by Natalie Ann
“Three kids,” Dena said, forcing a smile. “I had it all planned out. He was the planner, but when it came to our personal life, it was me. Work, it was him.”
“And he didn’t want to be here?” Rene said. “Amber told me.”
“No. He went back home to where he was from. I told myself I didn’t think he’d do it, but when I look back, he’d said it enough. I guess I thought he would stay for me and he didn’t.”
“And you wouldn’t move for him?” Amber said.
“No.” She’d always have to ask herself if it was wrong or selfish of her. If she’d caused this to happen or not.
“So he’s visiting here?” Rene asked, reaching for her chips and breaking them open. Half her sandwich was gone already.
“Are you sure you aren’t pregnant?” Dena asked Rene, laughing.
“Nope,” Rene said. “Just starving. If you don’t start eating, I’m going after your sandwich next.”
Amber and she laughed, but Dena moved her sandwich out of Rene’s way. “When we spoke at the restaurant, I commented about him being gone soon. That he never wanted to be here. He said things change.”
“Meaning what?” Amber asked.
“I didn’t wait around to find out. I walked away from him.” She took a sip of her soda and said, “I ran into his mother just now in the deli. I can’t figure it out. I could go years without seeing her and then I have to run into her after seeing Matt. Talk about bad luck.”
“Or fate,” Rene said.
“Whatever. I gave up on fate a long time ago.”
“So what did his mother have to say?” Amber asked. “My God, it’s like pulling your teeth lately.”
“She said Matt needs me. That was it. Nothing else. They called my name for our order and I walked away.”
“Well, that bites,” Rene said. “I hate not knowing. And Amber said he was limping. You don’t know anything at all?”
“Nothing and I’m not nosy enough to want to find out.”
“Did you check out any social media accounts?” Amber asked her. “That’s always the first place I go. Unlike you, I’m very nosy.”
“No.” She didn’t want to say that she had purposely stayed off her computer and phone to keep herself from looking.
Amber picked her phone up. “I’m going to do a quick internet search on him. He’s a lawyer; his name has to be out there.”
“With cases, sure,” Dena agreed, “but I doubt anything else.”
“Oops,” Amber said.
Dena reached her hand over and grabbed the phone out of Amber’s hand to see a picture of Matt with another woman at some charity event. It was an old picture. One from last year. God, he was gorgeous. But she was right, he didn’t look the same now.
He was thinner and paler. She was wondering why she didn’t notice that in the restaurant.
Probably because her anger got the best of her and she just wanted to move past him.
“Whatever,” Dena said, handing the phone back. “We’ve both dated over the years. So what?”
“That’s true,” Rene said. “The only way you’re going to really find out what is going on is if you talk to him.”
“It’s not going to happen,” Dena argued. “When he walked out on me twelve years ago I shouted at his back that I’d never forgive him and never take him back.”
“People do and say a lot of stupid things when they’re younger,” Amber said. “I know myself. You can’t hold everything against someone without knowing any underlying causes.”
“Whose side are you on anyway?” Dena asked Amber.
Amber reached her hand over and put it on hers. “Yours. Always yours. I’ll find out where he is and go over and kick his ass for you. I promise.”
“I can have Cole try to find him,” Rene said. “Or maybe Riley can have Trevor do it.”
Cole was a state trooper stationed in Lake Placid. Trevor was Lake Placid’s Police Chief. “No, thank you. If it’s meant to be, I’ll find him on my own. If I even want to, and right now, I don’t think I do.”
Seriously Wrong
So on Friday after work, Dena was wondering why the hell she was knocking on the door to a rental house not that far from her apartment.
She’d had no intention of tracking Matt down at all. Not one bit of interest in it.
But there were Rene and Amber standing there smiling at her Friday morning and she knew something was up. “What did you two do?” she asked them.
“My mother heard through the church grapevine that Matt was staying in Lake Placid while he recovers,” Amber said.
Dena didn’t want to ask, but did. “Recovers from what?”
Amber shrugged. “My mother didn’t know, which we both know is surprising. But she did know where he was staying. I guess one of the ladies in the church is friends with Penny and you know how it goes.”
“I do,” Dena said. Small towns, nothing got past anyone.
“Here’s his address,” Rene said, handing over a piece of paper. “Let us know if you need backup. I’ll warn Cole in case Matt calls the cops.”
Dena laughed. Rene was just over five foot. She couldn’t take down a fly if she wanted to. Well, maybe if that fly was trying to steal her food.
“No backup. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Right now I’m getting to work and you two should too.”
But by the end of the day she knew she had to find out what was going on. If she hadn’t run into Penny, mixed in with Matt’s cryptic message, then she might have just brushed it all off waiting for him to leave.
Once Amber told her he was renting a house, she knew he wouldn’t be leaving any time soon.
She took a deep breath and knocked one more time. Maybe he wasn’t home and it was just as well.
The door opened suddenly and there he was standing there in gym shorts and a T-shirt, sweat dripping off of him like he’d been working out for hours.
Talk about hormones wanting to jump out of her skin and reach for the yummy dessert presented so nicely in front of her.
He leaned against the open doorframe and crossed his arms. “Dena. What do I owe this visit to?”
“I have no idea. Maybe I just want to know when you’ll be gone.”
He laughed. “Come on in and we can discuss it.”
She hesitated and didn’t know why. She’d sought him out so she obviously planned on talking with him. “I can wait while you go change or shower or whatever,” she said.
He rolled his eyes like he always did when she was sarcastic with him. Funny how it just slipped out like when they were dating. On both of their parts.
“Have a seat while I shower,” he said, walking out of the room. She watched him go and noticed the limp Amber talked about. It was faint but enough. Then how his hand grabbed the railing and held on as he walked up the stairs. He was trying to hide his pain, but she was a trained medical professional. Something was seriously wrong with him.
***
Matt stepped under the hot spray and let it run over his body, then turned and let it hit his back.
Rehab sucked the big one, but he knew he’d never get better if he didn’t push himself.
He came here to get away from everyone so he could work through this on his own. So he could figure out his next stage in life.
So people would leave him the hell alone.
But there was one person he didn’t want to leave him alone and she was downstairs on his couch.
Why, was the question.
Once he was dried off and changed, he took a few Motrin and walked downstairs to see her with her jacket off and a bottle of water in her hand.
“Helping yourself, I see,” he said.
“I could have gone through your stuff, but figured a bottle of water was safer.”
He laughed. She was still as feisty as ever. She seemed to have done well in life. Just like him, she knew what she wanted to do and she got that career. Though if he was honest, he’d say he was surprised she was working
for a plastic surgeon over emergency medicine which she’d always talked about.
“You wouldn’t have found much,” he said.
“Yet you indicated you don’t know how long you’ll be here?” she asked, raising her eyebrow.
The urge to reach out and touch her was just so massive that he had to fight it back with every fiber of his being. “I don’t need anything but clothes at the moment. Or rather clothes and my laptop.”
She nodded her head and looked around. “It’s a lot of space for one person.”
“It’s what was available and met my needs,” he said, wondering why they were having this silly conversation.
“What needs are those?” she asked.
“Space and privacy,” he said.
She took a deep breath, her chest rising and falling, his eyes going right there like the cad he’d been accused of being over the years. He threw the best thing he had away and knew it, so he stopped trying to find anything other than a physical release for years.
“I can get out of your way then. I don’t know what made me come here.”
She went to stand up and he reached for her hand, pulling her back down. “No. That was wrong of me. You’re here and where I want you. Let’s talk.”
“I don’t know what to say or what I want to say.”
“Just say what’s on your mind.”
“You don’t really want to know what is on my mind,” she said. “The last time we saw each other you told me you hoped I had a good life but you couldn’t stay here another day.”
“I did. I said a lot of things that day I didn’t mean or wish I could take back. You also yelled at me that you’d never forgive me. Does that still hold true?”
“Most likely,” she said.
“You didn’t say yes.”
“I don’t know anything about you. You walked out of my life over twelve years ago with little to no explanation and we haven’t seen each other or talked since. Nothing.”
“I deserve your anger.” He was expecting it and braced for it.
“I don’t know if I even feel that anymore. I felt it for years. It controlled a lot of me. I had to stop feeling all of that to just move on. You think saying you regret those words is going to make it all go away? That it’s okay you said what you did and made me feel as if my world was exploding around me the day before I was going to leave the only family and support system I had?”
He grimaced. At that time, he’d never thought of those things. Even years later, listening to her describe it brought a guilt to his heart that he was struggling to move past.
“No. I don’t. I think that we need to spend time together for us to get to that point again.”
She laughed, unfortunately it wasn’t a happy sound. “You won’t be here long enough. If you think I’m opening myself up to spending time with you so you can just walk out the door again…” She was shaking her head rapidly. “No. Think again. Not happening. I can’t go through that again.”
Maybe that meant she still felt something for him, if she was afraid of being hurt again? He was wise enough to not voice that thought though or he’d probably be walking cross-legged for a bit.
“I don’t know when I’m leaving. If I’m even going to leave,” he said softly.
“Why? How can you say that?”
“Things have changed in my life. What I thought I wanted, I can’t have. I’ve thrown too much away trying to get it and it never made me happy.”
“And you think Lake Placid is going to make you happy when you couldn’t leave fast enough?”
“You made me happy,” he said.
“Obviously not happy enough,” she said back, a catch in her voice.
Damn, her eyes were filling and he didn’t want that. “I can’t say I’m sorry enough, Dena. I don’t even know what I could do to get you to believe me.”
“I don’t know that there is anything you can do to make me ever believe anything you’ve got to say.”
“I deserve that. We were both stubborn and stuck in our ways back then. Neither one of us was flexible.”
Her face flushed. Good, at least she knew it wasn’t just him. “You didn’t give me a chance to even make that decision. You decided to make it for both of us.”
“I did. I was wrong.”
“You never used to apologize for anything. What changed in your life? What happened to you?”
He hadn’t planned on telling her. Or laying it out like this. He didn’t want pity, but he wanted her to understand.
“I died. They said I did. I was gone for a minute and brought back. And when I came back I said your name. I know it, I remember it, the ER nurses kept asking me who Dena was. It was then I knew.”
Tears were flowing out her eyes. “What did you know?”
“That I’m not leaving here unless you come with me, or I’m staying if it’s the only way I can have you.”
Not Leaving
He died? What the hell? Why hadn’t anyone told her that?
“What happened?” she asked, looking him over for other signs of injury.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“And I’m sitting here with no place to go.” Not that she wanted him to know she had no life on a Friday night, but it didn’t seem the time to even worry about that.
“I had too much to drink one night.”
“You never drank a lot. Even in school when we snuck out for parties, you didn’t drink much at all. You always said you never wanted anything to come back to you that you’d done stupidly in your youth.”
She’d never forget the first time he’d said that to a bunch of friends and they all laughed at him like he was nuts to be thinking of that at sixteen years old when they were all hiding in someone’s basement drinking pilfered beer.
But she didn’t know him anymore. She thought she knew him so well back then, but obviously she didn’t since his breakup took her so much by surprise.
“I don’t. I mean I still didn’t. But it was a bad day. Something happened and, well, let’s just say I ended up in a bar. I was in a taxi on the way home when someone ran a light. I didn’t have my seatbelt on in the back. The taxi driver died. Like I said, they said I did too, but they brought me back.”
She couldn’t believe she was hearing this and felt more tears escaping her eyes. “Tell me about your injuries.”
“Punctured lung, broken ribs, internal bleeding in more than one place, my hip and femur were busted. I’ve got some high tech pieces in there. I had a few ruptured disks in my back. It’s been a long haul.”
How could it be that not one person said a word to her about this? His mother had to know, people in the community. “How long ago was this?”
“This summer. About six months ago. I had my last surgery on my back about six weeks ago. I’m in the rehab stage right now.”
She could only imagine the amount of rehab he’d had to do. “You’ve been out of work this whole time?” she asked, knowing how much his career meant to him.
“Desk work when I can. Research for others at the moment. I’m in no shape to stand in a courtroom. I don’t even know if I want to go back to what I was doing anyway.” Now that surprised her. “It’s a long story. Plus, if I do then I can’t win you back and I’m determined to do that.”
She snorted. “I’m not leaving, Matt. I might have left after college if I’d been given some time to think about it. If I had time to be apart from you and missed you so much that I needed to be with you. But you never gave me that chance. By doing what you did, you proved to me that I’m just fine on my own. That I don’t need to follow a man anywhere and I’m where I always wanted to be.”
***
It was exactly as he assumed. He knew he blew it back then and he had to figure out or find a way to make it right. If it was even possible for that to happen.
“I don’t think I’d ask you to leave. I guess the bigger question is if I’m okay with staying here myself.”
“I doubt it.”
“You’re not even going to give me an opportunity to prove it to you?” he asked.
“I’m not sure how you think you can do that,” she said.
“I guess there is only one way to find out. You’ll have to spend some time with me for that to happen. What do you say?”
“I say I think you’re nuts,” she said.
“But you’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking,” she admitted.
“Something,” he said. “There are tears in your eyes. You were upset when you found out what happened to me. That has to mean you still carry feelings for me.”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure what those feelings are. It could just be anger mixed in with some grief. We had a history together. I’d be that upset if I found out anyone I went to school with had been through what you had.”
He reached for her hand again to see if she’d pull away. She didn’t. “It’s more than that, but if you don’t want to admit it, that’s fine. I’ve got all the time in the world to make you believe me.”
“You seem awfully confident of yourself,” she said, her lips twitching. “If I remember correctly, you’ve never lacked any confidence.”
“Nope. If I want something, I’m going to do everything I can to get it.” At least now he did. Secretly he’d never been as confident deep down as he portrayed to the world.
“And you want me,” she said.
“I do.”
“I’m not a possession. I’m not something you pick up and throw out when you’re done. I’m a person with feelings. With emotions. With anger. That’s a lot to overcome. And if I’m not positive you can do it, why do you think you can?”
“Because deep down you still care for me. And I’m hoping with that comes love. That maybe you could love me again.”
She stood up and he knew he was pushing things too fast for her. “You’re just going to piss me off. I’m sorry you went through what you did. If there is anything I can do to help you with your recovery, you know I will. Not because I care for you. Not because you think I might still love you, but because I’m a medical professional and it’s my job. My career. I’m good at what I do and I like to help others, not just those I’ve slept with.”