February 12
Luke
“ H ave you two been conniving with my mother?” I ask, switching my glance back and forth between TJ and Billy. We’re back around the fire pit behind Billy’s garage with a six-pack. Kind of like the horses, guess I find it easy to be with my old buddies, too. I have plenty of friends in Utah, but there’s something about being with people who’ve known you forever. Even if I’m shooting them both accusing looks at the moment.
TJ appears puzzled. “What’re you talking about, man?”
“She’s suddenly making noise about me going back to Utah. Suggesting I should stay in Kentucky.”
“Well,” Billy says on a shrug, “now that you’ve got a big horse park to open…”
I just roll my eyes. “And two branches of another business out west.”
That’s when TJ narrows his gaze. “You barely mention it, though. So it must be surviving okay without you.”
I slant him an irritated glance. What is it with everybody acting like I don’t have an entire life somewhere else? “I’ve had a lot to deal with besides my business.”
TJ shrugs. “Fair enough.”
“And I’m lucky to have good people in place there. Lucky that even though I had to put out a few fires after I first got home, since then it’s been problem-free.”
“There ya go,” he replies on a grin, lightly crushing a beer can in his fist. “You can move back to Sweetwater where you belong.”
I ignore that, not only because I’m annoyed by it, but because something catches my eye behind Billy. A dark red RAV4 I normally wouldn’t notice—except for the little red fabric heart hanging from the rearview mirror. It saw it every time Taylor met me someplace. “Is that Taylor’s car?”
Billy glances over his shoulder. “Oh. Yeah. Had to tow it from the cemetery the other day. Alternator went out on her with no warning. Waiting for a part—hopefully tomorrow.”
I let my eyes bolt open wide, realizing it must have been right after our conversation there. “Was she okay? Did she have to wait in the cold very long?”
Billy’s look suggests I’m overreacting. Maybe I am, but I don’t like thinking of her being stranded. “Relax, bud—I was there with the tow truck fifteen minutes after she called.”
I nod, relieved, but also aware that she didn’t choose to call me , even though I’d just left and was surely a lot closer than Billy.
I shake off that discouraging thought, though, as something else hits me. “Damn—I was supposed to let you know you won a cake from the bake shop.”
My old friend makes a celebratory fist, pulling it back toward him with a, “Cha-ching! About time, too. Been dropping my card in that box for years.” Then he leans slightly forward across the fire from me, until I realize he’s staring me down. “Why do you look so depressed, man? Is it about your dad?”
I take a deep breath, blow it back out. Apparently I don’t possess a poker face. But no reason not to be honest. “Nah,” I say. “It’s…Taylor.”
“Huh?” Billy mutters.
“Taylor Mulvaney?” TJ asks—as if we all know anyone else named Taylor.
Then Billy casts me a sly grin. “I wondered what was going on when you announced the horse park was her idea.”
“The horse park was her idea?” TJ echoes. Despite getting permission for me to use the gym, he wasn’t at that second meeting and appears completely confused.
“Yes, it was her idea. And we’ve seen each other some since I got home. Not a lot,” I go on, “because we’ve both been busy. But the times we got together were…really good.”
Billy keeps grinning at me, and TJ looks like a guy trying to wrap his head around a shocking new concept.
I decide to take mercy on him and provide a little more background. “I’ve been into her since high school.”
“You have?” TJ just gapes at me, still sounding completely in the dark.
“She stood me up at the sweetheart dance when we were seniors, and that’s how I ended up with Jasmine that night.”
At this, TJ’s jaw drops. “Well, this is news. And you think you know somebody.” He rolls his eyes.
And I can’t help it—I laugh. “You sound just like an adolescent girl, Teej.” But that quickly, my laughter is long gone. “When she didn’t show, I was embarrassed, and too immature, I guess, to fill you guys in.”
“Well, let’s get back to the present,” Billy says, looking keenly interested in the subject. “You seeing her now?”
“No,” I correct him. “I was . That’s why I look depressed, remember? Keep up.”
“Details,” TJ demands.
I release a sigh and let my gaze land in the crackling flames as I think it through. “Things were going great. Great conversation. Great everything. Even though it was fast, I thought we were on the verge of taking it further, when— boom , she suddenly wants nothing to do with me. I asked if I did something wrong and she said no. So I have no idea why things changed.”
Across the fire, Billy strokes his chin like a detective in thought—then offers up, “If you ask me, Taylor doesn’t seem like a woman to be into something casual.”
“Who said I wanted something casual?” I counter.
“Dude,” TJ injects, “you live a million miles away. She has a business here; you have a business there . It probably seemed like a non-starter when she stopped and thought about it. What else could it be?”
Okay, is he actually making sense here? I can’t decide, a little befuddled. “Well, yeah, but…I mean…I never said…”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” TJ informs me. “You never said…whatever she might have needed to hear.”
Billy slants me an accusing glance. “The trouble with this guy, Teej, is that he’s had it too easy with girls. Mr. Good-Looking Romeo over here has never had to work for it—they just flock to him.”
“And now he’s finding out the hard way that sometimes you have to think .” TJ concludes by actually pointing at his head like I’m some kind of numbskull.
I lower my chin to ask, “Are you guys saying I’m an idiot?”
Billy gives his head a pointed tilt. “Like I said, I don’t know Taylor well, but…it’s safe to say she’s not like other girls you’ve dated.”
“Hey, I’ve been gone a long time—you have no idea who I’ve dated.”
My friends just look at each other. “Sure we do,” TJ replies. “Super confident, super gorgeous girls who know what they want and probably aren’t afraid to chase after it.”
Upon thinking that through for a minute, I’m a big enough man to confess, “Okay. Guilty as charged.”
“And that’s not Taylor Mulvaney,” Billy points out.
“Nope,” TJ agrees.
I glance suspiciously back and forth between them. “Since when do you guys know Taylor so well?”
They both go wide-eyed, like I’m a jealous boyfriend who needs to check himself. Maybe I do. My head’s all over the place.
“Bruh, I just fix her car and buy the occasional snack from her. Settle down.”
But then I narrow in on TJ. “What about you ?”
He throws up his hands in innocence. “Hey, I’m just a regular in the bake shop. The lady makes a mean cookie, after all. And I gotta see my girl, Mags. But you can relax because that’s as far as it goes, Romeo.” Then he cocks me a sideways glance. “And you could do worse. Too bad you messed up.”
I blow out another breath, analyzing the situation. “So…what you’re saying is, she thinks I’m leaving, and she thinks I’m not in this in any real way?”
“Probably,” Billy replies.
TJ just shrugs, asking, “And aren’t you? Leaving?”
“Well, yeah. But…”
“But what?”
That’s when it hits me. The last time things felt normal between Taylor and me, she asked me how running the park “would work” and I cheerfully told her I’d be back a few times a year. And the truth is—with so much going on the past six weeks, every bit of it unexpected and jarring, I just wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I guess I assumed that if our relationship progressed, we’d cross that bridge when we came to it, but…I sure never said it. I never said anything .
“Okay, in fairness to me, though,” I tell them, puzzling through it out loud now, “this thing between us was really new, so I didn’t think we were at a point where I needed to…declare my feelings or talk about the future.” I stop, sigh. “But by the same token, maybe I needed to…remember the girl I was dealing with.”
That, like TJ said, her business that ties her to this town. That I’m not sure she’s navigated a lot of relationships. And that, yeah, she doesn’t seem like a woman who’d be into a casual fling. All of that should have been obvious to me. But I missed every bit of it, too caught up in other things.
“In a way,” I go on, pausing to shake my head, “this is just like high school all over again. I didn’t make sure she knew I was really in this. And I’ve just realized…I am.”
And maybe that won’t make a difference. But I at least have to let her know.
I can’t fix my past mistakes. I can’t fix anything about the past. But there’s one night I can try to re-do to give us both a new, better memory.