by Mia Ford
“Of course, I will.” I smiled, pulling my much-hated romance novel out of my purse. “Just like always, right?”
“Oh, brother!” she groaned, shaking her head as she made her way to the walk-in, shaking her head until I couldn’t see her anymore, and probably continuing to do so even once she was out of sight.
I smiled to myself again and opened to the place where I’d left off in my book, ready to lose myself in the love affair of people who felt just as real to me as Courtney did. I loved that feeling of getting lost in the lives of others, loved it so much that I almost didn’t hear the sound of an engine idling outside.
Once the sound penetrated my thoughts, I hardly looked up. Our business wasn’t the only one in the immediate vicinity, and I was almost positive that whatever car was outside was not intended for us. It was only once I saw the truck that the panic began to set in. Because I knew that truck.
It had been years since I’d seen it pulling up to the front of the diner, but I would know it anywhere. I knew its occupant without ever having to catch a glimpse of him. For a moment that seemed to stretch out into forever, I froze, completely unsure of what the hell I was supposed to do now. Then my body just sort of took over. Without giving it any kind of conscious thought, I hit the ground, book and all.
I did so before I ever saw anyone step out of the truck’s cab, giving me a marginal amount of hope that I hadn’t been seen, and well before the little bell above the entrance gave its merry clang. I could have murdered that bell for sounding so happy when I felt pretty close to certain that I was going to either throw up, have a panic attack, or possibly do both at the same time.
“Hello?”
The sound of the voice shot through the diner like a bullet might have done, sounding so loud in my ears that I had to fight the urge to clamp my hands over them. I wasn’t actually a child, all evidence to the contrary, and if I’d allowed myself the luxury of covering my ears, I wouldn’t have been able to hear what came next. I needed to do that in order to know when I was safe. It was either that, or never leave the safety of the floor behind the front counter again.
“Hello?” the voice called again, a bit of uncertainty and maybe some annoyance as well detectable now. “Is there anyone here? The front door is open. You know, normally a sign that a place is open for business? Any chance that’s true here?”
I cringed and waited for it to be over. It was amazing how quickly things could go from one way to another. Only minutes ago, I had just been dipping into my book, ready for what would most likely be a day of reading without a whole lot else. Now, I was on the floor hiding for my life. Or at least, it felt like I was hiding for my life, which to me was pretty much the same thing.
“What the hell, dude? Why are you yelling? There’s somebody right—”
Courtney, who had come storming out of the walk-in with a look of total murder in her eyes, stopped and surveyed the scene she found in front of her. I could only imagine what it must have looked like to her, and I felt my face grow hot with what was surely the worst blush I’d ever blushed in all of my life.
She then looked from me to the disgruntled looking man waiting to be served and then back at me again. I shook my head vehemently, desperate for her to help me maintain my anonymity, all the while sure that I was sunk. When Courtney smiled, I felt my heart leap into my throat and would probably have tried to crawl away if I’d been able to move quickly enough. Except that I was not only not able to move quickly enough, but in the end, found that I could hardly move at all. Courtney reached down and grabbed the collar of my flannel shirt with one freakishly strong arm, and I was powerless to resist.
I was brought back up from underneath the counter like a fish being reeled in from underneath the water, my face still so hot I was sure it would burst into flames. She’d brought me up so that I was facing our customer, too, taking away any last chance I had of somehow hiding my identity. I closed my eyes briefly, willing my heart to slow its beating and my mouth not to say anything ridiculous. Then, I looked straight into the eyes of the one and only Neil Driscoll.
“Holy crap. Fay. I had no idea you were still working here.”
“I was going to ask you if you knew her,” Courtney said in an amused voice, making a point of not looking at me so that she didn’t have to see my glare of death. “But it looks like you saved me the trouble.”
“It looks like I did,” he said.
“And now you see that there was somebody up here all along. She just wasn’t where you could see her.”
“I can see that. Or rather I can see her. Now. You know what I mean, I think.”
“I do,” she laughed. A laugh that made me wonder if she could feel how painfully awkward everything had gotten in the last thirty seconds. “I really do. Now, do you two think you can manage without me, or is somebody else likely to go missing? Because I’m like, right in the middle of inventory. But if you guys need a translator, I can stay.”
“No, that’s all right,” he said. “Go back to what you were doing.”
Courtney raised one eyebrow, and I could see exactly what she was thinking. She remembered Neil from when we were growing up. I knew she did. I also knew she had never been his biggest fan. She had always thought he was “too stuck up to live,” and the way he was now giving her permission to do what she was going to do already was definitely not helping her to change her opinion.
For a minute, I was sure she was going to say something in retaliation. I was so sure she would, in fact, that I was actually relieved when she headed to the back again, leaving me alone with the elusive Neil.
For a second, I just looked at my hands, one of which was somehow still holding onto my book. I wondered what in God’s name I was supposed to do. Just an hour ago, I had done a decent job of convincing myself that Neil would never be back in Ashville. Now, here he was, standing in front of me like he’d never left at all.
There were differences, of course, the same way there would have been with any person I hadn’t seen in going on nine years. He had a fancier haircut, and the way he was dressed made me think he could have just stepped out of a Brooks Brothers’ ad. But the eyes were the same.
Those blue eyes that had always made me feel like I was falling were still the same, except for the fact that the way they looked at me was mighty different from the way they had before he’d left his Alaska life behind. My hand flew up to my locket, which was tucked safely away beneath my shirt. I wondered what kind of thoughts were going on behind those beautiful eyes. I was wondering so many things that I couldn’t seem to land squarely on any single one of them. Instead, I stood there like a hollowed out person who’d lost her brain when she wasn’t looking.
“Fay. I didn’t know you would still be working here.”
“Yeah, well, nothing much changes around here,” I answered quietly, feeling whatever dignity I had left slipping away at his second mention of the fact that in almost a decade, I hadn’t gotten anything aside from my diner job. “But I guess you knew that.”
“Sure,” he answered amicably enough, maybe even a little bit embarrassed, which was something I wouldn’t have minded a bit. “I guess I did.”
“I saw a light in in your house earlier. I’m still living in the same house. I didn’t think it would be you, though. I mean, the thought crossed my mind, but I didn’t think it would be you.”
“I didn’t think it would be, either. I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I inherited the house, and there’s a whole lot more to getting things all figured out than I expected there to be. It seemed like coming back for a while made the most sense in the end.”
“I heard about your dad,” I said in a low voice, furious for myself with the sudden feeling that I might actually start to cry. I dug into my palms with my fingernails, to make sure that didn’t happen. “I’m very sorry. I thought about sending my condolences, but then I realized I wouldn’t have had the first idea of where to send them. So, you know. I didn’t.”
&nb
sp; “That’s all right. It’s sweet of you, though, to think about it. Thanks, Fay. I appreciate it. Unfortunately, I should also be going.”
“Going? Didn’t you come in here for a meal? Or, why did you come in here?”
“Just a coffee to go will be fine, actually. I’ve got a lot of shit on my plate, and I’m not trying to stay in Ashville for the rest of my life.”
“Of course. Hold on.”
I poured him his cup of coffee with hands that were undeniably trembling. How many times had I done this exact same thing over the course of my life? Enough that when I’d first begun giving him drinks to go, they had been cups of coke or hot cocoa instead of coffee, back before he was grown up enough for a drink as mature as that.
Back in the day I had all but lived for the times when Neil would come in to see me. I had loved the way he had always made me feel like the most important, special person on the face of the earth. And now? Now he was like a stranger, only worse. A stranger wouldn’t have had this uncanny ability to hurt me the way that Neil was, to hurt me without even trying. And he wasn’t even doing anything! He was only acting like we were strangers or distant acquaintances, which was exactly what we were now. All I knew was that I wanted him to go. Out of all of the times I had imagined the two of us seeing each other again, it had never once played out like this.
“How much do I owe you?” he asked.
“Nothing, please. Let’s just consider it a gift from an old friend.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure,” I answered in an overly bright voice, knowing that I would never be able to work the register in my present state of agitation. “Least I can do, right?”
“Shit. Well, thanks. I don’t have anything to do for you in return. But we should get together before I leave, you know? We should do some catching up. Maybe I can buy you dinner or something, or what passes for dinner in this place.”
“Yea, if you have time. That might be nice.”
“All right, good. I’ll see you around, Fay.”
I nodded at him, feeling both relieved and sad when he was finally out of the diner and getting back into his truck. It was a nice enough offer, his idea of us going to dinner, but I wasn’t an idiot, or at least not a total idiot. Not as far as I could tell.
The dinner suggestion had been his way of getting the hell out of dodge as fast as he could. Nothing less and nothing more. For all the things that appeared to have changed about the guy, there was something other than his eyes that seemed to be the exact same as it had been when he’d gone and never looked back.
His desire to be as far away from little old Ashville as he could get was exactly the same as it had been when we were still teenagers. Although I wouldn’t have thought it was possible back when I was still an eighteen-year-old girl, Neil’s dislike of Ashville seemed to have grown instead of decreasing.
I’d heard the saying “absence makes the heart grow fonder” plenty of times. Everyone had. For Neil, the opposite seemed to be true. Absence seemed to have made his heart grow colder, towards Ashville as a whole, and undoubtedly towards me. I was nothing more than some silly little townie, and there was no way seeing me again was on his agenda.
My hand flew back up to my locket, and for just a minute, I could see the Neil that had been mine. The Neil that I had loved so completely. Then my hand dropped back to my side, and that image was gone, leaving in its wake the version of Neil I had just seen. This man was all work and no play for sure. If I saw him again before he left, I would be so stunned, someone could knock me over with a feather.
My guess was that seeing me again would only drive him to get his work done faster so that he could leave his past behind for good and get on with whatever fancy life he’d created for himself out there in the wide world.
“Well that was a trip and a half, am I right?” Courtney asked.
I turned to look at Courtney, who was beginning to look a little blue from all of her time in the massive refrigerator. I shrugged my shoulders in a gesture I hoped looked at least a little bit nonchalant. Not only was I not sure what to say, but I also wasn’t sure that I could trust my voice. Whether I wanted to be or not, I was kind of bowled over by what had just happened, and I needed some time to regroup.
“Come on, Fay. Don’t be mad, all right? I know you just wanted to hide from him, but really, why the hell should you? This is our diner. Not his.”
“I know. I’m not really sure why I was hiding, to tell you the truth.”
“Because you were surprised? Or who knows? Maybe he’s just like one of those guys in your books. What do they always get called? ‘The one,’ or some shit like that? Maybe he’s that, and your body just reacted.”
“Um, doubtful, Courtney.”
“No shit, it’s doubtful. Now come on, pour a girl a cup of coffee before she freezes to death. I swear, I can’t even feel my nipples anymore!”
And just like that, the strange and unexpected appearance of Neil was behind me. My real life came rushing back with full force. If there was one thing Courtney was good for, it was reminding a girl where she was. I poured her coffee, handed it to her, and the reached out and gave her an impulsive hug. It was something she would normally have shrugged off with a string of curse words, but this time, she let the hug slide. It wasn’t until we got an actual customer that I let her go. By that time, I was starting to feel a lot better. It had been a fluke, seeing Neil, and one I was sure I wouldn’t have to repeat.
Chapter 6: Neil
For a few terrifying seconds, I didn’t have a fucking clue where I was. All I knew was that the sun was way brighter than I felt like it should have been, and my head was pounding with the kind of hangover only whiskey was capable of giving me. When the culprit responsible for your hangover was the only thing you recognized for sure upon waking, you knew you were in trouble. This was something I had never known before, but I sure as shit did now. It wasn’t a lesson I was pleased to learn.
“Christ,” I groaned to myself, hearing how pitiful and weak my voice sounded and feeling powerless to fix it. “What the fuck happened last night?”
I lay there tangled up in my sheets and feeling like I might freeze to death if I didn’t get myself up to turn the heat to an acceptable level. I did my best to piece things together. It wasn’t just last night that needed piecing, either. There were whole days, at least a week, that was so disjointed that it took me a minute to remember what they had been and why.
Once I got everything settled in my own mind, I had the distinct displeasure of finding that things actually felt worse, instead of better. This wasn’t all that unusual when a person woke up from a night of heavy drinking, but knowing that didn’t make me feel any better. With things the way they were now, it was going to take a hell of a lot to make me feel anything close to kosher. It was going to take more than I thought the shithole town of Ashville, Alaska had to offer me.
That was it. The thing I couldn’t escape no matter how much of my dad’s extensive bar I spent my solitary nights trying to drink up. I was back in Ashville, and although I spent a lot of time and energy reminding myself that it wasn’t permanent, there was a part of me that felt like time had slid backward and taken me back to the place I’d spent all of my adult life trying to get away from.
Not only that but my dad was dead. He was dead, and the state of affairs he’d left behind wasn’t going to take only a couple of hours to sort through. Forget a couple of hours; it wasn’t going to take a couple of days. If I managed to get the fuck out of Ashville within a month, I would be doing well. No amount of lying to myself could change that fact. I was here, and I wasn’t going anywhere. In less than a week of being home, I had already managed to get myself into exactly the kind of shitty situation I had come home hoping to avoid.
“But how the fuck was I supposed to know?”
I grumbled the words to myself as I forced myself up to a sitting position. I chugged down the large glass of water I had apparently left mys
elf the previous night before passing out cold. I was dimly aware that talking to myself wasn’t the best development ever, but after days of being almost exclusively on my own in a house with twelve bedrooms and eight full bathrooms, it was a habit I had just seemed to pick up.
Things felt too empty otherwise, and since I had no intention of throwing any parties or making any friends, talking to myself so as to hear an actual voice seemed like the best of a whole bunch of shitty options. And although I was the one making it, it was a legitimate point, legitimate enough that I said it once more for good measure as I stumbled from the bedroom that had been mine when I was a teenager to the shower that was calling out my name.
As I let the water pour over me, I also allowed my thoughts to limp along back to the previous afternoon, to the encounter that had led to my impressive solitary bender on my dad’s favorite, pricey liquor. I didn’t want to go there, or at least most of me didn’t, but I didn’t seem to be able to stop myself, either. In some sick act of masochism, the encounter with Fay was the only place my thoughts wanted to travel. With me being as tired, drained, and worn down as I was, I was fucking helpless to stop them.
Maybe it made me an idiot, but it had never occurred to me that Fay Turner might still work at the local Ashville diner. Quite honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me to think about whether she still lived in the tiny town where fun and ambition came to die. I had thought about her plenty after I had first moved away, but over the years and after getting into bed with more women than I was prepared to count, she’d sort of lost her place in my mind.