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I reached for her phone on the coffee table, which she had finally agreed to attach a lanyard to. My biggest fear was always that she’d fall and not be able to reach her phone to call for help. She had a habit of wandering off to bed or the bathroom and leaving the phone somewhere else entirely, even when she was home alone.
I placed it securely around her neck. “Fine, but promise me you’ll keep this on you?”
“It’s not like Chris will be gone all night.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if he was, but that was another one I kept to myself.
After retreating into my bedroom, I started changing my clothes while I called Keith.
“I’ve been waiting for you to call,” he said when he answered. “I was starting to worry you chickened out.”
“What makes you so certain I’m not calling to say I can’t make it?” I teased.
He was quiet for a moment. “Are you?”
“No,” I admitted finally, but only after a long pause to torture him.
“Meet me at the corner of Mullins and Old Jackson Ridge Road,” he said.
“Doesn’t it feel weird to have a street named after you?”
“They’re named after my grandfather. Not me,” he argued. “Anyway, it’s no more weird than having a lake and a marina named after you.”
“Hey, that marina is going to be named after me, too,” I reminded him.
A warm laugh crackled over the line, and it filled me with more butterflies than I cared to admit. Especially when followed by the deep, soft hum of his voice.
“That’s right. You and I are gonna rule Silver Point. And when we’re done here, we’ll take on the world.”
It was cheesy, but I liked the way it sounded.
“Okay. The corner of Miller Mullins and Old Jackson Ridge Road,” I joked, staring myself down in the mirror. I wanted to take a shower and put on something nice. I told myself it was for me, not for him. “I’ll be there in an hour.”
I hung up and made a mad dash to shower and throw some fresh clothes on. I gave myself enough time to make it possible, but not so much time that it’d be obvious how much effort I was putting in. I opted to wear the only dress I brought with me to Silver Point. It might have been the only dress I owned at all, including out of the clothes in my closet back in California.
It was a short, casual, halter dress that fit my frame perfectly. It was red with a white leaf pattern, which wasn’t exactly my favorite, but looked great with my skin tone. I slipped into some sandals and went into the bathroom to add a few finishing touches that were sure to drive Keith mad. That was the benefit of being a tomboy who never dressed up much. When you did do those little extras, the effect was that much more shocking and dramatic.
I twisted my hair into a messy low bun, securing it with a french pin that a friend gave me. I really went in for the kill by dabbing on some lip gloss and lightly blushing my cheeks. Back home, I never had to worry about blush because my cheeks kept a natural pink glow from being out in the sun all the time. But ever since coming back to Silver Point, that was starting to fade—even with my work at the marina, which may have been hot but was usually in the shade.
I studied myself in the mirror, turning side to side, and couldn’t help but smile. Whether he always meant to or not, Keith had been driving me crazy from the moment I got back into town. Admittedly, sometimes, it was in a good way. Others, not so much. Either way, the way I looked that night was going to slay him. It was the best revenge I could hope for.
Just before walking out my bedroom door, I froze dead in my tracks. I had done all of this before. I had done myself up, thinking Keith wouldn’t be able to resist me. I marched out of my bedroom so confident, and so convinced that all of my fantasies about him were coming true that night. Instead, I ended up crying myself to sleep. It used to feel like it all happened a million years ago. But being back here around him again had stirred it all up and made it feel like it just happened yesterday.
“You have to let it go, Lana,” I told myself.
People grew up, and they could change. I couldn’t punish Keith for the rest of his life over something he did as a dumb high school guy. I always wanted him to regret it, and I was getting my wish. But at what point did my stubborn bitterness start hurting me just as much as I thought I wanted to hurt him?
I shook it off and pushed out the door. Claire flashed me a smug smile on my way out the door, no doubt because of how I was dressed. But I didn’t even let that stop me. I hated it when people waffled back and forth all the time, and I wasn’t going to keep being one of those people. I had made up my mind. I was going.
My flat brown sandals were easy enough to walk in, and it was a nice, cool night. So I walked the mile it took to get to Old Jackson Ridge Road at the edge of Mullins Cove. I could see Keith waiting for me in the darkness, leaning against a wooden post of a barbed wire fence.
He strained his eyes to see me in the dark as I got closer, but once I stepped into the street light, his jaw dropped just like I knew it would.
“Damn, Lana. You look…Damn.”
Speechless. Just like I hoped he would be.
“So, what are we doing here out in the middle of nowhere?”
