Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Teresa
I shifted a little closer and inhaled deeply, to confirm what I’d noticed earlier. Trevor smelled different, and I was here for it.
“Check behind your seat.” He nodded behind him.
I pulled out a striped shopping bag with needles sticking out of it. “Bamboo needles? Man. This is next level.”
“They’re less noisy.” He grinned.
“So, you could knit in secret when we all thought you were having a smoke outside?” I stared at him, trying to rewrite those memories.
“I suppose.”
“I thought you might switch to vaping or something.”
I shook his head. “I’ve given Big Tobacco enough of my hard-earned quid.”
I pulled out a long purple scarf and wrapped it around my neck. “This thing is nearly finished, right?”
“Looks like it.” He gave me an assessing glance. “Suits you.”
“I love the color.” It was my favorite shade of purple—deep and royal. I was currently wearing a sweater in the exact same shade.
The scarf smelled like him. A mix of cologne and something more organic, like salt and wood. It must have been made of pure pheromones, since my body reacted by the delicious sensation of flow—blood rushing up and down, every cell alive and tuned in. I buried my nose in the wool, breathing in the feeling. It intensified, funneling between my thighs.
How easy it would be to come, inhaling him.
The thought smacked me in the ribs, and I leaned away from the source of that scent. I had no business lusting after him. Not because I hated him. I’d forgiven him, for my own sake. I was a busy woman—I had no energy to hold grudges or hate a guy I had to work with. But he’d shown me who he really was. That was core stuff, and it never changed, right? We could be friends, but that was the extent of it.
He’d apologized later, claiming he did it to protect me. I would have hated that job. I would have hated that client. He had so many excuses, but nothing could change reality. He’d known how much that gig meant to me, and he’d killed my dream.
Trevor was the easy-going guy who got along with everyone. The guy who always sided with his superiors, and never rocked the boat. So, of course, he’d gone along with Charlie. By sticking his neck out for the woman whose boobs the client had rated, he would have risked losing their respect. And anyone who craved the respect of such douche wads was a spineless coward.
I needed someone in my corner who truly had my back. Maybe I needed a guy who was a bit of a caveman. I probably should have figured that out before the whole dating-Richard fiasco because he was as far from a caveman as one could be, other than maybe in the sense of spreading his seed around town—now that I knew what he was really up to.
No. Richard was more likely to offer helpful statistics and inspirational quotes than defend me. “There are two sides to every coin,” he’d say. When someone had stolen my bicycle, he’d berated me for not investing in a high-quality lock and eventually argued that the thief might have been in great need. We simply didn’t know all the facts, and he was obsessed with gathering information and looking at it from every angle like he was shooting for an ‘A’ with a college essay.
I should have run.
I shook my head as if to rid myself of the unwelcome thoughts. There was no point in dwelling in that chapter. All I wanted to do was close it and move on.
I removed the scarf and folded it back into the bag. “Very impressive.”
“Do you knit?” he asked.
“Not well. I never had the patience for crafts.”
“But you have the patience of a saint when it comes to creating graphics.”
I shrugged. “I like having the Z key. It’s hard to go from that to creating in the physical world. Every time I try drawing or painting, my left hand does that involuntary Apple-Zed twitch.”
He laughed. “Undo. Undo. I get that.”
“It’s terrifying when you can’t undo!” I exclaimed, laughing along.
“You like keeping your options open, eh?”
His voice held a deep vibration that delivered more meaning than I could handle. I bristled a little but smiled. “How else can I find what works the best? I have to try lots of options. If you commit to anything too early, you might get stuck.”
“Is getting stuck the worst thing you can imagine?”
I bit my lip. I sensed he wasn’t talking about work, but I was not ready for this. My throat felt tight. “Who the hell enjoys being stuck?”
He gave a slow nod, keeping his eyes on the road. The lighting had turned moody, with tall trees shadowing the winding road from both sides. I felt each curve in my belly, like on a roller coaster.
“Are you saying I have commitment issues?” I asked, fixing my eyes on the road.
“No, but it sounds like I touched on something.” He flashed me a quick smile. “I didn’t mean it like that. If it helps, I’m way more messed up. My therapist would back me up on this if he didn’t have that confidentiality thing.”
“You’re seeing a therapist?”
“Aye.” He took a deep breath, his shoulders tensing in a way that made my whole body tighten. “Ever since… what happened wi’ us, you know, I’ve been aware that I need to change. So, I’ve been working on that. And I wanted to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For showing me I was on the wrong path. I could have followed it to my grave and never taken charge of my own life.”
“Are you talking about smoking, or…”
“I’m talking ‘bout everything. And I know I don’t have a lot of time with ye, so I want to get it oot.”
I frowned. “You already apologized. I forgave you. There’s no need to rehash it.”
“You wrote me off, Teresa. I’ll regret that night for the rest of my life.”
“That’s a bit dramatic.” I tried to smile, but the joke fell flat.
“I mean it.”
Something stirred in my chest, and I tried to breathe through it. I couldn’t open that door. That night had been pivotal in my life, but I’d never thought it meant that much to him. “I get you wanted to quit smoking, that’s great. But what do you have to regret? You got the job and the payout. You’re set for life.”
“I took the easy way out.” His voice cut through my thoughts and every layer of clothing. “I had this ill feeling about ye working with Gavin… I told you that, right?”
I nodded.
“But I knew how much it meant to you. Ye told me,” he continued.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“I did what was easy. I did what served me. It wasn’t fair to you. I thought I was protecting you, but I could have protected you by being there with you.”
I forgot to breathe and my mouth dried as I stared at him, my heart in my throat. I’d never expected him to say those words. I hadn’t even known I needed to hear them until now.
His fist squeezed the steering wheel, skin tightening over white knuckles. “In the end, I was a coward, going with the flow because it suited me, and I did it behind your back. You didn’t deserve that.”
I finally resumed breathing, trying to process his words. I noticed we were both out of breath, panting like we’d just sprinted a hundred yards.
“Wow,” I finally said. “I don’t know what to say.”
Deep down, I’d thought I deserved it. That there was something wrong with me. I was a bit too much. Intimidating. Not fun to work with. Trevor might have been attracted to me, at least back then, but I’d genuinely believed he didn’t want to work with me.
“Don’t say anything. It’s me who needed to say something. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
My throat felt like I’d swallowed Trevor’s woolly scarf. “Maybe, but I know I’m not… likable. I don’t know how to play the game. Or maybe I do, in theory. But I don’t want to because it feels inauthentic. You have to fake so much. It’s exhausting.”
He lifted a shoulder. “It’s part of the job, aye? Ye know how it is. We massage the truth until it takes a new shape and form. This incredibly attractive?—”
“Lie.”
“Sometimes. But I get so swept up in the work that truth becomes almost meaningless. It’s never about the product. It’s about crafting that emotional response. That takes skill.”
I nodded, recognizing the feeling. “It’s an addictive game. It’s weird that we can put all this effort into selling an organic cola that tastes like dishwater and somehow that doesn’t bother me. I mean, it’s irritating, but nothing compared to people being fake or two-faced. That gets me every time.”
“No wonder you hate me, then.” He let out a sad laugh.
“I don’t hate you,” I insisted. “I told you, we’re good.”
It had been more than a year. None of this was fresh, and I didn’t particularly want to dwell on it.
“Dragonfly. That night at the pool, we weren’t just ‘good’. We were on fire.”
He left the sentence hanging in the air, and I didn’t know how to respond. I still thought about that night sometimes. A memory would surface, out of nowhere, of something he’d said, or I’d told him. We’d been so vulnerable. So naked.
“You know we can’t go back to that, right?” I said. “I appreciate your apology and it’s amazing you’re making positive changes… But we can’t be like that ever again.”
He huffed. “You sound like my therapist.”
“You talk about me in therapy?” I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
“It’s all confidential. He says something else, though.”
“What?”
“That even if you can’t get back what you lost, ye can build something new.”
The town sign of Cozy Creek caught my eye, and I pulled in a sharp breath. I wasn’t ready for this.
“And, who knows,” Trevor went on, smile on his lips, “Maybe some small-town magic will melt yer icy heart and you’ll find room in it for one reformed Scot with healthy lungs?”
He slowed down, turning onto Cozy Creek Main Street. Snow had started to fall, turning the already cute-as-a-button street into a children’s storybook illustration, complete with snowcapped mountains.
I blew a measured breath, taking it all in. The cafes, Bookers bar, the beautiful old library building. Copious amounts of pink hearts hung from the lampposts, reminding me of what day it was. My heart, not icy at all, squeezed in my chest.
“Come on. I know you’re not a Hallmark movie character, but you must admit this is fair lovely!” He pulled over, parking in front of a bookstore with pink paper hearts hanging across its window.
I swallowed. “If your plan was to use small-town adorableness to win me over, you should have chosen another small town. Literally any other town.”
He blinked at me. “Why?”
“Because I grew up here.”