Second Time Around: A Small Town, Second Chance Romance (The Billionaire Brothers Series Book 1)

by Kelli Walker

  Harley

  Twilight was falling over the Fleming’s farm, and, needing a reprieve from the swarm of townsfolk attending the wake inside the house, I had moved outside for some fresh air.

  I wandered the porch, breathing in the warm comfort of dusk, but soon noticed the small wooden swing hanging beneath the big oak tree in the yard. I descended the steps of the wraparound porch, slipping my heels off as I moved, barefoot, into the grass beneath the blackening purple sky.

  I approached the weathered wooden plank, dangling above a worn patch of dirt, suspended by two long, faded ropes. I sat down and let my legs hang freely, as I so often had as a kid. I watched the sun’s trail of orange shrink along the horizon, eyeing the heavens as the first few twinkles of starlight seemed to serenade the rising moon.

  It really was beautiful, watching the shadows sweep deeper into the fields, swallowing the growing crops into the cool shade of night. It all looked the same, just like it was when Ryan and I used to sit there as teenagers watching the world slowly turn by.

  I started thinking about Ryan and his mom, still feeling sad over what happened, sad about all of it, really.

  A hand at my back pushed me forward in the swing. Not expecting it, I nearly lost my grip and tumbled off and into the dust. My head spun around, and I was even further disoriented to see Ryan.

  “Wh…! Ryan! What… What’re you…?”

  “Do you remember when you used to sit here, begging me to push you for hours and hours?”

  “That was a long time ago, Ryan.”

  “Yes, Harley, I know. But… still. How many weeks' worth of time do you think we spent under this tree talking and watching the world spin by?”

  The closeness of his statement to my own thoughts cut beneath my skin, slicing into my heart, which manifested itself in a tone of annoyance in my voice.

  “I don’t know, Ryan, how many?”

  Whether or not my irritation was lost on him or not, Ryan didn’t seem to notice. As I swung back over the dirt patch and my momentum carried me again forward, he added another gentle shove and actually answered the question, meant to be rhetorical.

  “It had to have been months, not weeks… maybe even a year. For a long time, we ended up here almost every day, watching the sun sink down. I remember I’d wake up on the weekends to the sound of the branch creaking. I’d look out my window and be amazed to see you swinging here, wondering more than once if you’d been sitting here since we’d parted for sleep the night before.”

  I remained silent as the memories came flooding back. No matter how warm they seemed, they only brought me more anguish.

  “Mom would shake me awake on Sundays and say, ‘Harley’s outside, that sweet girl. Get your sorry ass outta bed, Ryan, and get that girl inside. It looks like rain, and she’s not going to ruin that pretty dress on account of my boy.’ She always brought us up to her friends, bragging in some kind of weird way about how her son was the first computer geek in the whole world to find a way to get a beautiful girl like you to fawn over me. I always told her…”

  I leaned forward, off of the swing, and dragged the soles of my feet in the dust until I slowed and stopped, cutting him off. I got up, straightening down my dress, and stood to face him. I wanted to be angry at him but couldn’t. I could see the pain on his face.

  “Ryan… Are you okay?”

  “Me? Yeah, of course. I’m… Yeah, I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  I stared up at him, knowing he was full of shit. He knew that fact wasn’t lost on me, and, eventually, he opened up. “I… I knew Mom was sick. I knew, and yet I still didn’t make any kind of effort. I guess… I guess I just never really considered that she wouldn’t always be there. I mean, she’s been sick so many times. I suppose it just never occurred to me that she wouldn’t get better just like she always had.”

  I listened, losing all of my defensive aggression. It hurt to see him in pain.

  “I asked her to come to New York. The doctors there… they’re just better. There’s no other way to say it. I’d even got Dad on board with the idea, sent them plane tickets, and had everything planned out… but she wouldn’t do it. I don’t know… It probably wouldn’t have changed anything, but I could’ve done more.”

  “I… I didn’t know that. You know, Ryan, I spent a lot of time with your mom over the years after you… left. She never had anything to say about you that wasn’t positive. As far as I could tell, she missed you, but it didn’t bother her that you’d gone. She phrased it a certain way one time… What did she say? … Oh, right. She said, ‘He’s doing exactly what he’s supposed to. My job as a mother was to give him wings… How could I be upset when he uses them to fly?’”

  I was closing my eyes as I remembered her words. I opened them to find tears in Ryan’s eyes. It shook me, perhaps because I had selfishly convinced myself that he was incapable of such emotion in an effort to block my own pain.

  I rubbed his arm as he looked away, trying to hide his reaction born of guilt and sorrow. At my touch, he flinched but didn’t move away. For some reason, the response clicked in my mind, and I recognized that the movement was a repulsion, not meant for me, but for the thought of someone stupid enough to be close to him.

  “She loved you, Ryan. More than anything.” He sniffled, and, for a moment, I thought he might break down. Ignoring all my other impulses, I decided that he deserved consolation. I wrapped my arms around him and hugged myself against his chest, feeling his broad chest quiver, ever so slightly, as he draped his own arms around my shoulders and lowered his head next to mine.

  For what seemed like an eternity, we held on to one another, allowing ourselves to be lost in an embrace more comfortable than either of us were in our own skin.

  Eventually, it dawned on me that his chest was no longer shaking. I waited, thinking, but quickly realized that we had strayed beyond comforting and were just holding each other just like we always had.

  Once again, I reacted defensively, pulling away in haste from the fear of instigating my own invitation for renewed rejection. I glanced at Ryan but strangely found him to have a similar expression of confusion. He quickly changed the subject, generically asking about the state of my life at present.

  “Uh… So… What’s changed in the life of the great Harley Andrews after all these years?”

  “Oh, uh… Well, first of all, I’m not really sure how much about it I’d call great… I manage the bank now. I’ve been working there since I graduated from college. I bought the Sheritans’ house after Mr. Sheritan died, and Mrs. Sheritan moved to Florida to live with her sister. Um… Other than that, Mom and Dad are good. They paid off the mortgage while I was at school… Dad still hunts and loves his scratch-offs. Not much else has changed. Everything pretty much stays the same around here.”

  I rambled on as we fell into a comfortable back and forth. It wasn’t until night had fully fallen, and the first families could be heard leaving the house that I realized my mistake, having forgotten how easy it was to lose myself talking to him.

  I caught myself and, again, felt the need to back away. Inwardly I berated myself for having the audacity to get comfortable with Ryan.

  Abruptly, I announced that I was going back into the house. In the moonlight, I could see the sudden change caught him off-guard. I looked away to spare my psyche from further questioning myself and immediately set off through the grass.

  For the second time in a single day, I was stopped in my tracks, caught by the wrist. I turned slowly, feeling my heart begin to pound beneath my breasts. In the darkness, I looked back to Ryan, feeling the warmth of his touch surge through my whole body.

  Ryan

  If I’m honest, I had no idea what I was doing. I was acting on instinct, and in the darkness of the yard, I couldn’t even tell what Harley was thinking. All I knew was that I couldn’t let her walk away.

  I wanted to tell her that I never stopped thinking about her. I knew that I screwed up, but I was still struggling
because the logical side of my brain still believed that I did what I did for a good reason. She would not have survived in New York. Our relationship would’ve imploded: maybe not the first day, maybe not after the first month, but, eventually, I knew she would’ve realized that she couldn’t be herself there. So, I ended it sooner, rather than later, thinking that she would’ve been left just as broken-hearted if we kept going, except I would’ve been even more of an asshole for wasting potentially years of her life in the process.

  Still, there hadn’t been a day that I hadn’t thought about her, remembering what we had, imagining what she was doing, or wondering what might’ve been.

  Holding her hand in the darkness, thoughts of all those things danced through my mind, but I couldn’t bring myself to voice any of them. All I wanted was to see her happy, but that wish was tied up in a dilemma of my own confusion, wanting her to find that happiness with me but worrying that I still wasn’t anything more than an anchor to drag her down.

  A car started in the gravel driveway, and the family inside backed out toward the road. As they turned to head back into town, their headlights illuminated the yard, dancing over Harley and revealing her stunning face, half-cast in shadow by the gloom of a hurt from which I was the cause.

  I recognized the awkwardness of my position and realized I had to either make a choice or let her go. Refusing to do the latter, I decided to veil my thoughts with further confessions of truth from our past.

  “Waking up all those mornings, seeing you out here in the morning sun… I never forgot how beautiful you were. I know it’s been a long time, but I… I don’t think I’ve ever woken up to a more perfect sight.”

  A long moment of silence passed in the darkness. If it weren’t for her hand still gripped in mine, I probably would’ve wondered if she had walked away. She broke the stillness of the night, admirably sticking up for herself, even though it cut me deep to my core.

  “Well, Ryan, if that’s really the way you feel… I guess I should’ve worked harder to be more than just a pretty face. I’m sorry I never quite made it to fit your standards. I guess it really was my fault all along. It’s not hard to understand why you left the way you did. How long has it been since the last time I saw you? You remember, don’t you? The day you left me standing in the park? I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to realize. Thank you, Ryan, for helping me to understand. I guess that’s just one more way I’ve proved that you were right: I was just a small-town, stupid schoolgirl fling, unworthy of your plans for success, fame, and fortune.”

  “Harley… That’s not true! And that isn’t what I was trying to say.”

  My eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and, as the moon climbed higher in the sky, I could begin to distinguish her silhouette from the rest of the void. I sighed, knowing that, even if I figured out a way to talk to her, Harley probably still wouldn’t want anything more to do with me. I resigned myself to that likelihood, accepting failure but wanting to try regardless.

  I stepped toward her shadowed figure and drew her close. Face to face in the blackness, the lunar light could just reveal the features of her face. Her eyes peered up at me, glowing in the moonlight, and I took her hands in mine, speaking from the heart.

  “Harley, I never deserved to be with you. It was never the other way around. I’m not sure if I knew that at the time, but I know it now, and that had nothing to do with why I did what I did. I saw our lives going in two different directions. We were, what, eighteen? Nineteen years old? You had your whole life ahead of you, and I wasn’t going to risk you spending half of it living a life you didn’t want just because we had always been together.”

  I stopped myself as the next sentence threatened to say too much of what was in my heart. I might’ve been able to stop the words from pouring out my mouth, but I couldn’t stop the thought from being branded within my mind. I never stopped loving you.

  Instead, I voiced a different thought, one which maintained my stance but avoided having to risk more than I was ready to commit to.

  “Besides, that day in the park wasn’t the last time I saw you.”

  “Yes… Yes, it was, Ryan. I haven’t seen or talked to you since that day. Trust me, I think I remember the worst…”

  She fell quiet, but I got the idea. I knew I couldn’t change the past, but I was still wondering if the future was likewise written in stone.

  “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that wasn’t the last time that I, myself, saw you. That… sounds a whole lot creepier than it was. It was… I don’t know, three years ago? Two and a half? I was here, and there was a wedding about to happen at the pond by the Walter property. Do you remember that? I didn’t even know it was happening; I was just out for a drive trying to get away from fighting with my dad for a bit. I was driving around and just happened to turn down that road… and there you were, setting up the flowers. You were wearing this button-up white dress with blue flowers or something on it, and you had your hair pulled back like you always do when you’re concentrating on something… The flowers were really pretty, by the way. However, I do remember asking one of my brothers about the wedding later on, and all they had to say was that the bride and groom rode off on an ATV with cans tied to the rear gun rack and some classic rock guitar solo playing in the background. So… I’m pretty sure you could’ve gotten by with some vases of dry sticks and dead leaves to look like camouflage instead of your immaculate floral arrangements.”

  She snickered in the darkness, and I smiled. A moment passed before the remembered description fully set in. We broke the silence in tandem with shared noises of restrained chuckles. We both laughed heartily, amused by the same knowledge of our hometown’s unique rural charms.

  As the humor ran its course, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. Luckily for me, Harley had something to say. “I… I’m surprised how much you remember… except, of course, the timing. That wedding was four and a half years ago, not two or three.”

  “Ah, well… I didn’t remember it because of anything to do with the wedding. I remember because of you.”

  Silence enveloped the yard around us as I wondered if I’d said too much. Harley wasn’t saying anything, and I began to panic, but we both blurted out words at the same time, trying to end the impasse.

  “I’m sorry. You go ahead.”

  “No… you go.”

  “Are… Are you sure? You can…”

  “Ryan. Just… talk.”

  I hesitated, again reconsidering my words. I could see her eyes looking up at me and, for a moment, I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so nervous. My silence seemed to spread my own feeling of discomfort. Harley’s eyes dropped as she turned her head toward the sound of more people emerging through the screen door. In urgency, I spat the words out, raising my voice by accident and making her jump.

  “Wh-What?” Her hands squeezed mine, and I could tell her shoulders were clinched, but still, she hadn’t fled, at least not yet. I exhaled, then repeated my question slower, lowering my voice to a normal volume and making sure to speak more clearly.

  “I said… Would it be okay… Would you want to… Can I pick you up and take you to lunch tomorrow?”

  My heart dropped beat by beat in my chest with the reverberations of a stomping T-Rex. I waded painfully through the silence, slowed seconds, stranded in limbo between my own blind senses of doubt and hope.

  “Ryan…”

  My ears perked up, and I leaned forward, hanging on every syllable out of her mouth. “… No, Ryan. I… “

  “No? … Oh, uh… okay. Can… Can I ask why?”

  She didn’t respond immediately, but I couldn’t read her face to figure out why. Eventually, she spoke. “It… just isn’t a good idea.”

  Before I could say a word, she pulled her hands free of mine and wrapped me in another embrace, confusing me even further. That perplexity grew when, after a moment of holding onto me, her hands around my neck pulled me downward, and I felt the warmth of her lips against my ch
eek.

  In a flash, she was gone. Beneath the porch light’s electron field of gnats and field flies, I saw her hurrying inside, although I couldn’t quite make out any expression on her lowered face. Moments later, she appeared back through the screen door with her folks.

  Thirty seconds later, the taillights from the Andrews’ family car disappeared down the road, leaving only the echoing drone of the vehicle’s tires on the asphalt slowly fading away. As that sound, too, faded away, I continued to stand alone in the darkness of my family’s yard, listening to the silence and filling it with my own deafening sound of mental resignation.

  Harley

  “You did what?!”

  “Harley! At his mother’s wake? Oh, for heaven’s sake…”

  “It wasn’t like that! He was upset. He asked me to go to lunch with him. It was just a peck on the cheek!”

  “Roger, where are you going?”

  Eleanor and I turned from the table to look at my father as Mom addressed him behind us. He slowly retreated from the kitchen doorway, looking like he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  “Uh… This didn’t really seem like the conversation for me. I think you’ve got this one, Melissa. Eleanor, it was good to see you. Harley… uh… good luck.”

  My mother sat with her mouth open in disbelief as my dad bravely continued out of the room. Her momentary distraction didn’t last long before she was again ridiculing me as some kind of heathen.

  “He just finished burying his mother, Harley; of course, he was upset! What were you thinking?”

  I resumed my former position, setting my chin down atop my crossed arms, and weighed my possible responses. I settled on blunt honesty since I was too far into my own melancholy wallowing to care for much greater effort.

  “I was thinking that I love him, but that I’m not stupid enough to let him hurt me like that again. He asked to take me to lunch. I declined, telling him that it wasn’t a good idea. Then, yes, I kissed him on the cheek. He was already distraught and sounded more than a little disappointed when I said no. I don’t know, it was kind of hard to see.”