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Tyler stood up, dropping his slice. On a whim, he leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.
“Have dinner with me,” he said abruptly. “We can talk for real, then. Cool?”
I was lost in the past, locked in a trance. I nodded before I knew I was even answering a question.
“Good. Come by my place later tonight. Nine o’clock.”
I blinked myself back to the present. “Y—Your place?” I sputtered. “Where’s that?”
Tyler smiled over his shoulder on his way to the kitchen, pointing toward the floor.
“Right here.”
Eleven
JENNA
My apartment was cold, but then again my apartment wasalwayscold. The walls were thin and poorly insulated. The heat was mediocre when it worked at all, and it wasn’t unusual to be calling the landlord two to three times per week to get it fixed up again.
The problem was, the landlord really didn’t care.
In the end, coming back to Northhold broke and virtually empty-handed had put me in a poor starting position. I was supposed to be rebuilding my life. Enjoying new beginnings. I’d promised myself this cold, shitty apartment would be a temporary pit stop, not somewhere I spent an entire year of my life. Just as reactivating my masseuse license was supposed to provide a short-term job while I looked for a permanent physical therapy position. Instead, it had become a full-time career.
I’d failed on both fronts, and that bothered me. The mountains of Montana were a far cry from the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, where jobs abounded and apartments were a dime a dozen. But the warm, quiet town I’d grown up in still felt like home.
An icy wind bit at my skin as I fought my way to my car and closed the door. In here at least, the heat worked. I could warm myself up nicely, then pick up a pair of hot coffees on the way to see Tyler.
Tyler.
I still couldn’t believe I was going to see my ex-boyfriend. In all the craziness of the past several years, I’d somehow put Tyler completely out of my mind. It didn’t make sense either, because I’d really enjoyed our time together. And after what happened the other night…
Well, now I couldn’t get him out of my mind if I tried.
I looked to the right as I always did, whenever I drove past my childhood home. The big beautiful house was alive with lights, both inside and out. I could see the upper window of the bedroom I’d shared with my older sister, and later on, enjoyed on my own. Tara was long gone of course, now enjoying a perfectly idyllic life in North Carolina with her lawyer husband and beautiful twin sons. Both she and our brother Owen had become successful entrepreneurs before I’d even finished high school, which was pretty intimidating to say the least.
That left me, rushing off to Texas A&M with high pressure and even higher expectations. I’d been motivated but indecisive, changing my major four times in just three years. I’d also been incredibly restless, distracted, and at times, outright lost.
None of this amused my parents, who’d packed up and left Northhold before the red-and-white balloon arch for my high school graduation party had even deflated. Eventually though, they stopped caring. I could hear the switch in attitude as the disappointment left their voices, and the annoyance took over. When I failed to graduate college on time, they didn’t even ask why.
But there were other reasons I hadn’t finished school. Big reasons. Nasty reasons.
Reasons I couldn’t and wouldn’t go into, even if my parents had cared to ask about them.
Nostalgia faded as I crossed town, and the better memories of my childhood tumbled into their respective boxes at the back of my mind. Eventually I reached the frozen wasteland that was the parking lot of the SunSet mall. It was only a quarter of the way plowed, but that was still way more spots than the mall required on any given day.
The place looked wholly different at night. The empty parking field took on a spectral quality, especially when only partially illuminated by the ancient, overhead lights. I parked and made my way swiftly over to the front doors, which were still open. I reached Aegean, ducked under the roll-down metal gate, then closed it behind me as Tyler had instructed.
A minute later I was climbing the stairs to the upstairs office, which by now I knew was Tyler’s makeshift apartment. Long ago, one of the pizzeria’s oldest employees had actually converted the small series of chambers above the restaurant into some semblance of living space. But that man was long gone now, even if his place wasn’t.
“Hey, come on in!”
Tyler ushered me inside, pecking me hello before taking my coat and throwing it over the back of some worn leather loveseat that somehow survived the 1980’s. Even crisscrossed with a million tiny cracks the surface of the battered cowhide looked supple and inviting.
Come to think of it, so did Tyler.
Damn.
He looked buff and amazing in a tight white muscle shirt with an apron tied around his waist. It was one of those shirts that was cut deep under the armpits, showing every delicious muscle along both sides of his rib cage.
