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“I’d rather be with an interesting man doing something meaningful with his life than married to Rob Wright. He’s all wrong, if you ask me. Actually, the guy’s a total jerk.” I shivered and wrapped my hands around the tops of my bare arms. Without the heater, the cool night air was chilly, and I hadn’t brought a jacket. We would have to walk back to town or call a friend to get us. It was already after nine. Our happily coupled friends would probably be in bed watching television and snuggling. Suddenly, a longing filled me. I wanted that with someone. Was it Darby? Could it be him, after all this time? Had he been right in front of me all along? “If it were up to me, I would choose you over him every time. I don’t care how fat a diamond he offered. He’s pretentious and full of himself and was hell-bent on making you look and feel bad tonight.”
“He succeeded,” Darby said.
“He may have made you feel bad, but he didn’t succeed in making you look bad. Not to me. The opposite, in fact.” I placed a hand on his thigh. “You seemed smart and funny and really interesting. The kind of man therightwoman would be grateful to have in their life. Not Arianna.” The very thought of Darby with her made me want to claw at a hard object with my fingernails. “But you have to see it for yourself.”
“See what?”
“How great you are. No one can tell you that. You have to believe it in your own heart.” I leaned closer. “Now, kiss me before we figure out how we’re getting home.”
He did as I asked, taking my breath away with the intensity of his mouth on mine. When we pulled away, we were both breathing harder than the moment before. “Thanks for tonight,” he said. “You were spectacular. Remind me not to get on your bad side.”
“Impossible. You’re already in here.” I tapped my chest. “Now, who should we text to come get us? I’m cold.”
“I’ll text the guys and see if anyone would mind coming to get us. I don’t think we can get a tow truck this time of night anyway, so we’ll have to leave her on the side of the road here.”
He pulled out his phone and typed for a moment. “We have a group text. Mostly we give each other grief.”
A second later, his phone dinged. “It’s Huck. He and Stormi are coming back from dinner with his parents and are going to swing by and get us.”
“Great.”
“What should we do while we wait?” Darby asked, drawing nearer and stroking my bare arm with his fingers, giving me goosebumps. “Make out like teenagers?”
“I never did that when I was a teenager,” I said.
“Really? Why not?”
“I don’t know, really. Just wasn’t ready. Things were tumultuous at home with my dad. His temper made it so we never knew what kind of night we were about to have. It took everything to keep it together well enough to get my schoolwork done.”
“What was he like?”
I closed my eyes, summoning an image of him from when I was a teenager. He ruled the house with an iron fist with rules like ways to fold towels and hang clothes. If anyone deviated from his instructions, he would grow enraged but never say it out loud. Instead, he would ignore us or say cruel things unrelated to what he was mad about. One night, I came home from an evening studying at my friend Mary’s house to find my mom crying at the kitchen island. Stacks of dishes were in the sink. I caught a faint scent of charred meat. An open bottle of wine and a glass were on the countertop in front of her.
I’d rushed to her side. “Mom, what is it?”
She’d looked up at me, her mascara and eyeliner smeared from tears. “I burned the steaks. I left them on Broil and started talking with Max and forgot. You know how charming he can be. Max, you know. Your dad was furious with me. He got so mad he took Max and Stan to a steak house and left me here.” She lifted the wine glass to her mouth and drank.
“Did he ridicule you in front of them?” I asked, my stomach churning.
“No, that’s not how he is,” she said, as if I didn’t know. “He pretended like it was fine, all lovey and passive-aggressive.” She tossed back a little more wine. Had she had the whole bottle? Not like her. My mother was always perfectly groomed and dressed, never one to draw attention to herself. I hadn’t seen her like this before, all smeared and messy and drunk. “And he told the guys I wouldn’t be able to join them for dinner because I needed to be here when you got home. They left hours ago. He whispered in my ear on the way out that I should be medicated. Something made for stupid people so they could get their act together.”
They do make medicines like that, I thought. My best friend Lottie was on one for her ADD. “Mom, you don’t need meds. It’s easy to leave a piece of meat under the broiler and have it burn.”
She raised bleary eyes to me. “You’re a much better cook than me. You know, I was sitting here thinking about how little I do well. Actually, I couldn’t think of one thing.”
I sat next to her and drew her into a hug. “Mom, that’s not true. He wants you to think that. He wants all of us to think that way. Trey said he barely got out of here alive.” I smiled to take the edge off my words, but we both knew the truth. My father had terrorized Trey, just as he did Mom and me. He was subtle but thorough. At the end of the day, we all felt sure we were nothing. Undeserving of the life he’d provided for us.
Now, Darby played with a lock of my hair, drawing me back to the present. “I could hear a whole story without you having to open your mouth just by your expressions.” He kissed me, tenderly this time. An emotion stirred inside me, like a tapping on the inside of my chest that made me ache with a combination of longing and gratitude for the sweet man sitting across from me. “I’m right here if you ever want to tell me the dark stories. You can’t scare me. Not after growing up with my dad.”
“When I was seventeen, I came home to find my mom crying.” I told him the story of finding my mother that night. “I heard him come home later and tromp up the stairs. He started in on her—yelled how she’d embarrassed him in front of the other partners. Called her useless for anything but…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Saying it out loud seemed like a betrayal to my mother.Anything but sloppy sex.
Darby nodded, murmuring that he understood and that I didn’t need to say it. He knew. “Sounds like our dads would be great pals if they’d ever met. Abusive in different ways, but that’s what it is nonetheless.”
“It took me a while to figure out that not all fathers were this way. Max, for example, was a really good guy.” I’d always thought he’d been a little in love with my mom. Had that been part of it, I wondered now? Had my dad picked up on something between them? Had that been the trigger? Or was it really the steaks? Probably the steaks. “Sometimes I worry I’m just like him.” I’d never said that to anyone before. “I’m particular about things too. Everything has to be perfect or I get anxious.”
“Are you cruel to your staff? Or to boyfriends who aren’t quite as tidy as you?”
I chuckled against the dull ache in my throat. “No, I’m not. I have high standards at the inn, but I would never come down on someone for simply making a mistake. It’s on me to train them correctly in the first place. Maybe that’s how my dad felt? Like he’d done his part and trained us exactly how he wanted things, but then we fell short, which enraged him.”
