Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Teresa
W hy the hell had I gotten into his car?
“I’m not going to Cozy Creek,” I snarled. “I only wanted to get away from him!”
“It’s not a taxi.”
I grabbed the door handle. “Fine. Pull over. I’ll find an actual taxi .” I mimicked his accent, out of spite.
“No.” He sounded annoyingly unbothered.
“What do you mean, no?”
“Ye can have yer wee hissy fit in the car while I drive. By the time we get to Cozy Creek, ye’ll be done. Saves time, aye?” He flashed me an infuriating smile. “Also, ye should put on yer seatbelt before the car starts beeping.”
As if on cue, the seatbelt alarm went off. Huffing my disagreement, I buckled up to make it stop. “I’m not throwing a fit. I told you I have no interest in any office space up there and I have work I need to finish.”
“Sure. But ye also need a break. We’ve been working nonstop for weeks. Might be a good idea to put some distance between you and Dick.” He threw me a searching look. “And I know you’ll want to have a say about the new office. D’ ye want Charlie and Bess only hearing my take on it because ye never saw it? I can be convincing, and they’re already big fans of that town.”
Trevor was right. What if Charlie and Bess got onboard? They were currently out of town on a short holiday. She was pregnant and they were both so in love their brains were probably mush right now, marinating in a cocktail of hormones that made kittens, ice cream parlors and small mountain towns irresistible.
I had to resist. I couldn’t move to Cozy Creek. I’d have to resign, which would leave me struggling with my mortgage.
Even if I amped up my job search, it would take a while. It was so much easier to look for a new job when you still had one, without the smell of desperation.
I had to join Trevor and make note of everything that was wrong with that office to ensure this idiotic move never happened.
Trevor glanced at me. “I’ll take your facial cramp as a yes.”
I huffed. How did other people play it cool? I didn’t even have micro expressions, only macro ones—obvious, overwhelming emotions I couldn’t hide.
Outside the car, suburban Denver blurred by in shades of gray under a cloudy white sky. I took a deep breath. No cigarette smell. Odd. Was it masked by some car fragrance?Trevor didn’t look exactly like I remembered, either. When had I last seen him in person? It had been so easy to avoid him at the tiny office with a timeshare desk.
We’d both been smokers once. I used to tell myself I was just a social smoker, nowhere near as bad as Trevor. But I’d been addicted. After his betrayal, when we still worked at Wilde Creative, I was so desperate to hide from him that I’d finally quit smoking. I didn’t want to risk bumping into Trevor on the balcony or other usual spots.
But now, he smelled different. It must have been a while since his last cigarette, or I had polyps in my nose and needed surgery. Anything was possible. Either way, I was grateful for the relatively fresh air, given I’d be trapped in the car with him for two hours.
Being increasingly hungry was probably a bigger issue. After my stomach audibly growled, I spoke on its behalf. “Can we stop for food? I’m not picky. I’ll eat anything that isn’t nailed down.”
Trevor’s lips tugged into a smile. “Open the glove box.”
Casting him a suspicious look, I released the latch, letting the lid fall on my knees. There, on top of a pile of car manuals, sat a plastic container and on top of it, a fork. I opened it and my eyes widened. It was a huge portion of fresh Nicoise salad with tuna, beans, potatoes, and boiled eggs. My favorite.
How could he have known? I hadn’t ordered it with the team, had I? I only bought it from the corner deli on my days off when I was too lazy to cook.
“Thank you,” I mumbled, shoving a forkful into my mouth. It was delicious. In fact, it tasted exactly like the one from my corner deli. “Is this for the both of us? There’s a lot in here.”
“I already ate.”
“Oh. Well, thank you. I’ll pay you back.”
The suburbia turned into occasional farmhouses, and the snowcapped mountains glowed on the horizon like pointy, cream-covered chocolate cakes. I was clearly in the mood for dessert.
“Can ye reach behind my seat?” Trevor asked as I finished the salad. “There’s a bag.”
I pulled out a small cooler bag, unzipped it and discovered an individually packaged piece of chocolate cake covered with sticky ganache. “What’s this?”
“I thought it’d make the road trip a bit more special.”
“Special?” I narrowed my eyes in confusion. “Why did you even pack me a lunch? It’s way past lunchtime.”
“Ye said ye were off to grab lunch. And it’s always that Indian place, isn’t it?”
I gave a slow nod, thinking back to our chat history. I might have occasionally mentioned my guts being on fire after those samosas.
“It’s the only place within reasonable walking distance.”
“I know. I planned to catch ye just in time.” He frowned, staring at the road. “I didn’t mean to catch the… ye know… the Dick show.” He was quiet for a moment. “Are ye okay?”
I let out a wobbly huff. “Of course not.”
“No, I mean, do you think ye gonnae be?”
“Probably. It’s not like I dreamed of marrying him and having his babies.”
In fact, I’d never dreamed of that with anyone.
“You didn’t?” He sounded genuinely surprised.
“No. We were just… dating.”
“Exclusively?”
“I thought so. He wanted me to meet his parents. We were planning a trip to Bali.”
He shook his head in slow motion. A tendon on his neck twitched. “That’s messed up. Did ye already buy the tickets?”
“Not yet.”
Thank God we hadn’t.
My phone rang, and I jumped at the sound. Richard. I stared at the screen, contemplating my options. Did I need to talk to him? Did I need to know how long he’d been seeing her or how and when he’d been planning to tell me? Nothing would change the outcome. There was nothing he could say that would lessen the pain. There was plenty he could say to make it worse.
Trevor glanced at the phone in my hands. “Ye don’t have to talk to him. Ye can block his number. Or does he have a lot of yer stuff?”
“No.” I rejected the call, feeling a tad lighter.
I didn’t need anything from Richard. I could imagine how badly he wanted to explain himself, justify his actions and part amicably. That was his MO—calm and rational. “We’re all adults here,” he’d always say. If I didn’t give him a chance, he’d be left without closure. He’d be judged by his actions—actions he couldn’t caption with his version of the truth. Denying him that was a small act of defiance, but it gave me back an ounce of control and I almost smiled.
Trevor drove in silence as I sanitized my phone of all things Richard—blocked his number and email, blocked him on all social apps, and finally, entered my photo gallery. I browsed the evidence of our time together, wondering if it had all been a lie.
The trips to the farmer’s market for the perfect focaccia. Movie nights with wine and low-calorie snacks, watching the latest art films so that Richard could “keep up”. He didn’t want to see them in the cinemas though, so we watched bootlegged copies. I’d hated it, but I’d loved sitting on his comfy couch, eating three flavors of popcorn and feeling like I wasn’t a lonely weirdo, because I had a boyfriend.
We’d only taken one proper trip, to a bed and breakfast in Maine where he’d had food poisoning and I’d bought him a bottle of Moxie neither of us could finish. After that, he’d wanted me to join his family on Thanksgiving, planning a long journey to their suburban home in Connecticut, where we were to sleep on the couch and possibly babysit his little sister I’d never met, so that his parents, who I’d also never met, could have a date night. Maybe I should have agreed, but it had felt like too much. Something you should only do if you were deeply in love and fully committed.
I’d let him down as easy as I could, and maybe that had been the beginning of the end. He’d traveled by himself, stayed away for a week, calling to catch up only once. After that, he’d never again brought up the possibility of visiting family—mine or his. The only trip we’d talked about was the Bali one.
In November, my life had been swallowed up by the end-of-year rush. In advertising, the last months of the year were something to be survived rather than enjoyed. I’d made it through, leaning on my online chat with Trevor. After all, he was always there and claimed to have no life outside work, something I could relate to. In January, things had calmed down for me, but Richard had become busy, working late nights on a job that was so high profile and top secret he couldn’t tell me any details.
Cold sweat prickled on my neck. Carolyn. She was the late-night job, and I was an idiot.
With my phone Richard-free, I expelled a deep sigh and leaned my head against the seat.
“Ex-boyfriend digital bonfire?” Trevor asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’m trying to figure out when it started,” I confessed. “I don’t want to think about him. He doesn’t deserve my attention. But I can’t stop going over the timeline and trying to spot anything suspicious. Anything I should have noticed.”
“Ye wouldn’t notice anything. Cheaters are too good at acting normal.”
“You think he’s been at it the whole time?”
“Uh-huh.” He sounded so sure that my stomach tightened.
“Why? That could have been their first meeting we saw,” I argued.
“You need some build-up for that kind of PDA. Unless he’s paying her.”
“It’s his ex.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Really? Well, maybe they didn’t need that much build-up, then. Old flames…” He bit his lip, giving me a quick side-eye, and my breath seized.
Old flames.
Something twisted in my gut. Maybe not an old flame, but something old. And no matter how hard I tried to stop it; my mind drifted back to that night.