Excitement that Dylan was going to be back warred with irritation that he hadn’t bothered to call me all week. I decided to cling to the anger.
It was easier to deal with than the alternative.
“I’m going to have a little party here tonight. You gonna come?” He asked.
It was on the tip of my tongue to refuse. Wouldn’t it just be awkward, me hanging out with the people who had once partied with Ella? Me mooning around after Dylan when, after a week of obsessing, I was no longer sure if he would even care or not?
But I wanted to go, damn it. Why should I care what other people thought, or if Dylan would want me there or not?
Jax had invited me. I wanted to go. It was that simple.
“I never miss a party.” I affected a voice as I spoke, holding out the hand with the untarnished polish and pretending to snootily inspect my nails.
Silence sounded through the garage. I looked up to find Jax studying me intently.
“What?” I asked, shifting on the bench and feeling like nothing so much as a bug under a microscope.
“Are you really like that now?” He finally asked.
“Like what?” I narrowed my eyes, not liking where the conversation had turned. Damn it, couldn’t anyone just accept that I was who I was now, end of story?
“You know. A party girl. Like your sister was.” I thought I saw a hint of worry in his bright blue eyes, and I understood that he, too, had seen how far down Ella had fallen before she died.
God damn it, so many of us had seen it, me most of all. So why hadn’t I been able to fix it? To fix her?
“So what if I am?” I fired back, more attitude in the words than I’d intended. Jax held up his hands, offering peace.
“It’s just a question, babe. No offense meant.” Picking up the mug of coffee that I’d barely touched, he drained the contents. “You’re a big girl. I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”
Stung, though I wasn’t sure I was entirely entitled to be, I sat still for a long moment, frozen on the work bench.
Before I’d come back to Fish Lake, I’d thought I was returning to a town where no one gave a shit about me, the less exciting Sawyer twin. What I was finding, though, was that some residents of my hometown cared a bit more than was comfortable.
I wasn’t sure what the hell to do with it.
“I’m not feeling well,” I muttered, and I wasn’t lying. I didn’t know why, but my world had just tilted off of its axis, and I had fallen with it. “I’m going to head home.”
“Kaylee.” Jax fixed me with a concerned stare. “Will I still see you tonight?”
“For sure.” I managed a wobbly smile as I shoved paper back into my tote bag. Closing my laptop back up, I looked up when someone entered the garage. Backlit by the blazing sun of late afternoon, the figure was cast in shadow and I couldn’t see the person’s face.
“Can I help you?” Jax greeted the newcomer and wiped oil off of his hands with a rag.
“Thanks.”
I froze. I knew that voice.
“Someone said they saw Kaylee Sawyer come in here a while ago?” The figure moved forward, out of the sun. Tall, treadmaster fit body, pale blue eyes. Dark hair cut neatly, designer jeans, and a leather jacket that had probably cost more than the car that Jax was currently working on.
Fuccckkkk.
“Kaylee?” Jax turned to me, a hint of wariness on his face, reserve over a strange man asking after one of his friends.
But the man wasn’t strange at all. In fact, I knew him pretty darn well.
What I didn’t know was what he was doing in Fish Lake, when he was supposed to be back in Connecticut.
“Joel?” I stood, hugging my laptop to my chest like a shield. “Joel, what the hell are you doing here?”
Chapter Eight
“I’ll give you two some privacy.” Jax looked from Joel to me, his expression inscrutable as he turned and walked towards the back of the shop. My heart thudded against my ribcage.
“Who the hell is that?” Joel shoved his fingers through his tidily coiffed hair roughly, making the fine strands stand upright. Instead of making him rakishly dishevelled, he just looked like he needed to comb his hair.
“Never mind.” I cast a distracted look back over my shoulder in the direction Jax had gone. “Joel, what the hell are you doing here?”
“That’s a nice welcome.” The civility of his crisp east coast accent tempered the irritation in his voice, but only a bit. “I came to see you. What else would bring me to Fish Lake, Oregon?”
I caught the hint of condescension in his voice. Normally I wouldn’t have cared about someone running down my hometown. But two weeks back here had somehow managed to change my tune.
“It’s not that bad. And you didn’t have to come.” Frowning, I stalked out of the garage. I wasn’t comfortable having this conversation around one of Dylan’s best friends.
I breathed in a lungful of fresh air once we were outside. It helped to clear my head, but only a bit.
“Joel, I...” I was floored that he’d shown up here. I thought I’d been clear enough. Then again, I supposed that our track record suggested that I was likely to change my mind.
“Don’t say it.” Joel pressed his hand on my arm and turned me so that I was facing him. He clasped one of my hands in his own, and I squirmed, wondering who was watching, what assumptions they’d come to.
“Let’s go get some coffee, or something.” I suggested. At least in a booth at Twin Peaks, we could be a bit more discreet.
“I’d rather just get this out, then we can go hang out. If you want.” Joel stared into my coffee colored eyes with his own blue ones, the expression unexpectedly tender, given the circumstances. “I know you said we shouldn’t talk for a while. It’s been a week, and the time away from you has made up my mind.”
Oh, shit.
“Joel—” I started, but he cut me off.
“I understand that you’ve got some issues that you don’t want to share with me. I do. But I’d rather have what I can of you, than nothing at all,” he insisted. He sounded sincere, and knowing Joel, he was.
I shook my head, speechless, and my heart did a sick little wobble in my chest.
“I want you to come back to Connecticut with me. You can stay with me, and we’ll hang out for the rest of the summer.” In the fall I went back for my senior year, and Joel started law school. He had a guaranteed job at the end of it, on the partner track at his dad’s law firm.
It should have been exactly what I wanted—stability with someone who wasn’t going to ask questions about my past. Someone who cared enough to fly all the way across the country to be with me.
I didn’t want it. I had never wanted it.
At least not with him.
“You shouldn’t have come.” I could barely force the words out of my mouth. My heart ached when I saw his face fall, just for a moment before he smoothed it out again.
“I’m not going to go home until you at least think about it a bit.” His face was a study in determination, and I winced inwardly. “I think you owe me at least that.”
I felt irritation spark. I didn’t owe him anything—I’d been very clear, or at least I was pretty sure that I had.
We were done.
But I knew Joel well enough to see that under that insistence there was a mix of pain and desperation. He loved me, and I loved him.
I just didn’t love him the way he deserved to be loved. I didn’t know if I was capable of that kind of love at all, whether with Joel or with the guy who had started to haunt my every waking thought and dream.
“Is there someone else?” Joel asked sharply. I had been too busy arguing with myself in my head to notice the silence stretching out between us.
My gaze whipped up, a guilty flush spreading instantly. I opened my mouth, compelled to be honest.
But... Dylan wasn’t the reason I’d broken up with Joel. I didn’t even know what was going on between us.
&n
bsp; So what was the point in upsetting Joel further?
“No,” I finally answered, looking at the ground, hoping that my face didn’t give me away. “Joel, you really caught me off guard. I need to... I just need some time.”
I needed time to think of how to phrase my words. Words that would make him understand that I wasn’t about to enter the ‘on-again’ phase of our relationship, not ever again.
“All right.” He said finally, though he looked like he wanted to argue. “Can I see you tonight? Can we go for dinner?”
“Tomorrow,” I replied, thinking of the party. I wasn’t exactly in the mood to get on down anymore, but I was aching to see Dylan, stupid as it might be.
I spoke again before Joel could argue. “Where are you staying?”
He gestured across the street to the small motel that had stood in the same spot since before I was born.
“It’s not the greatest, but there wasn’t a lot of choice,” he replied. There it was again, that faint hint of derision. I could feel my hackles rising. “I’m booked through the week. Unless you want me to stay with you?”
“No.” Seeing the hurt bewilderment on his face, I backpedaled. “I just mean—there isn’t really any space.” This was a flat out lie. Mom wasn’t likely to notice if he stayed right in my bed with me, but it wasn’t going to happen.
No way did I want Joel to meet my mom. To find out about Ella. Or Dylan. Or any combination thereof.
“All right.” Joel’s words were clipped, and I knew I’d hurt his feelings. I felt like shit, but combined with that was a bright red streak of anger.
I hadn’t asked for him to follow me here, to complicate things that had already been settled. This was not my fault.
As I watched him cross the street, his broad, athletic shoulders stiff with tension, I wondered, if it wasn’t my fault, why I still felt so bad.
***
I sat on the edge of my bed, my hands on my knees, frozen like every cell in my body had turned to ice. My eyes took in the sight of my hands, pale against the slightly darker skin of my knees, the polish that had been so perfect only this morning already chipped all to hell.
Panic lanced through me with every breath. It wasn’t an emotion that I had expected to come along with the guilt, but it did.
Joel’s offer was tempting. No matter that he wasn’t the one I really wanted—was any relationship perfect, after all? But he represented the stability that I had lacked for most of my life. And we could probably be happy, after a fashion.
The selfish part of me told me to just do it, to maintain the facade of a life that I had been living for the past three years.
But I found that I couldn’t even reach for the phone to call him, to say the words. I wasn’t going to do it. Part of the reason was noble—I knew that Joel would find someone so much better suited for him than me.
The other part? I wanted as much of Dylan as I could have before the twisted inferno that was us exploded inside of me.
Fuck being noble. That’s what Ella would have said. She would have reached for what she wanted without apology.
And hard as it was for people who had known me once upon a time to believe it, I’d tried so hard to keep a piece of Ella alive inside of me that it had really happened. I wasn’t the sweet, studious girl people remembered.
And the girl I was now just wanted to be free to be me.
“Fuck!” A knock at the window broke the silence inside my room and made me scream. Hand pressed against the suddenly hammering heart in my chest, I lurched on the bed.
Dylan was on the other side of the glass, hanging on to a branch of the apple tree he used to coax Ella into climbing down.
“What the fuck?” Striding across the room, I intended to throw up the sash of the window and give him hell for scaring me, no matter that the fearful acceleration of my heart had turned into delicious anticipation.
“Hey.” The one syllable was dark, almost morose. Though he smiled at me, it didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Hey,” I replied, opening the window fully so that he could climb in. “We have a front door, you know.”
“I know.” He didn’t explain further, instead pulling me into his arms.
My heart leapt into my throat—fuck, but just the warmth of his body against mine felt good. Despite all evidence to the contrary, when I was around Dylan my world felt more stable than it ever had.
But something was niggling at the base of my brain.
“You didn’t call. Or text.” I winced at how needy I sounded. But damn it, he’d just professed that he’d missed me, when his actions said otherwise.
“No cell reception.” He said. Something flickered over his face—guilt, maybe? “Sometimes we have it, sometimes we don’t. This fire was a bad one, way up north. Things were pretty rustic.”
“Oh.” I said as he tightened his arms around me again. There was a sense of urgency in his touch, in the way he immediately bent to press his lips to the base of my throat.
I had thought about little else but how it would feel to be in his arms again for the entire week. But this didn’t feel right, didn’t taste good, the way a rotten apple is still sweet but at its core has gone bad.
“What’s wrong?” Dylan pulled back when I stiffened. I looked up at him, confusion a bitter taste in my mouth.
“I’m not Ella,” I said carefully. I was sure he knew this by now, but he’d confused the hell out of me by climbing the apple tree to knock at my window. That was something he’d done with her, never with me. “You can’t swap one twin for the other.”
Dylan reared back as though I’d struck him. Though panic coated my throat and made it hard to breathe, I made myself continue to gaze up at him calmly, holding my ground.
I wasn’t trying to be a bitch, wasn’t trying to start a fight. But I wasn’t about to be a substitute for my dead sister, either. I had to make that very clear.
“Why the fuck would you say something like that?” Dylan looked ready to punch something. I knew him well enough, though, to know that that something would never be me. “Do you think I’m so dumb I don’t know the difference?”
His upset seemed extreme. The Dylan I knew might have been hurt, might have been puzzled, but would have shrugged it off, filed it away. Something else was going on.
“What’s wrong?” Perching on the edge of my bed, I held out a hand for him. My pulse sped up when he looked at the outstretched hand without taking it.
He didn’t respond.
Should I let it be or should I push? He wasn’t himself right now. Something had happened in the last week that I didn’t know about.
After Ella had died, all I’d wanted was to be left alone. People did what I wanted, instead of what I’d needed, which was to push until I was able to share what was going on inside of me.
I decided to push.
“What happened this week, Dylan?” When he still didn’t take my hand, I took away the choice, leaning forward and clasping his fingers in my own. He tugged away, and I swallowed the snaking tendril of hurt.
“What makes you think something’s wrong?” His voice was flat. “Apart from me being pissed that you just essentially told me I’m a dumbass.”
Part of me wanted to roll my eyes—I hadn’t said anything of the sort. But I seemed to have inadvertently hit a sore spot, one I thought was probably linked to his dyslexia and his dislike of school, so I made a mental note to tread carefully in that area in the future.
“We’ve seen each other at the absolute lowest point in both of our lives.” Miraculously my voice stayed steady, but inside I was a quivering wreck.
What if I made him so mad that he just left? What if he never wanted to see me again?
I gave myself a mental bitch slap. I’d survived worse. It would suck, but I’d be just fine. And if he left because I was trying to help, then he wasn’t who I thought he was, anyway.
Instead of speaking, Dylan grunted in response. I thought I detected the slightest hint of
tension leaving his limbs, but I couldn’t be sure.
“You know something about me that I don’t even want to know about myself.” I couldn’t keep the tremble out of my voice anymore, not when I remembered the two very different ways that Dylan had looked at me the night everything has gone wrong.
Swallowing hard, I pushed farther.
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
The setting sun silhouetted him from behind, highlighting the way his brow furrowed, the way his muscles stood out with the sharp relief of tension.
As I watched he clenched his hands into fists at his sides. Relief was bright and beautiful when he finally, slowly, seemed to expel half of the tension out of his body before taking a seat beside me on the edge of the bed.
“I’m sorry.” He held himself stiffly, taking care to not even brush against me. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.
“Tell me.” Lifting my hand, I hesitated a second before placing it on his tense thigh and squeezing.
If we were officially together—if I was his girlfriend—I wouldn’t think twice about offering comfort in the form of a hug or a soft touch. What we were was strong but undefined, but I found that I couldn’t just sit beside him and let him be so alone.
“We lost someone on the team this weekend.” His voice was gruff and almost unfamiliar with the tone.
“Oh, God.” My gut clenched in sympathy. No wonder he’d been so strange. No wonder he hadn’t gotten in touch.
“A burning tree collapsed on him.” Dylan’s voice was quiet. “It’s scary as hell, because it could have been any one of us, you know? He followed all the procedure. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
I didn’t say anything. Sometimes there wasn’t anything to say.
“And it brought back some shitty memories. You know?” Half turning, his gaze sought mine. “I came here because I wanted to see you. Because, you know. You get it.”
I closed my eyes and cringed.
“And I jumped all over you the second you came in.” I turned to face him, pressing my lips together until they hurt. “I’m sorry.”
“I wouldn’t mind if you jumped all over me now.” He gave me a wry half smile. He was joking, I knew, just trying to lighten the tension in the room.
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