by C. M. Owens
“It’s summer,” Whit says tightly. “People come and go every summer. It’s possible she’s a seasonal.”
“Possibly. Still think I’d remember a girl who looks like her. Just her ass alone is memorable.”
Whit mocks a gag, slowly loosening up, and Blake chuckles while pocketing his hands.
“It’s seriously bugging the hell out of me as to where I’ve seen her before. And she even admitted I seemed familiar too.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Whit tells him.
“Weird thing is that she said she’d meet me when she met me, and wouldn’t set a time. Then she sent a text saying she was here, and I told her I’d meet her near the entrance.”
“Definitely weird,” I agree, shrugging… bored out of my mind.
“There she is,” he says, looking past me.
A slow smile curls his lips, and I turn around with Whit to see this girl he’s been going on about. My eyes immediately land on something that has my breath fogging up my throat, and my free fist clenches at my side as my other arm falls away from Whit.
Looking lost and uncertain, Mika is walking around in a small circle, glancing down at her phone. Her shorts are up to her ass, showing off her tan legs. Her shirt is loose and hanging down on one side, revealing her shoulder. And her hair is braided to one side as she nibbles her lip.
“Guess I better go get her before she bails. She looks nervous.”
Blake starts to walk by, and reflexively, I grab his arm and jerk him back.
“What the hell, man?”
“The fuck are you doing here with her?” I growl.
His eyebrows go up in confusion as I jerk him back harder, gripping his arm tightly.
“You know her or something?” he asks, confused.
“That’s Mika,” Whit says flatly from somewhere behind me.
“She related to you?” Blake goes on. “I’ve never seen you get so pissed before. What am I missing?”
“Why are you here with her?”
Blake looks down at my hand, then over at Mika, then back to me, and something in his eyes shifts. “Ah, fuck. She’s the one. Isn’t she?”
I’ve never fucking told him her name, or any of the story, but I did get drunk enough once to admit to him a summer girl had fucked my head up.
“Shit, man. I didn’t know,” he goes on.
My eyes shift over to Mika about the time she sees us, and confusion mars her face before her eyes turn to angry slits. She spins around and walks away, and I fight with myself not to go after her. Maybe she’ll fucking leave soon before I completely lose my mind.
“Ah, hell,” Blake groans. “You’ve really fucked up now.”
I let him go, cracking my neck to the side, and I watch as Mika pulls her keys out of her pocket, heading toward the parking lot.
“I don’t care if she’s pissed. She shouldn’t even be in Hayden. She has the entire fucking country she can go to. This is the one place she shouldn’t have ever come back to.”
Blake’s hand clasps my shoulder, and we both watch until Mika disappears from sight.
“I wasn’t saying you cared about pissing off Mika. But you should probably notice your girlfriend is missing at some point, otherwise you’re going to end up single.”
My eyes slowly flutter shut, and I take a long, regretful breath. He’s right. I just really fucked up. It’s shitty that I don’t even care.
Once again, Mika is in my head.
Chapter 14
MIKA
I almost feel hungover when I wake up. I’m not sure why I spent the night crying, but I did. Maybe it’s because I went to the carnival to make a friend and saw Blake and Chase were already friends. I felt like the idiot getting played. I should have known better than to think someone just wanted to get to know me.
You look so familiar… Asshole.
Clutching my aching head, I pull on a pair of exercise shorts with my free hand, awkwardly working them over my hips. Sluggishly, I head downstairs for coffee, since coffee is a good cure for crying hangovers.
Just as I stumble into the kitchen, a small breath leaves my lips as my jaw tries to unhinge. Why the hell is Whit in my kitchen?
She’s sipping coffee, regarding me intently as she sits at my bar.
I look around, making sure I didn’t accidentally sleepwalk into the wrong home last night. Nope. Definitely mine.
“Morning,” she says softly.
My eyes drop to the white T-shirt covering her body, and my eyebrow arches. That’s definitely Aidan’s shirt.
“We need to talk,” she tells me.
“I think I need coffee first,” I mumble, moving over to the blessed caffeine beast and hurriedly making a cup before we start swapping questions.
“Do I want to know why you’re in Aidan’s shirt?” I ask her, already dreading the answer. I can’t believe Aidan would do this. He’s hardcore against cheating, since he saw what having your heart broken did to me.
I might have been a teenage drama queen, but it felt like my life was ending. That led to a very fucked up version of myself for longer than I care to admit. It’s probably part of the reason why Aidan is here with me now, probably worried it was all going to trigger something.
I’m not that girl. Yes, I’m severely different and incredibly messed up, but I’m in control now. I couldn’t be the wild, careless party girl I became after that painful spring even I wanted to be.
“I came here last night to talk to you,” she says on a sigh.
I relax a little. When I got home, Aidan had just showed up, and I told him I was sick before disappearing into my room. So… Whit spent the night and needed something to sleep in? That’s better than cheating.
“I feel like I should hate you.” Her words are matter-of-fact, not harsh.
I look over at her and frown.
“Why hate me? I’ve already promised I’m not here for Chase. I wouldn’t even be here right now if I’d known he still lived here.”
“You could have called any shop in this town and asked if the James boy still lived here, and they’d have told you yes. You could have asked Chuck about it one of the million times you spoke to him before moving down, and he’d have told you yes. So try again.”
True.
“I try not to ask about him,” I admit honestly. “But I did think he was gone. He always hated this place, and when his mother died and he posted he was moving, I never foresaw him returning.”
She sets her coffee down. “I always wondered why he came back, and now I think it was subconsciously about you.”
“Me? Why me? I didn’t live here. And in case you haven’t noticed, he’s intent on hating me.”
“Which takes me back to my previous statement; I feel like I should hate you. Are you the one who turned him into this? Because I’ve been blaming his parents this entire time. He was volatile when younger, but he’s just cold now.”
Volatile? When was he volatile?
My heart clenches in my chest, and I move my coffee to the counter and sit down across from her at the bar.
“You want all the sordid details?” I ask angrily.
“Yes. I do. I think I deserve to know them.”
She’s right. Even though I feel like it’s none of her business, Chase should have already told her.
“Fine. Let’s start at the beginning.”
That’s what I do. I start from the first time I saw the sweet boy in town. My father asked him if he wanted to come eat with us. He knew the James family. He knew how shitty Chase had it.
I tell Whit about how Chase and I retreated to the roof of this home the second dinner was over because there was a meteor shower. We ended up talking almost all night long. No one came looking for Chase, and my father made him a bed on the couch.
From then on, he was at my summer home almost every day, only leaving in small intervals to go check on his mother and make sure she wasn’t hurt, or choking on her own vomit, or shoving something into her arm that was goi
ng to kill her.
I tell her that my mother was annoyed with Chase, but that my father always had a soft spot for him. This was his town. He could have been Chase if he hadn’t had a rich grandfather.
Little by little, I recap every summer, telling her how we grew closer. Telling her how we slowly fell in love. Then I get to the part that almost destroyed us the first time.
“I was fifteen and stupid. Jared was seventeen and popular. I was constantly worried there was another girl all over Chase when I was gone. He was so beautiful, and he always said summers were ours, but we’d take the rest of the year to do our own thing. So I let Jared talk me into having sex. It felt so wrong. I actually felt disgusted afterwards. But I kept having sex, thinking it would eventually get better. It didn’t. Starting to see why the first isn’t so important?” I ask, trying to alleviate her unprecedented fears.
My stomach roils with just the memories. I blamed my mother. I blamed my jealousy and concerns over Chase. I blamed my hormones… It took a long time to blame myself for simply being stupid and own my mistake. I sometimes wonder if that’s what drove Chase into someone else’s arms.
She sits silently instead of answering, imploring me with her eyes to continue.
“Anyway, I broke up with Jared a little after my sixteenth birthday, and then summer rolled around again. I told Chase everything, and he… He slammed the door and left. He didn’t come back for a week. I sobbed like a freaking idiot, making it impossible for anyone to console me. I was always pretty dramatic,” I confess, trying to lighten the mood.
Whit just stares, sipping her coffee in silence and making this all so much more awkward.
“Somehow we moved past it, and by mid-June, we were us again. Then one night on the roof, he asked me to… Well, you know. He also wanted us to be loyal to each other if we took that step. No more doing our own thing during the school year. Summer we’d have each other, and the rest of the time we’d be waiting for summer. That was the promise.”
She nods slowly, still watching.
“He was so sweet, always holding me, touching me, kissing me in a way that made me feel loved. When I had sex with him, it didn’t feel wrong. You probably don’t want to hear this, but it was years ago. I couldn’t get enough of him back then. When summer ended, it felt like my heart stopped beating. It was all I could do to get through the school year, but at least he sent me letters. He didn’t have a phone at that time.”
“He wrote you?” Whit whispers, her eyes wide and mystified.
“I wrote him more than he wrote me. He was saving his money, so buying a lot of stamps was an issue. Sometimes I sent him stamps in the envelopes just so I’d get to have more letters from him. I loved his words in writing, even though most people would consider it cheesy nowadays. He was working in the off season at a restaurant as a busboy—I was saving up most of the money Dad paid me for working odd jobs on the ranch. But during the summer Chase was mine and I was his—no work. We only had just under three months together, so we spent every second making it count.”
She clears her throat. “You said it was intense,” she states in a hushed tone. “Both of you. Sounds more like it was epic. What happened? What really happened?”
A tear rolls down my cheek, and I sigh while wiping it away.
“My parents divorced. Long story short, my mother lost it a little when my dad remarried, and she wouldn’t let me come back the next summer. I knew Chase was hurt or mad because he hadn’t written any letters to respond to mine. I stopped hearing from him just before summer. By spring, I was desperate to see him and explain what had happened. I didn’t care if we had a night or a week to be together before my mother sent police. I honestly even thought about quitting school and talking him into running away with me.”
Tears gather in her own eyes as she listens attentively.
“I drove, managed to make it down here in record time, and I went straight over to his house. There was a party that night, though. And I got to see why I hadn’t heard from him. I got to see why he wasn’t responding to all the letters I sent him about how much I loved him… About how much I missed him… About how much I couldn’t wait to be with him for longer than summer…”
My words get choked on the way out, and Whit tenses.
“What happened?” she prompts.
Swiping away another tear, I take a calming breath.
“He was with another girl. They were all over each other. At one point she even had her hand down his pants. I watched it like I couldn’t look away until… finally I was able to. Then I drove straight back home. The end.”
A tear falls down her cheek, then another. In a moment, she’s sniffling and dabbing at the onslaught of tears.
She didn’t even have to hear the worst part. No one should know the worst part. That part was just teenage drama and heartbreak that I over-exaggerated. It’s what teenagers do. It wasn’t as intense and epic as my mind led me to believe—because that sort of love doesn’t exist.
Dr. Kravitz assured me of that. Even Dr. Stein agrees that I romanticized all my feelings to the nth degree. While losing Chase was painful, it wasn’t nearly as painful as everything I endured after the night that changed my life.
The real nightmare came later. It’s not often something shapes your life and changes the way you have to look at absolutely everything.
“So why come back? Obviously he destroyed you. Why come back?” Whit asks, drawing me out of my reverie.
I shrug, staring down at the bar. It’s a ludicrous explanation to a sane, rational, healthy person. She’d never understand. So I give her the philosophical version instead of the fucked-up truth.
“I’ve spent my life living with a hollowness inside me that I can’t explain. When you find something that feels as intense and real and pure as what we once had, it fucks you up. It’s a deluded, exaggerated version of it, because it couldn’t have been that amazing. Anyway, it’s not worth the good times when you have to endure the hellacious aftermath… but I can’t seem to move forward from this point in my life and have a lasting, healthy existence.”
That sounds so much better than the truth, even if it does make me sound a little pathetic by default.
I stand and pour more coffee, ignoring the hot tears pricking my eyes.
“I decided I needed closure. My… therapist… agreed. Sort of.” Therapist sounds much less eyebrow-raising than psychiatrist. “It’s the only way I’m ever going to move forward. The bowling alley is unfinished business. It was supposed to be ours. I spent three years planning out every detail with Chase when we were younger. Hunter helped me pull it all together when I finally decided I had to do something drastic for closure. So… I bought this house and the bowling alley.”
It seemed like it was meant to happen now, at this time, considering how everything kept shifting into place.
“My dad had a stroke shortly after I saw Chase sucking that girl’s tongue down his throat. Early last year, he finally passed away. He hadn’t been able to really communicate since the stroke, and spent years suffering from it. My stepmother stayed with him, even though she just kept the married title and did whatever. In order to inherit anything, she couldn’t divorce him. In the end, she had to follow the will. She couldn’t sell the house to anyone but family—and only for the price stipulated in the will. She wanted to sell it to her son, but he was just going to sell it immediately after in an effort to get around the will and sell it for a much higher price. We both had lawyers going to war over it. I won. They lost. The stipulations were that I had to live here, since my lawyer made the case my stepbrother was just going to sell it as a means of getting around the will. To honor my father’s wishes, I was given the house if I truly wanted it for the sentimental value my lawyer fought to prove it had to me. I agreed to the move without thinking about it.”
Whit nods as I take a sip of my coffee.
“The bowling alley had always been our dream when we were growing up, trying to find a way to be
together,” I go on. She knows I’m talking about Chase again. “When my brother called to find out if it was still empty, the realtor told him the price had been slashed. It was too good to pass up, so I bought it, then asked Hunter to turn it into our dream… My closure… He did everything via phone and internet, speaking with the contractors and such. Since he had Chase’s designs, he didn’t have to see the space to draw his up.”
“And the bald eagles? They’re everywhere. What’s the truth behind them?” she asks quietly.
This time, my tears do start to fall, and I swear more tears fill up in her eyes.
“Chase’s idea. Bald eagles mate for life. Most of the time, they return to the same nest every year and make it stronger, better, bigger… It was us. Come to find out, bald eagles mate for life, but not forever. When one dies, the other moves on like its heart isn’t broken the very next year.”
I clear my throat while shoving my coffee away. Everything tastes bitter right now.
She chews on her lip as more tears fall from her eyes.
“No wonder.”
“No wonder what?” I ask while averting my gaze.
“I chased Chase for a while. I even joked about it. The chase for Chase. Until a little over five months ago, he never acted interested. When he finally took me up on it, he made one thing very clear: The second I fell in love, it was over. He said he wasn’t that kind of guy. Guess it’s because he already found a love too rare to ever imitate.”
I snort derisively. “We were kids. He was a sweet kid back then. I was young and dramatic. Together we were incredible… Until we were toxic. Everything seems like it’s so much better when you’re a kid. Love like that doesn’t really exist, Whit.”
Her lips thin for a minute, until she speaks again. “Chase James was never a sweet kid. He was a bully, a menace, and an asshole. Compared to then, now he’s sweet—obviously he’s not actually sweet, but you get the idea. He used to punish people for looking at him wrong. He hung around with guys who were just the same. Most of them ended up in prison. Chase was the only one smart enough to calm down. He was a hellion and a fighter. Not a sweetheart, Mika. You had a different Chase than anyone else got to know.”