Chapter 13
CAL
For almost a year I resisted Lily Moreland with everything I had, and I still ended up exactly where I'd been trying not to go.
My whole adult life I've spent avoiding this specific feeling. This particular combination of want and need and rightness that refuses to leave.
I've dodged it, sidestepped it, watched other people fall into it and told myself I was smarter than that, more careful. And here I am, right in the middle of it anyway, like the universe took one look at my carefully constructed walls and laughed.
Why did I kiss her? Because now I know. Now I know that kissing like that exists, that a person could kiss someone and feel the ground shift under them, and I can never unknow it.
Every kiss before hers had been fine. Good, even. Enjoyable in the moment and forgettable by morning. Now I have a reference point I hadn’t asked for, and it stays lodged somewhere deep, sharp and wrong.
I feel sick. Genuinely, physically sick. The guilt is there, plenty of it, but what's worse is the want. The specific misery of knowing exactly what you're missing and understanding with complete clarity that you can't have it.
Ramsey takes one look at me when he walks onto the porch and says nothing. He doesn't ask what's wrong, doesn't offer a theory. He just sits next to me the way we've always sat, and the silence between us is the comfortable kind that doesn't require filling.
I pick up a beer and hand him one, dragging my own to my lips before I say it.
"I kissed her."
Ramsey nods once, like I've confirmed something he already suspected, and takes a slow pull from his bottle.
"At the firehouse," I add, because apparently I need him to have the full picture of my spectacular lapse in judgment.
"She came to apologize. Said she'd been coming on too strong and she was sorry and she was going to back off. And then I kissed her."
The words sound even worse out loud than they did in my head, which is saying something, because they sounded pretty bad in my head.
"How'd the apology go otherwise?" Ramsey asks, and there's the faintest edge of amusement in his voice.
”Ramsey, man..."
"I'm just asking."
"It went fine until I kissed her and then walked out without saying anything useful,” I say with a glare.
Ramsey sets his bottle down slowly, fixing me with an expression I haven't seen since we were seventeen and I reversed my truck into a ditch trying to impress a girl at a bonfire.
"So you kissed her and left?"
It sounds so much worse when he says it. "Correct."
"Cal..." He levels me with a look that lands somewhere between disbelief and disappointment, and I feel every year of our friendship in that single syllable.
"I know."
"That's possibly the most..."
"I know, man. I know."
I rub a hand over my face because I don't need him to finish that sentence. I've already finished it a dozen different ways in my own head, and none of them are flattering.
Ramsey sits back and turns his bottle in a slow circle. I've known this man all my life. I know what every silence means, and this one is the kind where he's deciding how much truth I can handle.
"The promise to Rome," he says finally, not quite a question.
"Still stands."
"How the fuck you figure that after all this?"
"Because that is all it will ever be."
There isn't much else to say to that, and we both know it.
I made the promise and then kissed her anyway and walked out, which means I'd managed to break it and not break it at the same time.
I had not touched her and I had also very much touched her, and now I have to live with both of those things simultaneously.
I rub both hands down my face again and stare at the street like it might offer me something useful.
"She said something. Before." I apparently need to talk to someone about this. “She said who she wants and who she takes to bed is her choice and not Rome's."
Ramsey is quiet for a moment, considering that. "She's not wrong."
"No. She's not."
"She's also twenty-two. Not twenty-one."
I catch his eye and he holds it. "She's also twenty-two," he continues. "The age thing is the least interesting argument you have."
It is. I know it is. I've known it for months and kept reaching for it anyway because it was easier than the real one.
I'm terrified. Her age doesn't scare me, and Rome doesn't scare me. How badly I want her and everything that comes with her scares me.
"She is just so..." I stop, let out a big sigh, and try to find words that don't make me sound like a complete idiot.
Ramsey waits.
"She is just so fucking hot I want to open the door for her and be the one to say thank you."
Ramsey stares at me as he pushes his glasses up his nose.
I am a nearly thirty-year-old man. A firefighter, someone who once talked a man off a ledge with a cool head, reduced to this.
Ramsey's mouth twitches.
"Don't do it..."
He presses his lips together, but his shoulders are already starting to shake.
"Ramsey, I swear to God..."
He loses it. It rolls out of him in waves, and despite everything, despite the mess I've made and the shame sitting heavy in my gut, even I crack, because it is objectively the most pathetic thing I've ever said out loud.
Ramsey wipes at his eyes under his glasses, trying and failing to get himself together.
"Ramsey, fuck you, man."
"Say thank you," he wheezes, barely getting the words out. "For what? For arriving? Leaving?"
"For existing, apparently," I exclaim. "I told you, I've lost my mind. But you go ahead and laugh."
It takes him a long time to settle down, and what's left is the unflinching honesty that's always made Ramsey the person I trust most in the world.
"You need to be careful from here," he says.
"I know."
"Not for Rome's sake." He leans forward slightly. "For hers."
I drop my eyes to my beer, shame and regret slicing through me so sharp it's almost physical.
"You kissed her and walked out like that?" Ramsey shakes his head slowly. "That wasn't one of your proudest moments, my friend."
I can't believe I just left her there. Standing with her heart on her sleeve and tears she hadn't wiped and her hand still holding my shirt like she could keep me there if she just held on tight enough.
"Figure out what you want," Ramsey says. ”And then either do it or don't. But stop leaving her in the middle."
Figure out what you want. The problem is I know exactly what I want. I've known for almost a year, since the first time she looked at me. Knowing I can't have it is the hardest part of it all.
LILY
The last person I want to see after the disaster with Callahan is fucking Cherry.
I'm outside Ruth's, iced coffee in hand, doing nothing more threatening than existing on a public sidewalk and trying to piece together the wreckage of my dignity.
The May air smells like cut grass and spring. I can't enjoy any of it.
Cherry materializes like a vulture waiting for an opportunity.
"Lily." She says it like she hasn't spent the last several months directing a low-grade chill my way every time we ended up in the same room.
"What do you want, Cherry?"
She falls into step beside me, uninvited, and we walk half a block in a companionable silence that is not companionable at all. I can feel her watching me from the corner of her eye, and I keep my gaze forward, sipping my coffee like I have nowhere to be and nothing on my mind.
"I've been meaning to check in on you," she says finally, her voice warm with manufactured concern.
“How kind."
"I just..." She tilts her head, the practiced kind, the one designed to make you think she's choosing her words carefully when really she rehearsed them in the mirror that morning. "I worry, sometimes, about people who are new here. They don't always know the whole picture."
I take another sip of my coffee, letting the silence stretch just long enough to be uncomfortable. "What picture is that?"
"Cal Holt."
My face does nothing. I've practiced keeping my face very still since approximately third grade, and I'm excellent at it.
"What about him, Cherry?"
"I just think..." Another head tilt, earnest now. Deeply, performatively earnest in a way that makes my teeth hurt.
"There are red flags, that's all. And sometimes when you're new somewhere, and young as you are, you don't see them."
I stop walking and face her directly, as if I would ever believe she's genuinely doing me a favor.
"Red flags, really?"
"He has a type." She shrugs, small and practiced. "He goes through women. Nothing ever goes anywhere." A pause, perfectly timed. "I'd hate for you to get hurt."
I study her for a long moment. This woman who has her fingers in more conversations than she's part of.
Who has never once done anything that suggested she was motivated by anything other than her own interests dressed up as concern.
Who smiles like butter wouldn't melt and leaves wreckage in her wake and calls it helping.
"Cherry," I say pleasantly, "you'll have to excuse me if I don't believe a word you say."
I turn and start walking again, hoping she'll take a hint, but I'm not that lucky.
"I would hate for you to find out the hard way that Cal is a walking, talking red flag," she calls after me, her voice still sweet as honey.
I glance back over my shoulder, letting my smile go just a little sharp at the edges. "Yeah? But have you seen the flagpole it comes with?”
Cherry blinks twice before schooling her shocked expression, and I keep mine perfectly open, as if I'd said something entirely reasonable.
"I'm just trying to help," she manages, her composure slipping just slightly.
"Thank you, you're such a doll, really." I give her my brightest smile. "Is that all?"
It's not all. I see it on her face, the shift from the script she'd prepared to whatever comes next.
"You know there's a rumor." Her voice drops slightly, conspiratorial. "About Cal and a woman seen leaving his house. Early morning. Not that long ago."
One perfect brow goes up, and I can feel Cherry's malice oozing from her fake smile like oil from a cracked engine.
I know about the rumor, alright. It had grated on me for months when I first heard it, wormed its way under my skin and stayed there despite my best efforts to dig it out.
Even though I wanted to ask Callahan about it, I decided against it. Technically we were nothing and had been nothing, so I suppressed the urge to ask if he really had stooped so low as to sleep with this snake standing in front of me.
"Is that so?"
"People talk in a small town," she says, and her smile is back in full force now.
"They really do."
"I just thought you should know."
I hold her gaze for another second, letting the silence do the work, and then I nod once.
"I also heard she was a lousy lay. Unhygienic, even."
I walk away before she can say anything else, keeping my pace easy, like I have all the time in the world and not a single worry on my mind. I make it around the corner and halfway down the next block before I stop.
I stand with my back against a brick wall and stare at a patch of May sky above the roofline, letting myself feel everything I hadn't let Cherry see.
It was nothing. It was Cherry, and Cherry is a person who plants things and tends them carefully and enjoys the harvest. I know that. I know all of that, and I still hate it.
I replay the kiss and him walking out. I think about the two weeks before that, him going quiet on me, pulling back, the distance reinstalled like he'd noticed a crack in his walls and gone at it with spackle.
I think about all the moments that almost were and then weren't, all the times I caught him watching me like I was something he wanted and couldn't have, and I am so, so tired.
Tired of reading into silences and decoding exits and finding reasons to be in a house where I'm family to one Holt and a problem to avoid for the other.
Tired of Cherry's sympathy face and the rumor she was definitely responsible for and a town that sometimes feels like it has opinions about my life I never solicited.
I wanted to live here this year so that I'd have enough love and family to sustain me when I went back to the big city, alone and far away from them. Harbor Hill is mine for a little while in all the ways that matter, and I'm not going to let any of this take that from me.
I have three months before my MCAT prep intensifies and interviews start. Three months of Harbor Hill summer, which Poppy described as the best thing that happens to this town all year, and Poppy has never once been wrong about anything I can verify.
Three months of the harbor and the pub and Erin's shop and Ruth's diner and Mr. J's barbershop and Gran and the Estrogen Council and all of it. All the warm, ridiculous, wonderful fabric of this place I've chosen.
I'm going to live it. Fully. Without spending every third thought on a man who hasn't figured out what he's doing yet. Callahan Holt can find me when he's ready. In the meantime, I have a summer to get into.
I finish my iced coffee, toss it in the nearest trash can, and go to find my brother.