One Last Time: A Second Chance Romance

by Roxie Noir

  “So you can fucking leave,” I say, both hands on the kitchen island, leaning in. “Don’t you dare come to my house and be shitty about Delilah.”

  Caleb takes a deep breath.

  “I didn’t come to be shitty about Delilah,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’ve been an asshole.”

  I crack the knuckles on one hand, anger already dissolving.

  “I came because you’re my brother and I knew you’d need me,” he says, shrugging.

  I take a deep breath, bend over the counter, rest my head on my hands for a moment.

  “Sorry,” I say, eyes closed.

  I hear him come over to the island, pull out a stool, sit down. A plate clatters onto the countertop, and then he puts a hand on my head and pets my hair.

  It’s nice.

  “I don’t hate her,” he says, slowly. “I just hate how much she hurts you.”

  “It’s not her fault,” I say, voice echoing off the counter.

  He keeps petting, his hand slow, thoughtful.

  “I hate how miserable you always are after you see her and things go badly,” he says. “I hate that you’ve gotten your heart broken over and over again, and blaming it on her was easy.”

  Finally, I look up. Caleb cracks his knuckles, considers my face for a moment.

  “You look like shit,” he says, gently.

  “I did it again,” I say. I sound hollow, even to myself. “I fucking did it again, Caleb. I didn’t learn. I’ll never learn. I tried something different and I thought it was working but then I went and did it again.”

  “Well, I think both of you did it again,” he points out. I tense, instantly.

  “What did I just —”

  “I’m not making a judgment. I’m stating a fact,” he says, taking a cookie off the plate and putting it in front of me. “You’ve never gotten into a one-sided fight with her before and I’m guessing you didn’t this time, either.”

  I shove half the cookie into my mouth, come around the island, grab a stool, carry it back to where I was standing. I eat the other half of the cookie.

  “I found a box of stuff from when she was with her ex,” I admit.

  I tell my little brother everything. Everything everything, starting with Ava’s wedding and going through to last night and me driving back here in my pajamas, watching the sunrise through the mountains. Halfway through he gets up and makes us tea, so when I finish I’m staring into a mug of chamomile.

  “Shit,” he says.

  “And that’s just this year,” I say.

  There’s a brief silence. Caleb glances at the cookies, then watches me.

  “What if this is it?” I ask, chin in hand, elbow on counter. “What if this is just how it is, forever? The two of us back and forth and up and down, over and over, like that graph that does the —”

  I wave my finger in the air, demonstrating.

  “A sine wave?” Caleb asks. Of course he’d know.

  “Yeah, that.”

  “You need to get some sleep.”

  My eyes feel like someone’s been walking on them.

  “I know.”

  He mirrors my position, thinks for a moment.

  “You missed it, but at dinner, Levi spent a good five minutes complaining to me about how June never remembers to clear the hair out of their shower drain, so inevitably it backs up, and when it does it becomes his problem. And he’s annoyed about it, because no one likes backed up shower drains, especially when it’s someone else’s hair.”

  “Wedding still on?” I ask, sipping tea.

  Caleb laughs.

  “Of course,” he says. “He still lights up every time she looks at him, even when he’s annoyed about the drain.”

  “I wish my problems were about hair in the shower.”

  Caleb goes quiet, tapping his tea mug with a few fingers.

  “That’s your thinking noise,” I say.

  “Do your problems have to be worse?” he finally asks.

  “Our problems are worse,” I point out.

  “But do they have to be?”

  Something about the question makes me uneasy, so I stand, take our empty mugs, put them in the dishwasher. I check that the light in the oven is off, that the croissants are still looking alright.

  “They’re old wounds,” Caleb finally says, after a long time. “You could stop pouring salt into them.”

  Could I?

  My impulse is to tell my brother to fuck off, that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That he can’t possibly understand, but I swallow the words and don’t say anything.

  “Do you want any more cookies?” I ask, pointing. “I’m gonna pack those up to take to the brewery tomorrow.”

  Caleb grabs two more, one with each hand.

  “Those croissants ready yet?” he asks.

  “Still rising.”

  “Any chocolate ones?”

  “The fuck do I look like, a bakery?” I ask, and he laughs.

  “Figured I’d try,” he says.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Delilah

  The text said the party was in the back yard, so I park on the street and walk around Lainey’s house, six-pack in one hand. It’s quieter than I expected, but maybe this is the quiet kind of roller derby party.

  But when I get there, it’s nearly empty. Just the fire pit and two people, casually talking.

  Then I stop in my tracks.

  “Wyatt?”

  “You’re right, she is alive,” he says to Lainey.

  He grins, leaning back in his wooden chair, a beer bottle to his lips.

  “I had no choice,” Lainey says, straight-faced and solemn. “He arrived shortly before you did. I’m sorry.”

  Wyatt laughs, his head back, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, and Lainey glances over at his reaction, the tiniest smile on her lips.

  “What?” I ask, baffled from two directions at once: that Wyatt is here, and by that weird thing Lainey just said.

  “She just called me Darth Vader,” Wyatt says.

  “Lainey, be nice to Wyatt,” I tell her.

  “He liked it,” she says.

  “No, I didn’t,” Wyatt says. He’s grinning.

  “What are you even doing here?” I say, putting the beers I’m carrying down on a table, then sit next to Lainey, leaning in toward the fire.

  “I volunteered to make sure you were alive and all right,” he says. “Since you’re ignoring me, my sister, your sisters, and Aunt Vera. Do you know how many women you’ve worried?”

  I grab a beer. Lainey hands over the opener, and I pop the top off, take a drink, lean back in the wooden chair.

  “Sorry,” I say, and I mean it. “I just… I needed a minute.”

  Wyatt sighs.

  “Why?” he asks, sarcastically, and I snort.

  “I love them, but they’re a lot,” I admit. “Have you ever had to tell them you broke up with someone? They act like you’ve chopped off your own foot.”

  Wyatt just makes a grunt of disapproval.

  “Anyway, we colluded to get you over here,” Lainey says. “It seemed better than taking your picture with today’s newspaper.”

  “They’re not that worried,” I say.

  Silence.

  “Right?”

  “Olivia swears that last weekend she was awakened at four in the morning by a crash and a scream,” Wyatt says.

  Next to me, Lainey’s lips thin by a hair as she looks into the fire.

  “She wasn’t,” I tell him, rolling my eyes. “She was on the warpath all weekend, though, and I’ve got no idea why. Hormones? Altitude? Too many hormones for the altitude?”

  “Not how any of that works,” Lainey says.

  “But you are okay, right?” Wyatt asks, leaning forward slightly.

  “We just got in a fight,” I say, waving the beer bottle. “A word fight, I mean. Verbal? Whatever means we screamed at each other a bunch without any physical violence.”

  Wyatt nods. Lainey’s
still looking into the fire, stone-faced, but then she glances at Wyatt, then at me, then seems to snap out of it and take another sip of her beer.

  “I’ll call Vera tomorrow,” I promise, then sigh. “I’m sorry, I just — it’s been the shittiest week…”

  My phone chirps, and I jump. There’s a split second when my heart leaps, but then I pull it from my pocket and see Ava’s name.

  “Shit,” I mutter.

  Wyatt’s craning his head around to see the screen.

  “Did you somehow just summon her?” he asks.

  “No, it’s Ava,” I explain. “I’ll call her back —”

  “Answer it,” Wyatt demands.

  The phone chirps again.

  “Answer it. Delilah. Answer it.”

  “It’s the sweet baby angel, just answer it,” Lainey says.

  I stick my tongue out at both of them, then answer it.

  “Hey,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut. “I’m really sorry I haven’t —"

  “Delilah?”

  Ava sounds weird, like she’s out of breath or something. I sit up straighter, give Lainey and Wyatt an alarmed glance.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Can I come over?” she asks, her voice wobbly.

  “To where?” I ask, stupidly. “Are you okay?”

  There’s a long, long pause.

  “Thad and I had a fight,” she says, miserably, then sniffs. “We were out of pasta, and tonight was supposed to be spaghetti night and so I said I’d get some on the way home from work, but then I had to stay a little bit late and I forgot —”

  She takes a breath, and I interrupt, gently.

  “I’m at Lainey’s house,” I say, raising my eyebrows at Lainey. She nods. “Do you want to come over here?”

  “Okay,” she says. “Thanks, Delilah.”

  “Is she okay?” Wyatt asks, frowning, when I hang up.

  “I think she and Thad got into their first fight,” I say, putting my phone away again. “And I guess now I’m the sister who’s good at fighting with partners? Fuck.”

  “You’re the least likely to blow smoke up her ass and she knows it,” Lainey counsels.

  “Agreed,” Wyatt says.

  Fifteen minutes later, we hear someone shouting Hello? Around the front of the house, so the three of us call Ava back. She’s wearing jeans with knee-high boots over them and a black wool winter coat, somehow looking perfectly put together even though she’s obviously been crying.

  I, on the other hand, am wearing jeans for the first time all week. I’ve worn leggings to work for the past three days, because the idea of putting on anything less comfortable than that just sounded like torture.

  “Hey, y’all,” she says softly, then frowns. “Wyatt?”

  “He’s making sure I’m not dead,” I say, pop the top off a beer, and hand it over as she sits. “What happened?”

  Ava takes a deep breath. She stares into the fire. Then, she comes to some kind of decision, guzzles half her beer, and looks determinedly at the three of us.

  “Tonight was supposed to be spaghetti night,” she begins.

  The gist of the fight is more or less that Ava forgot to get pasta on the way home from work, Thad snapped at her about it, she snapped back that it’s always her job to get pasta, and things devolved from there until she was shouting about dirty socks and he was detailing all the times he’d turned her curling iron off for her before the whole house burned down, not that she ever bothered noticing.

  In other words, just a fight, but I think it’s their first one and Ava is distraught.

  “Could you get a curling iron that turns off automatically after thirty minutes?” I ask.

  “Probably,” Ava says.

  “It sounds as if you both might be feeling under-appreciated and taken for granted right now,” Lainey says. “I think that’s not uncommon with recently married couples.”

  Okay, she’s way better at this than me.

  Ava’s nodding.

  “And, I don’t know,” she says, looking down at the beer. “It also feels like we just got married and we’re already in this routine? And spaghetti night is part of that routine? And sometimes I don’t want that, I want him to be exciting and sexy again and surprise me —"

  Her face goes bright red, and she glances at Wyatt. He pretends he heard nothing.

  “Have you told Thad that?” I ask.

  “No,” she admits. “I don’t want him to think… I don’t know. That I’m needy?”

  “Sweetheart, you’re allowed to have emotional needs and express them,” Lainey says.

  “Just tell him,” I say. “You’re married. He knows he has to take your feelings into account, but you have to tell him your feelings. And if you do that and he doesn’t, divorce his ass.”

  Ava stares into the fire. She drinks her beer. She drinks some more beer, still staring.

  “Is that what happened to you and Nolan?” she finally asks.

  “Sort of,” I admit. “I mean, not really. It was…”

  I drink the last of my beer.

  “I fucked up,” I tell her. “Promise me you won’t tell your sisters or your mom.”

  Ava leans forward, wide-eyed.

  “I shouldn’t have gotten married,” I start. “I should have spent a year backpacking the world and finding myself or something, but instead I married someone eight years older than me because I wanted to be someone else and I thought I could force myself into some other mold.”

  Wyatt’s also leaning forward, frowning. He doesn’t know this story, either. Lainey’s one of the few people who do.

  “Anyway, he had this life plan all laid out, and part of the plan was that six months after we got married we started trying for a baby. And I agreed to this, for the record. I was not at all sure that I wanted to have a baby that soon with him, but instead of saying that out loud, I just went along with this plan.”

  I grab another beer, pull one foot onto my chair, and point at Ava.

  “Definitely don’t do that,” I tell her. “After the first month, when my period showed up, I was so relieved I cried. Then I felt so guilty for being relieved that I cried about that, and then I think I just cried for the hell of it, but I wanted so badly to be the right kind of person that I didn’t say anything and we kept trying.”

  I pause, drink some more beer. Even though this story is years old and water long under the bridge, it still sparks deep guilt and the creeping, unsteady feeling that I’m not a good or brave person.

  “Then next month, my period was a week late,” I go on. “I’ve had two panic attacks in my entire life, and they were both during that week. I didn’t tell Nolan.”

  I take another drink.

  “But I did go to my gynecologist and get an IUD,” I say. “Which I didn’t tell Nolan about until we’d been ‘trying’ for another four months and he was starting to think we had fertility issues.”

  Ava is agog. She’s full-on staring at me, wide-eyed, open-mouthed. Wyatt’s giving the fire a dude, did you hear that? look.

  In some fairness to me, we were a bad match and shouldn’t have gotten married. It wasn’t until a few years later that I finally recognized some of his manipulative, controlling tendencies, and I think he sometimes saw me as more of a prop than a person, but I was definitely still an asshole.

  “And then, we got divorced, and then I ran off and fucked Seth in a hotel in Harrisonburg and we’ve been stuck in this stupid fuck-and-fight cycle ever since,” I say quickly.

  I think Ava’s eyes might fall out of her head.

  “I thought you hadn’t seen him since you broke up?” she gasps.

  I grimace.

  “You guys have been together this whole time?”

  “Not together,” I say. “Extremely not together.”

  We drink the rest of the beer while I slowly and excruciatingly tell Ava and Wyatt everything. I’m not sure I like it, and it’s sure not how I thought today would go when I woke up this morning, but they
’re both cooler about it than I expected.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ava scoffs when I get to the very end. More drinks have appeared, and she’s now had three. “We knew there wasn’t a brewery emergency. We’re not total idiots, we could hear you two screaming at each other like you’d found him in bed with a farmyard animal.”

  “Damn, Ava,” says Wyatt.

  “Sorry,” she says, but she’s grinning.

  “Do you at least feel better about Thad?” I ask.

  She sighs.

  “Yes,” she says. “It’s just so hard! Why can’t things just always be great? I don’t want to have to ask him to appreciate that I always buy the pasta, you know? Can’t he just do that?”

  “Ava,” I say. “My sweet baby angel. Listen. You like Thad more than you like being angry at him about spaghetti, right?”

  Her face scrunches.

  “Being angry is fun,” she says. “But, I guess.”

  “Then talk it out and let it go,” I tell her. “It’s not rocket science.”

  In my peripheral vision, I can see Lainey turn her head and give me a look. I ignore it.

  “All right,” Ava says, standing. “I’m gonna — oh noo.”

  She wobbles on her feet, arms out for balance.

  “You’re more than welcome to stay in my guest bedroom,” Lainey says, then looks at me. “You too.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I’ve only had two beers, but Lainey’s house is nice and warm and cozy and comfy, and mine is far away and feels like all the times Seth’s been in it.

  “I should call him, though,” Ava says. “Do you think he’s worried? I hope he’s worried.”

  “He’s worried,” I confirm.

  Wyatt walks over to me and offers his hand, pulls me out of my chair.

  “Do you need a place to crash?” Lainey asks him as Ava wanders away, on the phone.

  Wyatt looks down at her, and I swear he almost says yes.

  “Nah, I only had one,” he says, holding up the beer bottle. “But thanks for the offer.”

  Lainey’s guest room has a bed and a couch. Ava insists that I take the bed, and she also insists that it’s not because I’m old and decrepit.

  Even so, I have a hard time falling asleep. The new tattoo on my wrist itches under the bandages. I can’t believe I actually told my sweet baby sister — who, at twenty-two, is not all that sweet, nor all that baby — the whole sordid truth of my relationship with Seth, and I also kind of can’t believe she wasn’t fully scandalized.