang out with Spence.

  “So what did Ronnie McCombs have to do with us not going on a date?” he asked.

  She sighed. So much for hoping he would be sidetracked enough to forget what had originally started the whole conversation.

  “When I walked to the stockroom, neither of you noticed me. I overheard him asking who was taking you to the girl’s choice dance.”

  Even after all these years, the pain could still slice sharply.

  He frowned. “I told him, didn’t I?”

  She wanted to make something up, something benign and relatively harmless but couldn’t think quickly enough—and besides, he sounded as if he genuinely wanted to know what happened. Maybe it would be cathartic to tell him, sort of like a stomach being pumped after taking poison.

  “Oh, yes. You told him you were going with me. You were quite nice about it but Ronnie laughed and said, ‘Big fat Candy Caine? Why are you going out with that cow? Man, she’s so big her feet don’t get wet when she showers. Be careful, man. A guy could suffocate in that rack.’”

  Yes, she had the whole conversation memorized. He could make of that what he wanted.

  “He said that? What an ass. I hope I decked him.”

  She couldn’t say anything. Everything would have been different if Spence had punched Ronnie—or at least stood up for her. They were friends, after all. She had helped him get a passing grade in English class for four years running. She would have thought that meant something.

  “Okay, I didn’t deck him.” His expression shifted from annoyed to embarrassed as he correctly interpreted her silence. “That doesn’t explain why you had to back out of our date, just because some weird little prick made a rude comment.”

  She picked up a pillow and hugged it to herself, unable to speak. Good grief. Why had she ever started on this excruciatingly uncomfortable conversation? She should have enjoyed her first real orgasm and just kept her mouth shut about her inexperience. If she had, by now said inexperience wouldn’t have been an issue.

  “That’s not everything, is it?” he asked, wariness in his voice, as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the rest.

  She shook her head, remembering the pain cutting through layers and layers of flesh to the bone, of hearing someone she had loved with all the passion of her silly fifteen-year-
old heart say things that devastated so deeply.

  “No. That’s not everything.” She took a deep breath and faced him. “You didn’t deck him. You didn’t even disagree with him. In fact, you told him it was a pity date. You didn’t know how to say no when I asked you out because you owed my father. You and your mother worked for my pop and he had paid for your sports fees all through high school.”

  “Charlotte.”

  She went on as if she didn’t hear him. “You also added that no way in hell would you be going anywhere near my giant rack. You didn’t even plan to dance, if you could avoid it. You were going to wrap things up with me as early as you possibly could, and then you had a date to meet Becky Brinkerhoff at her house by ten. Her parents were out of town, and you planned to spend all weekend getting laid.”

  He growled a quite appropriate oath but she went on as if she didn’t hear him.

  “I didn’t want my fat butt to be the one thing standing in the way of your fun or be a pity date only because of my father, so I told you I was sick. So did you?”

  He blinked. “Did I...?”

  “Spend the weekend with Becky Brinkerhoff?”

  He didn’t answer but she saw the truth in his eyes. How ridiculous, that she could still be hurt by that, all these years later.

  She gave a ragged little laugh. “In the interest of fairness to you, I should add that I do remember that most of the time you were nice to me. That was the only time in all the years we knew each other that I ever heard you say anything...hurtful.”

  “Damn. I’m sorry, Charlotte. I was a bigger ass than Ronnie McCombs.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes. It does. We were friends. Friends don’t treat each other that way.”

  “I had a stupid crush on you. You had to know.”

  He raked a hand through his hair but didn’t deny he’d known. Mortified heat burned in her stomach and the fat girl who still lived inside her skin wondered if that was the only reason he was here kissing her, touching her, making her feel so many wonderful things—because he had some vague idea that she was one of the few in town he might be able to bring around again. She had worshipped him once. How tough would it be to convince her to idolize him again?

  The worst realization of all was that he might not be completely wrong.

  She pushed that thought away as unworthy of both of them.

  “It doesn’t matter. It was years ago,” she repeated. The words hid so much misery, she ached for the remembered pain of being fifteen and in love with someone completely unreachable. “I’m not that fat shy girl anymore standing in the doorway at Litchfield’s Hardware with my heart in little pieces at my feet. We’re both different people.”

  “I was a prick in high school, cocky as hell—especially toward the end of my senior year when the scouts were already filling my head with all these dreams of how drastically my life would change after I signed that first big contract. That’s still no excuse.”

  He had been nineteen, with the world at his feet. Why would he have wanted to waste even a minute with a homely awkward fat young girl? She still wondered that.

  “So back to the point at hand,” she went on, before she lost her nerve, “as you can probably imagine, after my one disastrous foray into the dating scene, I wasn’t particularly motivated to ask anybody else out after that, and there weren’t that many guys around here willing to look past my weight or my shyness.”

  “What about college?”

  “I dated a few times, but there was never any kind of spark. After I came back to Hope’s Crossing, I told myself I was too busy building up Sugar Rush to have much of a social life. I was still heavy but by then I had a little more confidence in myself to know that wasn’t the sum total of my parts. I’m funny, I’m kind, I’m compassionate.”

  “I agree,” he said softly.

  “I knew all that but I still wasn’t taking care of myself. When Dylan nearly died in Afghanistan, it was a wake-up call that life was...passing me by, because of my own choices. I knew I needed to make some changes.”

  “You do look fantastic.”

  “I still have a ways to go, mainly toning and strengthening, but I finally feel as good about the outside as I should have all along about everything I had to offer on the inside. Things I can’t really blame a teenage boy for not seeing.”

  He reached a hand out and gripped her fingers. “I wish I could put things right somehow. Make up for what I don’t even remember saying.”

  She really should have slept with him when she had the chance, she thought ruefully. They certainly couldn’t go there now because she would forever be wondering if he was only trying to make it up to her.

  “Please. Not necessary. Yes, you broke my heart, but what girl survives being a teenager without having a little piece of her dreams smashed to bits? It’s a rite of passage, isn’t it? I can tell you that after that, I became far more selective in the caliber of person I trusted with my heart.”

  “Um, ouch.”

  Despite the tumult of emotions that lingered from dredging up this painful episode in her life, a little bubble of laughter emerged at his pained expression.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.” It wasn’t true anyway. She hadn’t trusted anyone with her heart after Spence. “Really, I still find it quite amazing you agreed to go with me in the first place, even if it was only out of a sense of obligation to Pop. Plenty of teenage guys in your situation would have been far more concerned about maintaining their Stud of the Year position in the eyes of their friends. They wouldn’t have cared about repaying a debt of honor to someone who had helped them and certainly wouldn’t have taken it to the extreme of agreeing to go out with any fat daughters.”

  “Whatever I said to Ronnie, my obligation to your dad wasn’t the only reason I said yes, Charlotte. We were friends,” he repeated. “You were always good to me, even when I was a jerk. If I hadn’t been such a self-absorbed ass, I would have been smart enough to see all those wonderful qualities beneath the surface and asked you out myself.”

  A tiny corner of her heart wanted to ask if he would have been here with her right now if she hadn’t lost eighty pounds but that was one of those impossible questions. They both probably knew the answer, and it didn’t matter anyway. She had lost the weight. He obviously found her attractive now—and more important, she had the confidence in herself to know she was much more than that.

  “Now that we’ve skipped hand-in-hand down that particularly cheerful memory lane, you should probably go. I imagine Peyton is wondering what’s happened to her father.”

  He made a face. “I doubt that. She’s probably hoping I don’t come back so she can take my credit card and buy a one-way plane ticket back to Portland.”

  “She’ll come around,” she said, grateful the conversation had turned to his daughter instead of her. “She asked me to go with her to a bead class next week. Did she tell you that?”

  “She didn’t mention it. A bead class. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

  “I think so. It’s taught by Claire’s daughter, Macy, who is around Peyton’s age. Maybe this will be the start of a solid friendship that will help her feel more settled here.”

  “I hope so.”

  She rose pointedly, wishing again for those darn hats. A nifty fedora would come in really handy right now to get him to take the hint that she wanted him to go.

  He did rise but gave her a searching look. “I don’t feel like we can leave things like this between us.”

  “Like what? We cleared the air, we reminisced about old times, we hashed out in great lengths why I’m still a virgin and likely to remain one for some time. I’d say we’ve covered everything.”

  He shook his head. “You make me smile, Charlotte. It’s been a long time since anyone or anything has.”
>
  Before she knew what he intended, he pulled her to him and wrapped her in his arms. After a startled moment, she hugged him back, aware that this soft, sweet tenderness was more seductive than any heated kiss.

  “You should know,” he murmured against her hair, “I’m not a stupid kid anymore, too self-absorbed to see what’s in front of me.”

  She closed her eyes, already aching at the pain she had a feeling was in store for her, then found just a particle more grit, enough to step away and hold open the door. “Good night, Spence.”

  He studied her for a long moment then kissed her softly one last time and walked out into the night.

  Though she wanted to call him back, drag him to her bedroom to finish what they had started, she firmly closed the door behind him.

  She was in serious trouble here. She had mostly mended from that cruel betrayal. It hadn’t been easy, and after a brief bout with unhealthy habits that hadn’t worked out, she had once more turned to muting the pain with more unhealthy habits, including copious amounts of ice cream and macaroni and cheese.

  She was halfway in love with Spence all over again. Maybe even a smidgen more than that, but who was keeping score?

  Somehow she suspected he had far more ability now to leave her devastated.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE LIGHTS WERE off at his house. So much for Charlotte’s theory that Peyton was pacing the floors, wondering where her father was. She was probably sound asleep in bed, exactly where she was supposed to be.

  He sat in the driveway for a moment before going inside, still reeling from the combined force of all the evening’s events. How was a guy supposed to process so many shocks in one night?

  He didn’t know which he found more astonishing. That moment when—without knowing any of the facts—she had expressed complete faith in his innocence would probably hit close to the top. He could have told her the complete story, all the ugly details, but she hadn’t needed them. She had quietly told him she believed in him, and the sweetness of it still overwhelmed him.