One Last Chance: Small Town Second Chance Romance

by Amelia Gates

  In all honestly, I just wanted to go to bed and forget everything and anything that happened in the past twenty-four hours. But since Daisy and I still weren’t communicating by phone, I had no way out of our date without just standing her up entirely, which would only cause more problems going forward. So I finished my work a lot later than I wanted to, showered more quickly than I should have, and set out on foot for Daisy’s place.

  It would have been faster to take the truck, but if I didn’t deal with this black mood it would wreck her whole night. I hoped the muggy night air and the exercise would clear my head and the walk would put enough distance between me and my problems to forget them for a while, but I wasn’t too hopeful. Monday seemed to have it out for me, and I didn’t honestly believe that it would get any better from there.

  Chapter 18

  I adjusted the knick-knacks on my shelf for the four thousandth time, then straightened my comforter again. Showered, shaved, and dressed in my most alluring nightgown, I still couldn’t sit still. I wanted everything to be perfect—a tall task for my shabby little room, but one I was determined to achieve.

  It didn’t help my nerves that Kash was late. I’d had my music playing just slightly louder than usual for hours now. My dad was snoring away in the living room, and my mom had been in bed for an hour. I tried to distract myself with a book, but it was hopeless. I would read a word or two, then notice something out of my periphery which would look better if I moved it slightly to the left or right. Some things ended up on my closet floor after multiple adjustments still couldn’t make them look right to my eye.

  I hadn’t been this nervous to show off my room since my last sleepover party when I was twelve. I didn’t know why I was now. It wasn’t like Kash had never been in there before, but maybe that was the problem. Maybe I was trying to show more growth, more maturity, than I had actually developed in the last six years. I didn’t want him walking in and seeing the same old, threadbare stuffed animals which had been on my shelves before he left. I wanted him to see me as the grown woman I was, but being with him made me feel like a teenager all over again. The fact that I still lived with my parents didn’t help matters either.

  To say I was conflicted would be an understatement. Even after I forced myself to sit on my bed and read, I kept one eye on the clock. My window was open. All Kash had to do was whistle. Then I’d give him the all-clear, he’d come inside—then the moment I’d been dreaming of for months (years, if I was honest with myself) would begin. I strained my ears, but there was nothing. I re-read the same sentence five times without absorbing any of it and didn’t even care.

  Where the hell was he?

  Just when I’d nearly given up hope, nearly believing that he’d chickened out, I heard it. That not-quite-a-bird whistle from the empty lot beside my house. Heart pounding, I bounded to the window and hung halfway out of it, beaming with excitement. My face fell when I saw his expression.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered.

  He shook his head, his eyes dark and distant. I touched his face and he turned his head to kiss my palm, then buried his eyes in my hand and sighed. This wouldn’t do at all. He obviously needed to talk, which was sure to disturb my parents. Even if he kept his voice low, his deep masculine tone would be alien in my parents’ house, a noise to be investigated at the end of a shotgun.

  I held up a finger, silently asking him to wait there. He sighed and shuffled his feet, looking up at me from under his brows with an impatient sort of mild agony. I threw a sweater and pants on over my short little nightgown, stepped into my shoes, and slipped out the window the way I’d done dozens of times before. Kash caught me around my waist and pulled me into an embrace which smelled of desperate fury. Concerned, I kissed him hard, then took his hand and led him toward the walking path at the back of the circle. It led up to the top of a hill overlooking the river, another spot we’d claimed as our own when we were younger.

  The flat stone we always perched on seemed smaller now, and the river seemed duller and browner, but it was still our spot. I sidled up next to him until we were shoulder to shoulder, then put my hand over his.

  “So? What’s on your mind?” I asked.

  “Right now? I’m disappointed in myself, I guess. I know you were looking forward to tonight. I feel like I screwed that up.”

  “Shut up,” I said, nudging him. “You’re going through something. You don’t get to martyr yourself for me, Mr. Lawson. Now, what’s going on?”

  He sighed heavily and pushed his hand through his hair. “I’m getting laid off. Budget cuts to the road crew. There isn’t anywhere else and anyone else hiring in this town. Well, nothing that’ll give me money that makes sense. I might be able to get a couple part-time gigs, but that won’t satisfy Breaker. He’s expecting me to find a job in a town with no jobs. This whole shit just feels too impossible.”

  A muscle jumped in his jaw and he looked down at his hands. I rubbed his back, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “That’s not all, is it?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Leroy’s going through withdrawals right now. Blames me for not getting him more.”

  Kash pushed himself to his feet and stalked across the top of the hill. He snatched up a stone and threw it as hard as he could toward the creek. “And who can blame him? I used to be the hookup. Me and Hunter, the one-stop mobile shop for all your brain-bending needs. How many people ended up like Leroy when I left?”

  “How bad was he?” I asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

  Kash groaned. “Not too bad. Not yet. He’s hurting, though. Irrational. Itchy. Tried to take my head off with his bare hands, then started bawling like a baby when I flattened him.” He paused and ran his hands frustratedly down his face. “I didn’t—why didn’t I see what that was doing to people?”

  I stood and went to his side. “You did. Remember? This isn’t the first time you’ve had this epiphany, Kash. But the first time, Hunter was there. He reminded you that the only way out of this town was to make more than it’ll pay you to stay. That hasn’t changed.”

  Kash scoffed bitterly. “Are you telling me that I need to go back to selling? Because trust me, I’ve already considered it.”

  I gasped. “You haven’t! Damn it, Kash--!”

  “Hey, I said I considered it, not that I’d done it. Will you listen? You’re right. The only way out is to get more money, a lot more money. Even more now.” He glared down at the water, fists clenched.

  “Wait. What do you mean? I thought you couldn’t leave anyway.”

  “I can’t. Legally, I can’t. But I can’t stay either, can I? The stipulations Breaker put on me are just not possible around here. I can’t make the money he wants me to make without breaking the law. I can’t get the jobs he wants me to get because they don’t exist. If I stay here, I’m going to end up in prison. If I leave—well, maybe if I go far enough, I can get out of his reach.”

  “How far would you have to go? How much would it cost?”

  He looked up at the moon, shining full and bright over the empty expanse. “I was thinking about that. Several thousand dollars, probably, and I’d have to work quickly. It’s pretty easy to get into Mexico from here. Once I’m there, he wouldn’t be able to find me.”

  I blinked in shock. “Mexico? Kash, that’s something a fugitive would say. You didn’t even do the crime you were accused of, why are you acting like this?”

  He exploded, throwing his hands helplessly overhead. “Because it doesn’t fucking matter, Daisy! It doesn’t matter that I didn’t kill Hunter and it doesn’t matter that there’s no work, it doesn’t matter that I can’t possibly pay my keeper without the work, and it doesn’t matter that Leroy is scratching his skin off. There’s no winning here. The best I can hope to do is scrape enough together to blow this town and hope to God you come with me.”

  I stepped in front of him, glaring. I grabbed his face in my hands and forced him to look at me. “Listen to me, Kash. You are
not going back to selling drugs. You are not going back to prison. And you are not going to run away to goddamn Mexico. You know why? Because if you do, I will never speak to you again. Is that what you want?”

  Dark fury whirled in his eyes. “So if I go back to prison for failing to do the impossible things Breaker demands that I do, you’ll never talk to me again? So supportive, Daisy.”

  His cruel sarcasm cut but didn’t wound me. I was too pissed off for that. I dropped my hands to my sides. “Way to dodge the point, Kash.”

  “What the hell is the point, then?”

  I turned to walk away from him. I was too angry to make a sensible argument, and he was too upset to hear me. There was no point in my staying up there with him.

  “Daisy! You aren’t even going to answer me? What the hell was the point of that little ultimatum if it wasn’t just your way of taking Breaker’s side?”

  I whirled on him, my hair whipping my face. “There are no sides, Kash! You’re out here acting like the whole world is out to get you, well guess what, it’s not. Breaker’s doing his job. Your foreman is doing his job. The city is doing its job. Leroy was a lost cause before you even lost all your baby teeth. This isn’t about taking sides, Kash. This is about doing the best you can with what you have even if the situation isn’t perfect!”

  He tensed and narrowed his eyes, then raised his hands in sarcastic surrender. “All right then, since you know everything, why don’t you tell me how to make the best of this situation? Oh, what’s that? You can’t, because you can’t even tell your own daddy that you’re a grown woman and you do what you want?”

  I clenched my fists, trembling with fury. “Nice deflection,” I choked out. “But here’s the thing, Kash. You won’t make enough money to get away even if you do go back to selling, you know why? Because you never made any to begin with. That’s why everybody wants you to go back to dealing, so they can get their shit for free. Fool yourself all you want, but I know that you and Hunter never saw a dime.”

  I didn’t cry until I was alone in my room with the window shut and locked.

  Chapter 19

  It would have been real easy to prove her wrong. I knew exactly where the cash was buried. I could have brought it to her that night. Somehow, though, I didn’t think that would change anything. Daisy wasn’t pissed at me for not making enough money. She was pissed at me for—hell, I didn’t know. From where I stood, it seemed like she was pissed at me for being in the situation that I was in. Like it was my fault.

  I wondered for a while if she did think I killed Hunter, somewhere way down deep in her mind that she wasn’t even allowing herself to reach. A sick urge to force a confession out of her nearly strangled me. I would have walked her back home just to make sure she made it, but I knew I couldn’t hold my tongue if I did.

  I watched her from the top of the hill until the light went out in her bedroom, fighting the urge to follow her. The argument reminded me of all the fights Hunter and I got into before he died—arguments which had been unfortunately public, and which had sealed my fate as the police were already under the impression that a falling out between us was the cause of Hunter’s death.

  “Maybe I’m just too restless for their whole damn family,” I muttered to myself.

  I took off into the woods in the opposite direction from Daisy’s room, making for a spot that Hunter and I had never taken Daisy. We had both agreed—in one of the rare moments when we both agreed on everything—that she would be safer and more content if she didn’t know about the spot, or what it contained.

  A layered fury overtook me no matter how quickly I moved. Fury at Daisy for not seeing that escape was my only option, and fury at Hunter for not listening to me when I told him the same thing six years before. We had the money, enough to get away and set up in a comfortable house in some other town. It hadn’t been enough for Hunter. He thought his only skills were cooking and dealing—completely discounting his ability to sell and sweet-talk people—and he didn’t want to start a drug ring in an unfamiliar city.

  At the same time, though, he hadn’t wanted a short-term comfortable solution. No, Hunter was set on living large for a long time. When I’d done the math and shown him that we could buy a decent house in cash, on land, in a town big enough to offer opportunities, he’d laughed in my face. He wasn’t going to move out of one crappy house just to move into another, he’d said. No, he wanted a three-story mansion and flashy sport cars. He wanted to wear his wealth on his sleeve.

  I would have been happy just to get away and own a piece of something. That was what I wanted, and I knew Daisy wanted the same. At least I thought she did. I was beginning to realize that I might not know her as well as I thought I did. Mexico seemed to be the only practical solution to our current problem. It would give her everything she wanted—dates in public, sex between the sheets, my freedom—a future. I couldn’t fathom why she was so against it, and it made me furious.

  I let my feet wander wherever they pleased. I was too pissed off to make a plan, I just wanted to burn through the current and remembered frustration without taking it home with me. I took savage, immature pleasure in stomping fallen branches to pieces as I stormed through the underbrush.

  I wasn’t a superstitious person, but I was as afraid as anyone to speak ill of the dead. Regardless, my fury roiled in my brain, and Hunter was at the eye of the storm. If he’d only let us leave when I said so, he’d still be alive and Daisy wouldn’t be trapped under their dad’s drunken, smelly thumb. If he hadn’t been so insistent upon hiding our fortune from his sister, she would have a little more faith in my ability to do what I said I could do.

  My feet took me to a slight swell on the forest floor which overlooked a hollow filled with the charred remains of a massive spruce. The trunk curved protectively over a soft, green patch of earth. A ring of carefully placed stones circled that patch, nearly invisible after six years of undisturbed growth. We’d chosen the right place to hide our treasure, Hunter and I. I nodded grimly at the place and turned away, fighting against all the memories we shared here.

  I had no reason to go in for the cash now. I still remembered exactly how much was hidden there, in the steel ammo safe tucked inside the plastic tackle box wrapped in a plastic bag. I remembered the combination to the ammo safe, could feel in my shoulders how far down the stash was buried, and even recalled how heavy the whole thing was. When the time came, I’d be ready to haul it away.

  I was miles away from the motel now, and the long walk gave me plenty of time to think. Eventually I came to begrudging terms with the fact that Daisy was right—taking my money and running wouldn’t help. It would trap me—and her, if she decided to come with me—in whichever country we ended up in after crossing the border. It wouldn’t be fair to her. Hell, it wouldn’t be fair to me. Running off like that would be the ultimate confession of guilt.

  No.

  There was only one way to get out of here—I would have to clear my name.

  It wasn’t until I was almost home that I realized I’d overlooked the greatest tool in my arsenal. Leroy. He knew everything about everybody and wasn’t afraid to talk. If I could just get him relaxed enough to remember shit from six years ago, he might spill some little tidbit which would start me off in the right direction. I was a little too excited when I got back to the motel, completely forgetting the predicament I’d left Leroy in.

  Unfortunately for me, he was already in bed, which was fine—he was probably still dealing with withdrawal anyway and would be in no mood to talk.

  A few more steps took me up to my room and I can’t deny that by the time I got there, exhaustion had finally decided to rear its head. I flopped down on the mattress, leaning into the squeaking, but still thankful that I was in a place where I could rest my head without the smell of piss lifting my nostrils. Still, I wasn’t as thankful as I would have been given the opportunity to just move the fuck out of here, or at least share this worn out mattress with Daisy.

  Da
isy.

  My mind spun. My heart sunk. Sometimes I wished it was easy to give her up. But that had never been the case and I knew, deep down, that it would never be. It boggled my mind, though. How the universe could connect us this way, but make things so damn hard all at the same time.

  Closing my eyes, I tried to will myself to sleep. But all I could hear and all I could think about was the pain and the anger in her voice. That, and the fact that as old as we were, we were sneaking around like damn teenagers.

  I couldn’t even fucking call her to apologize.

  Chapter 20

  I rolled over my plan to clear my name the entire day at work. One more week and I wouldn’t have the job working on the roads anymore. And I know the foreman said we could take this last week to do apply for jobs and all that, but I already knew what the job situation was like. I’d turned in enough application and gotten shot down, lowballed, and ignored enough times to know that resubmitting an application was like trying to shoot without a bullet in my gun.

  As soon as I got off, I burst through the motel doors, eager to get started on my plan. Leroy wasn’t at his desk, which meant he was either in his office behind it, or in his apartment behind that.

  As I approached the office door, a unique, subtly chemical scent greeted me.

  Frowning, I knocked on the door.

  “Go away!” His voice was lazy, but somehow, still had a sharpness to it.

  I knocked again, just to get his attention. “Leroy, it’s Kash. I got a question for you.”

  This time, he didn’t answer and so I knocked again. When no answer came, I said, ‘fuck it’ and opened the door. Leroy sat between clouds in his chair—a white, whirling billow around his knees, a blue haze above him. His head lolled back against the leather seat, pinpoint pupils tracing the path of smoke trickling off the cigarette which dangled between his fingers.