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Which is totally fine. I’m good at it.
I slam the hatchback and turn to Cole. “Thank you. What you did for me this week means more than you’ll ever understand, and I really appreciate it,” I say with a true smile. “Thanks for not letting a teensy-weensy, unimportant thing like a bear spray attack-slash-introduction get in the way of our being friends.”
I lift up to my toes, throwing my arms over his broad shoulders for a hug. I feel his palm cup my hip and wait for the squeeze, but it doesn’t come. Not this time. He hugs me back politely, like a gentleman and nothing more. Like this morning didn’t happen.
“Wait.”
Hope springs in my heart. Is he going to say something meaningful? Or do something sweet? Maybe he changed his mind and wants to stay in this fantasy world too?
He hustles toward his truck and digs around in the back seat for something. He comes back with a little white card which he holds out to me. “Here.”
I take the card and look at it uncertainly.
Cole Harrington
555-349-8731
It’s his business card. He’s giving me his business card.
I swallow thickly and force a smile to my lips. “Thanks. Yeah, I uh . . . thanks, Cole.” I put the card in my back pocket and try to figure out what to do now. I’ve already said thank you and hugged him goodbye. The only thing left to do is . . . leave.
“Well, uh . . . ’bye, I guess.”
He opens my door for me, waits for me to get in, and then closes the door too. All perfectly kind, and I’m doing okay until he taps Sioux-B’s roof. “Drive safe,” he says.
I look up one more time into his blue eyes, which are emotionless and empty. His jaw is set, and his lips are pressed together. He looks . . . cold. Like a stranger. Nothing like the man who grinned up at me from between my legs hours ago.
Grimly, I drive away, slowly and carefully adding distance between us as I make my way through the forest and back to the main road.
“Let’s go home, Sioux-B,” I tell my car.
Hopefully, I can get to the main road before the tears start. That’d be helpful, at least. No way can I get safely down this trail otherwise.
I almost make it too.
CHAPTER 13
COLE
“Drive. Safe. Fucking drive safe?” I say out loud, watching the taillights disappear into the trees. “What the fuck was that?” I’m apparently taking a play from Janey’s book and talking to myself now.
I don’t know what happened between sitting down to breakfast and Janey turning into a cleaning Tasmanian devil, but I’m sure I fucked up somewhere. She asked about me texting her, and I wanted to say yes. Fuck knows, I want to text her. I want to follow her home, see where she lives, make her come in her own bed. Hell, I want to do laundry and go to the grocery store with her.
But I shouldn’t, and I know that.
She needs time.
This week has been a whirlwind of changing directions for her, and in this pocket of non-reality, she’s been okay. But she’s going to get home, see Henry’s socks on her bedroom floor, or her Mom is going to call, or any one of a dozen other things, and she’s going to have to face it on her own. She’ll have to decide for herself how she wants to react, and as frustrating as it is, I need to let her do that.
Is there a chance she’ll go back to Henry? I hate to say it, but I’ve seen it happen before, women who deserve so much better but have settled for so long that they don’t know any other way, so they keep reconciling, hoping for a different outcome that never happens.
Is there a possibility that her mom is going to say Janey embarrassed her family by refusing to give in to Paisley? Also, yes. And Janey might actually apologize for what we did.
She’s spent her whole life making sure everyone else is happy, and I think she forgets that she deserves to be happy too. Truly happy, not just a forced focus on the good without ever acknowledging the bad.
I want her to find that—in herself, for herself.
When that happens . . . I’ll find her again. Because I might’ve let her leave, but I didn’t let her go.
“I understand, Mrs. Webster. I can send you the photos if you’d like, but there’s nothing in them,” I tell my client over coffee a few days later.
“He was with her for days! And you got nothing?” she screeches so loudly that people three tables away look at us with interest. I thought she’d be glad to find out that I saw no evidence of her husband cheating, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
