One Last Time: A Second Chance Romance

by Roxie Noir

  I like all those things. Love and weddings and babies are all great. I love the hell out of Bree and Callum, and even if Olivia’s on my nerves right now, I’m excited for her kid, too.

  I just cannot bring myself to care what its nursery looks like, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m broken.

  “…that senses when the baby moves, and rocks it back to sleep so you don’t have to,” Winona is saying. “They’d just come out when Callum was born, but my friend Jenn had one for her first and she absolutely raves about it.”

  Olivia’s nodding along like she’s trying to take notes, so I take the moment to find Seth’s leg under the table and give his thigh a quick you’re doing great and it’ll be over soon squeeze.

  He covers my hand with his, glances over, gives me a quick, secret smile.

  “…concerned about the altitude, but my OB-GYN said it was all right. Still, I’ll be keeping a close eye on things,” Olivia says.

  “Honey, Snowpeak’s only at about five thousand feet,” my dad interjects.

  “Well, I’m just glad you’re still coming,” Vera says, indulgently. “Family weekends are so important. With everyone.”

  Seth’s leg tenses slightly under my hand, so I move it away and into my own lap, curling my fingers into a fist, fighting guilt.

  In two weeks, we’re going to Snowpeak, West Virginia on our annual skiing getaway, and I have yet to mention this fact to Seth. It’s partly out of sheer thoughtlessness, because I honestly forgot it was coming up this soon, and partly because I want to invite him and also don’t want to invite him.

  Vera gives me a significant look. Then she darts her eyes to Seth before looking at me again and doubling down on the significance of said look, as if I didn’t understand it the first time.

  I hold my ground and look right back. We had a talk the week after Ava’s wedding, once I’d stopped being the most hungover person on the planet, and it went better than I was expecting. I’m not sure I’m fully convinced that she’s going to respect boundaries forever, but she at least seemed to acknowledge my point, so I’ll take it.

  “Yes, I can’t wait,” I say, practically daring Vera to say something to Seth.

  Please let me deal with this myself, I think, trying to psychically beam my thoughts into her head. I already fucked up, don’t make this worse.

  She doesn’t. Miracle of miracles, my stepmother looks away and takes another sip of wine. It feels like angels shine lights from above and sing the Hallelujah chorus.

  Until Olivia slides right into that silence and pipes up.

  “Seth, you’re coming, aren’t you?” Olivia pipes up. “We’d love to have you along. It’s so much fun, such a nice, relaxing getaway, and the two of you could have some really romantic alone time.”

  I nearly throw my fork at her. Olivia knows damn well that I haven’t invited Seth, because she asked me an hour ago whether I’d invited him and I said no.

  “He’s already made plans for that weekend,” I say, smiling back at my sister, fork still gripped in my hand. “What was it you said you were doing?”

  Seth and I look at each other. I’ve got a fake smile frozen on my face, and his eyes flash, even as the rest of his face stays neutral.

  “I have to… help my brother find chairs for his wedding,” Seth says, his eyes never leaving mine.

  I kick myself for not supplying the lie.

  “Oh!” exclaims Ava. “I love weddings! Which one is getting married? When’s the wedding? Where’s he having it? Has she picked out a dress yet? Are you a groomsman?”

  Bless you, Ava, I think as Seth’s eyes slide away from mine and he puts on his casual, easy smile.

  “My oldest brother, Levi,” he says. “It’s in about four months, it’s at a place called Treetop Lodge, which used to be an upscale hunting lodge in the 1920s, but now it’s mostly an event space. I don’t know about the dress, and yes.”

  “Treetop Lodge,” she says, and turns to Thad, sitting next to her. “Babe, did we look at Treetop Lodge?”

  “I don’t think so,” he says, though the man clearly has no idea.

  “No,” Vera says, authoritatively.

  “Wasn’t there some place we considered…”

  And Ava’s off, talking about weddings, half trying to plan Levi’s, and Seth gives me another look.

  I turn away, because I can’t do this here, now, in front of my entire family. They all seem to think that I should be worshipping the ground he walks on for even considering me a viable dating partner, given my ancient, haggard status.

  I’m being slightly unfair to them, but good God they can be a lot, and I don’t trust them around him. I know we have long history that we’re pretending doesn’t exist, but we haven’t even been dating for a full month. We haven’t spent the night together yet, sort of. This time.

  Olivia, who’s in full monster mode tonight, has already insinuated that my thirty-year-old ovaries are shriveling as we speak. I think Ava’s been dropping nonstop hints about ring shopping, and God only knows what my dad said to him in the wine cellar. They can’t even behave for a few hours. I’m not forcing him to be around them for a whole weekend.

  “What about helicopter skiing?” Michael asks. “I tried it when I went to Whistler in January, and it was a stunning experience. Really amazing.”

  “Babe, I don’t think Snowpeak has helicopter skiing,” Olivia says.

  “They should,” he says. “Maybe I’ll talk to Evan about it, see if he’ll consider offering it for VIPs or something.”

  Finally, I glance back over at Seth. This time, he avoids my eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Seth

  “I didn’t think he’d ever stop talking about heli-skiing,” Delilah says, her breath puffing into the cold air. “What’s it like to be so insanely self-confident that you think people are invested in what you’re saying, even they’re practically falling asleep in front of you?”

  I just keep walking and don’t respond right away. Not while we’re this close to the house, where any one of her sisters could be listening at a window, just waiting for something interesting to happen.

  “And it can’t be good for the environment,” she says, pulling her keys from her pocket, pointing them at her car and unlocking it. “Besides, what happens if you get hurt somewhere only accessible by helicopter? I guess the helicopter has to get you back out, but that seems pretty dicey.”

  Finally, next to her car, she stops. I shove one hand into my coat pocket, the other holding the now-clean pie dish.

  “Were you going to tell me?” I ask, an edge sliding into my voice. “Or were you just going to disappear for the weekend?”

  “I forgot,” she says, and her eyes dart away. “It’s this annual thing, and it’s been in my calendar but I didn’t realize it was that soon —"

  “Don’t bullshit me.”

  “I’m not —”

  “Not a single person in that room believes that I have to help Levi pick out wedding chairs,” I say.

  “That’s because you came up with the worst lie I’ve ever heard.”

  “You made me lie!”

  I’m loud, too loud, and we both look over at the house. Nothing moves. I shove a hand through my hair.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she says, quiet but strained. “I didn’t want my fucking sister to go and invite you in the first place, but I didn’t want them thinking that we’re on the rocks or something.”

  “And fuck what I think, right?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “But you’ll keep secrets and then have me lie to cover for you.”

  Delilah heaves a deep breath. Her cheeks are flaming, even in the dark, her eyes too shiny, her lips too red. Always an angry crier.

  “We’ve been dating for a month and you’re mad that I’m not bringing you on my family vacation?” she says, stepping closer to me, her breath frosting in the air. “Tell me. In your blank slate, start over scheme, would you br
ing a brand new girlfriend who you’d never even slept with on a vacation with your entire family?”

  “I’d at least tell her I was going,” I say. “If I brought her around my family, I’d at least give her some warning. And yeah, I might invite her if I thought she was worth keeping.”

  Delilah’s eyes wobble, her whole face bright red, and all the muscles in her jaw twitch.

  “Goddamn,” she says, and a single tear spills out.

  She turns away from me, hair flying, and walks away.

  “Del —”

  “Stay there!” she shouts over her shoulder.

  At the edge of the driveway, by a tall, cylindrical tree, she stops.

  Delilah stares at the tree. Or, at least, it looks like she’s staring at the tree because her back is to me. She stares at the tree for a minute, then two.

  Finally, she comes back, stands in front of me, clears her throat.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I should’ve at least told you I was going. It wasn’t my intention to hurt your feelings.”

  I’m thunderstruck. Delilah and I have gotten in more fights than I can count, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard her apologize before. I look at the tree — maybe it’s possessed? — and then back at her.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “That was a breathing thing I learned in therapy,” she explains, waving a hand at the tree. “It’s to… I can be really… you know.”

  “I do know.”

  Delilah snorts. She takes another deep breath.

  “They’re crazy and you don’t even ski,” she says, her voice quiet. “I didn’t want you to feel like you had to come and then listen to Michael talk incessantly about heliskiing and polo, or discuss a nursery in great detail, or politely ignore ten hundred thousand million hints about finally making an honest woman out of me. Ava’s been married for what, six weeks? and they’re already after her about kids. They’re a lot, and they stress me out, and I didn’t want to make you have to deal with it yet.”

  I believe her. I just witnessed her family in action for a few hours, and she’s right. But all the same there’s the shadow of a whisper, deep in the back of my mind, saying you’re not a family vacation kind of boyfriend and if she were serious, none of that would matter.

  I push those away, stuff them back into a pit, and I reach out and brush my fingers along her cheek.

  “Delilah,” I say, softly. “Have you met my family? They’re the definition of a lot.”

  She smiles, finally.

  “It’s completely different,” she says. “I don’t think my sisters know what a trebuchet even is. I didn’t until Rusty showed me the diagrams. But your brothers don’t act like your opinion doesn’t count if you’re not married.”

  It’s true. My family is remarkably pressure-free, at least in that arena. Even when Daniel accidentally knocked someone up, no one wanted him to marry her.

  “I really did forget it was in two weeks,” she says. “I thought I still had a month or something. I’ve been distracted lately.”

  I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish it were as simple as Delilah thinking he’s my boyfriend, he should come.

  But I let it go. I give her a kiss and we get into her car, and I remind myself about the blank slate, that nothing before this matters, and Delilah pulls around her parents’ driveway, down the tree-lined lane, and away.

  The first snowflake falls on Delilah’s windshield when we’re halfway back to my house, and she frowns at it.

  “I thought Dad said it wasn’t starting until after midnight,” she says, anchoring both hands on the steering wheel.

  “Could it be that the Weather Channel was wrong?” I say, and she laughs.

  “I bet we’ll hear about it,” she says. “He loves to complain when people make wrong guesses about an inherently chaotic system.”

  More snowflakes fall. Delilah’s hands tighten on the wheel. I fiddle with the windshield defroster so she doesn’t have to look away from the road.

  Within five minutes, it’s pouring snow. Delilah’s white-knuckling the steering wheel, going thirty miles an hour on the dark country roads, already gone gray with fallen snow.

  “Should I turn around and go back?” she asks, voice tense.

  I pull my phone out to check the map, just to be sure, but I’m right: we’re closer to my house than to their estate.

  “Do you want me to drive?” I offer.

  “Are you any better at snow driving than me?” she asks.

  “I doubt it.”

  “If someone’s gonna drive my car into a ditch, it should probably be me,” she say, and then we both fall silent again.

  The snow keeps falling, thick and heavy, blanketing the road in what seems like minutes. There are no other tires tracks. We pass two other cars in the next twenty minutes, both of us tense and on high alert.

  I have to remind myself to breathe. I have to remind myself that even if we go around a curve and hit something, we’re not going fast enough to do ourselves much damage. That safety features in cars have come a long way in the past twenty years and at worst, one of us will break a bone.

  I know if someone from, say, Michigan or Vermont saw us right now, they’d laugh their asses off, but this is the South. I can count the number of times I’ve driven in snow on one hand, because even when it does snow, it’s gone in forty-eight hours, tops.

  The roads aren’t built for it. No one has snow chains. I think Burnley County has two snowplows for hundreds of miles of winding country roads.

  The forty-five minute drive from Delilah’s parents’ house to mine becomes an hour and a half, snow piling higher and higher the whole time. We both heave a sigh of relief when we turn from the country road onto a bigger one with streetlights, then into town.

  And then, finally, into the parking lot of my townhouse. Delilah parks, pulls on the parking brake, then leans back against the headrest and exhales so hard it steams her windshield.

  “Holy shit, I fucking hate driving in fucking snow,” she says, clenching and unclenching her hands. “Fuck.”

  She stops clenching her hands and starts shaking them out, and I do the same as her: lean back, try to let the tension go, but I can’t. Not quite, no matter how many deep breaths I take.

  “You okay?” I ask. Already the snow is sticking to the windshield, blocking some of the light from the street lamps in the parking area, mottling the shadows inside the car.

  “I’m fine,” she says. “Just… rattled.”

  Rattled. That’s the word for it, that sense of darkness that keeps sliding away whenever I try to think of it too much.

  I reach over and take Delilah’s right hand.

  She’s trembling. It’s slight but it’s there, the faintest of tremors working their way down her arm and into her hand, so I start massaging. I work my thumb into the muscles in her palm, over the tendons and sinews, roll each finger between my own until finally, the shaking stops.

  “Thanks,” she says, softly.

  “Stay over,” I tell her.

  Delilah takes a breath and opens her mouth, like she might protest, so I cut her off.

  “Please stay over,” I say, folding her hand into mine. “And go ahead and just say yes without making a fuss, because if you think I’m letting you drive any more tonight you’ve lost your damn mind, and you hate it when I tell you what to do.”

  She’s laughing.

  “You gonna threaten to go caveman again?” she asks lightly, her hand still in mine. “You never actually followed through the first time.”

  I grin back at her, the tension in my body starting to fade. The post-danger endorphins starting to kick in.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I tell her.

  “At Ava’s wedding,” she says. “When you went back to the chateau and I had to —"

  She stops short. I shrug dramatically.

  “Right,” she says. “Sorry, I forgot about the slate for a minute.”

  “Don’
t make me take your keys.”

  “Yes, I’ll stay, I don’t have a death wish,” she teases.

  A brief flash of realization crosses her face.

  “Or a stuck-in-a-ditch wish,” she says, quickly.

  “Thank you,” I tell her, and finally unbuckle. “C’mon in, it’s freezing out here.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Delilah

  Seth pads into his kitchen in his sock feet, pushing a hand through his hair as he does. I’m still unwinding my scarf from around my neck, hoping it doesn’t frizz my hair too much.

  “I’ll sleep on the couch,” he says, his back to me. “Did I already say that? Do you want some tea?”

  I hang my scarf and sit on the shoe bench in his entryway to pull my boots off, eyeing Seth’s back as I do.

  “It’s your house, I’ll sleep on the couch, and tea would be great,” I say.

  “Great,” he echoes, looking up at his cabinets.

  I don’t want to sleep on the couch. I don’t want Seth to sleep on the couch. I want us both to sleep in his bed, and furthermore, even though I’m still rattled and feeling all adrenaline-y from that drive, I’d also like to fuck his brains out while we both sleep together in his bed.

  No, you had to make it two months, I remind myself, staring blankly at a spot on the wall. Nice, Radcliffe.

  It’s working, though, even if I think I might be the first person ever to die from horniness. Today was the closest we’ve gotten to a real fight, and by some miracle, I chilled out and apologized instead of doubling down on being an asshole.

  “Do you have decaf?” I ask, padding sock-footed into the kitchen myself.

  “Yeah,” he says, still standing in the exact same place, looking at the exact same cabinets. “I’ve got, um.”

  He looks around, then opens a cabinet that doesn’t contain tea. Closes it. Frowns.

  “Hey,” I say, and put my hand on his arm. He’s tense as hell, even as he looks over me and tries on that charming grin he’s got.