Third Time's the Charm

by Liz Talley

  Marilyn made a face. “Well, I’m a cat person.”

  She wasn’t surprised Marilyn was a cat person. The cat sweaters made that obvious. “Well, if you hear of anyone in the next day or two…”

  “Oh, you know who you need to talk to? Grace Metcalf. She teaches biology. You’d love her. She’s your age, I think.” Marilyn didn’t elaborate any further.

  “And why would I talk to her? Is she looking for a pet?”

  “No, but she’s trying to put together a group to help strays. I think they’re actually working on setting up an official rescue organization. She’s really into it.”

  “That’s exactly who I need. My mother wants this poor pup gone yesterday.”

  “I’ll tell Grace to stop by if I see her. Now, I better get this evaluation to Mr. Paul. He’s lighting my phone up every fifteen minutes. Enjoy your lunch.”

  Sunny looked down at the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she’d pulled from her lunch bag and wanted to toss it into the trash can. But she forced herself to eat at least half of it. Wasn’t like she could afford new clothes, so she needed to eat. Before the last miscarriage and Alan’s death, she’d at least enjoyed food. People always said grieving made food taste like cardboard, but she’d not believed them until she’d been surrounded by casseroles and fried chicken after the funeral and wanted nothing more than to throw it all out.

  The door opened and in tumbled three students.

  Maybe she could talk to Grace Metcalf before the day was over, but until then…

  “Hi, I’m Mrs. David. Can I help you?”

  Henry was running late. It was already four thirty, but a series of emergencies at the site of the small credit union addition paired with a goose chase for an old account had him running out the door after Sunny had texted him for the third time.

  Get her a rental, stupid.

  But he knew he wouldn’t. Because he wanted to be close to her, like some friggin’ sadist who enjoyed the sting of the whip or the burn of the lighter. He’d rather feel pain with Sunny than not have her around at all.

  God, he was pathetic.

  He roared up the hill, his truck kicking up gravel when he stopped in the lot next to faculty parking. Sunny stood huddled in the shadows, talking to Grace Metcalf. Her gaze slid to where he idled, and then she shook hands with Grace and headed his way.

  In she climbed as the cold snapped at them from outside the warmth of his cab. Sunny rubbed her hands together as soon as she slid into place. “Brr. It’s cold out there. Where the heck is spring?”

  “I know, and it’s going to get colder this weekend. Front coming down.”

  “Yay,” she deadpanned. “What happened to the groundhog not seeing his shadow?”

  “It’ll be warm before we know it. How was your day?”

  “Crazy,” she said as he pulled from the lot. She gave Grace a wave as they passed her going to her car. “But I survived.”

  “That’s good. Hey, I see you met Grace.”

  “Yeah, she’s going to help me find a home for Fancy. I hope. And she may have talked me into helping her with a 5K she and her group are doing next month.”

  “Easter egg hunt weekend? I think I heard something about a 5K, but I didn’t know Grace was involved.”

  “Yeah, Easter Egg Hunt weekend. I couldn’t say no to her after she said she’d help me find a place for the dog. Plus she said they needed someone with some rescue experience. Problem is, they’ve done very little toward organizing that race outside of applying for the permit to hold it and advertising it in the paper.”

  Henry warmed at the idea of Sunny doing something worthwhile rather than trying to get out of Morning Glory. Not that she wasn’t going to leave. He knew she would, but he also knew that one of the best ways to get over hard times in one’s life was finding distraction. He’d started carving duck calls after the divorce. Clem Aiken, who’d leased his barn, had taught him to use a lathe. Spending time with Clem had distracted him from the drama of dealing with lawyers, judges, and the guilt every time he looked at his kids. Henry had even formed a small business, selling his duck calls online. Whistling Dixie was a minor success and kept him busy on the weekends when his kids weren’t with him or he wasn’t working. “Grace is a great person.”

  “And a lesbian.” Sunny’s mouth twitched. “She, like, led with that, which was a bit weird.”

  “Well, she got hit on so much when she first moved here, I think it’s become a habit,” Henry said, smiling. Grace Metcalf had been the hottest thing to hit Morning Glory outside of Sal Genovese’s spunky sister, who’d gotten a few guys all atwitter, including his bud Clem. Henry had even thought about asking Grace out until she gloriously kicked open the closet door by taking her girlfriend to dinner at the grand opening of Sal’s New York Pizzeria. The willowy, perpetually cheerful biology teacher’s preference for her own gender had deflated any hopes of local bachelors who were looking for true love.

  “I understand,” Sunny said, frowning at the beeping from his dashboard, grabbing the seat belt she’d obviously forgotten to click into place. “Rare to get new people in Morning Glory.”

  She said it like there wasn’t much the small town offered, and maybe to some it didn’t. It was, after all, a typical small Southern town full of the run-of-the-mill characters. People made it their business to know where their neighbors went to church, and if they didn’t, they made sure to take them a pie and invite them the following Sunday. Morning Glory wasn’t Mayberry—they had a few drug dealers and thieves—but it was relatively friendly and safe. They were proud that their town rarely made the Jackson six-o’clock news. In fact, the last time Morning Glory was mentioned in the Clarion Ledger was when their library received a grant to buy new computers. Seriously. That was the newsmaker for September.

  “Not too many.”

  Just as he turned onto the highway, he remembered he’d forgotten to grab the files he needed to take home to his father. He muttered a curse word and jerked the steering wheel, making a sharp turn.

  “What are you doing?” Sunny, who was in the process of buckling up, tilted toward him and her sharp shoulder hit his ribs.

  “Sorry, I forgot something I need at the office,” he said. He didn’t want to enjoy the scent of her shampoo or the brush of her hair on his forearm. But like the nutcase he was, he did.

  “Jeez, a warning would have been nice.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Which is something you say a lot.” Her voice was flat. And annoyed.

  “But it doesn’t matter with you, does it?” he muttered, pulling into the graveled space where he normally parked. “I won’t be a minute.”

  Sunny looked at him, her brow furrowed. She hadn’t expected him to say something pissy, but honestly, her attitude had started to rankle him. Yeah, his kid had run over her bike, but he’d bent over backward to make sure she wasn’t inconvenienced. And, yeah, he’d had an ulterior motive—he wanted to make things right between them—but she didn’t know that. Her suck-ass attitude had gotten on his last damn nerve.

  He stared back, his hand hovering on the door handle. “What?”

  She looked away. “Can I use your restroom? I had a lot of coffee today.”

  “Sure.” He climbed out, fishing his keys from his pocket. His team was still working at the site, but the office was empty since Carson had left early to meet Tomeka at an obstetrician appointment and Carol had gone home early with a headache.

  He flipped on the lights and pointed toward the small bathroom in the temporary office. “Right in there.”

  “Thanks.”

  He found the files and wasted the next minute checking his Twitter feed, noting sports trades, and rolling his eyes at all the political commentary. Sunny came out, drying her hands on a paper towel.

  “Ready?”

  She nodded but then hesitated. “Why did you say what you said?”

  “About my apologies meaning nothing to you?”

  She nodded.


  “Isn’t that obvious? No matter what I say or do, I’m still the boy who screwed you over.” He pocketed his phone, wishing he didn’t give a damn about how she treated him.

  “You didn’t screw me, Henry. You screwed her, and that’s the problem. That’s always been the problem.” Her words were like bullets slamming into him.

  He deserved her anger, but that didn’t change the fact that it was hard to hear those words come from her mouth.

  “God, Sunny, I was nineteen, and we were broken up,” Henry said, clenching his teeth against the sudden surge of his own anger. She acted as if he’d killed babies and burned villages. Okay, he’d made a mistake, and it had been big one. But Sunny had run away and given him no chance to fix it. Or try to fix it. She’d been the one to give up on them. Not him.

  Her empty-eyed stare was a challenge. Time to wade in. To say everything he’d been wanting to say since he’d seen her last week.

  “You know I didn’t mean for it to happen. It’s not like I went to the party intending to have sex with Jillian. We just both got wasted. And… and you said those words. You said we were over.”

  “Wait, you’re blaming me?” Her expression went from remote to furious in less than a second. “Seriously?”

  “I’m not blaming anyone. I’m just saying that I wasn’t in a good frame of mind to begin with—”

  “You slept with her. You gave away everything we ever were and everything we could have been because you got horny. Being drunk doesn’t negate that you took yourself away from me.”

  “You didn’t want me. You said those words.” He couldn’t forget that phone conversation. The way she’d sounded so resigned to them being done once and for all. No “pretending” to be broken up. She’d said she was done. Everything they’d planned was over. She’d screamed for him to go to the party and forget about her. That time he’d believed her.

  “No. Because those words were the same we’d hurled at each other every time we got into a fight, Henry. You’d say that maybe we should just break up. And I would say that you were right. That we shouldn’t stay together. We said the same things to each other six months after we first started dating. Then again your junior year. And again the day after you graduated. They were just scared words, Henry. You know I didn’t mean them.”

  He stared at her. “Didn’t mean them? Then why in the hell did you say them? Why did you tell me to go have fun and forget about you? That you were accepting the scholarship to State.”

  “Because I wanted you to come home. I wanted you to ditch that debutante bitch and show up at my doorstep like you had every other time.” Sunny’s face suffused with color, her blue eyes flashing with fury.

  “Well, why in the hell didn’t you say that?” He swiped a hand through his hair and tried to figure out what she was talking about. But he knew. Now. It had taken him many years of marriage and a year of therapy to figure out that many times what a woman says is not what she means. I’m fine means she’s not fine. Do whatever you want means don’t do whatever you want. I don’t care means I DO care. But at nineteen, he’d had no clue that Sunny hadn’t meant what she said, that she’d been following some unwritten relationship script meant to motivate him into doing the opposite of what she’d told him to do.

  “I shouldn’t have had to tell you. You knew the way I felt about you,” she said, her voice sticking. She cleared the catch in her throat.

  “I was a dumb kid, Sunny. I didn’t know you were scared, that you wanted me to prove something to you.”

  Sunny shook her head. “You know what? I don’t want to do this. I never wanted to do this. Let’s just go.”

  “Well, you brought it up.”

  “No, I didn’t. You’re the one who said your apologies aren’t good enough.”

  “They’re not,” he said.

  “That’s right. Being sorry isn’t enough. You ruined…” Her words fell off, and she looked away, blinking. Were those tears? Or was she so furious at him she couldn’t bear his sight?

  “What do you want me to do, Sunny?”

  She whipped her head around. Definitely tears. “Nothing. You can’t undo what was done. So drop it.”

  “So why are you treating me like I’m something you scraped off your shoe? If there’s nothing I can do to fix what I did, why torture me?”

  She dashed away the dampness with the back of her hand. “Torture you? That’s what you think I’m doing?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I don’t want to be around you, Henry. I don’t want to remember everything that existed between us. Don’t you understand? I don’t want to sit beside you in that goddamned truck.” Her voice, so filled with hurt, dropped to a near whisper.

  And those words found their mark. “Then don’t. I was just trying to be nice.”

  Closing her eyes, she shook her head. “No, you’re trying to fix things. You like everything nice and neat, but that’s not how life is. I learned that on the day you told me you’d knocked up Jillian. Suddenly all my plans, all that stuff we dreamed about, well, that was just wishful thinking. It was a kid’s dream. Not real life. Real life sucks the marrow from your bones and leaves you hollow and empty.”

  Henry watched her, wondering if she truly believed her words. He didn’t think life was easy, and he knew firsthand after a failed marriage and a cancer scare that life was messy as hell, but empty… or hopeless?

  Sunny pressed her lips together. “You can’t fix me, Henry. You can’t repair what was done that day.”

  “So you think everything turned on that dime, Sunny? I mean, please, get over yourself and this idea that I’m to blame for everything bad in your life.”

  A wall of anger hit him as she advanced. “Don’t give yourself that much credit, Henry Todd Delmar. You don’t have that much power over me.”

  “Well, that’s the way you make it sound,” he said, lowering his voice and holding his ground as she stopped in front of him.

  Sunny parked her fists on her lean hips, her blue eyes glacier chips.

  “We were kids. And kids make mistakes. You’re grown now and you can’t possibly blame me for all the bad stuff in your life.”

  “I don’t blame you for everything bad in my life. I made my own decisions. But you lit the match, Henry. You lit the fucking match.”

  Sunny stood in front of him, closer to him than she’d been since that day years ago. He stared down at her, at the lips that were still just as lush, at those eyes he’d loved once upon a time. His body, mind, and soul were in knots, and he couldn’t untangle them.

  He couldn’t fix her.

  He didn’t owe her anything. Not really.

  Then it happened. The air shifted, an undetectable scrape of one thing against another. A sudden spark. A flare. Ignition.

  Henry felt his body sway toward hers. He was a moth, unable to resist the flicker of light that was Sunny.

  “Say something,” she demanded, her breath hitching.

  But he couldn’t.

  “Henry,” she whispered, her blue eyes not so hard anymore. They’d softened, ripened, giving him permission.

  He lowered his head. She rose to meet him.

  Their lips met.

  The initial touch was gasoline tossed onto a flame—igniting, expanding, blowing up. Henry pulled her to him, fisting his hand in those fiery locks as Sunny grabbed his neck, pulling him down. She opened her mouth and he lost himself, hauling her up against his body, stumbling back into the desk. Papers fell, something thumped, but he didn’t give a damn. All he cared about was the woman in his arms, a woman who was so familiar and yet such a mystery. A woman who bit his bottom lip, giving a groan of desire so guttural it tilted him into a frenzy.

  One hand fitted to her ass, lifting her to his hardness.

  He devoured her. She returned the favor. Hands grasped, mouths melded, tongues danced as Henry found not a homecoming but a new place to explore. This was a woman who gave as good as she got. Her hand twisting in his hair hurt, but
he didn’t care. He wanted to drown in her, dominate her, take all her sorrow and rip it from her. He wanted her goodness, the sweet honey he knew she hid beneath the hard veneer of a woman who didn’t give two shits about anything.

  Because she was in there somewhere. There was a ghosting in the sigh of surrender, an unspooling of memories in her scent, a page turned back to a time when they held something precious in their hands.

  Sunny pulled his head back, making his scalp sting. “Stop.”

  “No.” He dipped his head again, intent on capturing those lips and stopping the words.

  “Henry, stop,” she said, pushing against his chest. “Stop.”

  He released her and stepped back, his body unwilling. His mind reeled with what he’d done. No, what they’d done. Sunny hadn’t been unwilling. But now she was.

  “Don’t ever do that again.” She swiped a hand across her mouth. Her eyes blazed against her pale skin, and her hands trembled. “We don’t have that anymore.”

  He begged to differ, but he wasn’t going to argue with her over what was between them. They both could deny it until the end of time.

  Sunny moved toward the door, and he wondered how she could move so easily. His own knees were weak and his hands shaky. Not to mention, his pants were a bit tight in the crotch. Sunny had taken him back to being a teenager with the first taste of her lips.

  She stood with her back to him, waiting for him, refusing to look at him.

  “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, I think we covered that already,” Sunny said before opening the door and walking back into the cold, dying day.

  Henry reached down and crumpled a flyer sitting on Carol’s desk and tossed it into the trash can. “Shit.”

  “I’m barely making it myself, Sunny. I just don’t have much money to spare,” Eden said.