CHAPTER 55
maverick
Aquiet kind of camaraderie settled between us—not friendship and not comfort, just a steady understanding that we were both there for the same reason.
We fell into a simple routine of working on the house with ease.
Harley spent his days cleaning through boxes, throwing out everything he came across.
I had a feeling he didn’t plan to save a single thing.
I worked my way through the house, room by room, checking off things on a list that never seemed to get any shorter.
Pipes, drywall, warped trim, wiring that hadn’t been touched. It just kept adding up.
The longer I worked, the clearer it became that the house hadn’t just slipped recently. It’d been falling apart little by little for years—long before his mother’s decline.
It was a strong reminder that things under the surface didn’t always match the pristine surface. You could be broken and not look it on the outside. You could smile in public when you were supposed to and run a successful business, all while falling apart on the inside.
Yeah, the house reminded me a little too uncomfortably of Harley’s demise.
Some mornings I’d bring him coffee. I told myself it was practical.
I was stopping anyway, making it a completely normal thing to bring him.
Other mornings, Harley beat me to it and had coffee and pastries waiting for when I showed up.
Every time, he’d make up a story about having to run into town, as if he needed a reason to buy us breakfast without pretense.
It was as if kindness between us required negotiation and logic.
Breakfast was eaten on the run. Sometimes our fingers brushed as we passed a cup or a bag. Every accidental touch landed heavier than it should’ve, sending my mind down a convoluted path to justify why it was okay that it felt like something.
Lunch was small talk or silence on the front steps. We talked about the weather. A lot. Way more than any reasonable person did. It was the safest topic we could settle on, something to fill the loaded silence when it became too much.
I usually clocked out at the time Frank expected me to, but then I lingered.
I did extra things for Harley to make his life easier.
I convinced myself it was just extra work to get the job done faster and move on.
In reality, it was harder to walk away from him at the end of the day than I wanted to admit out loud.
Eleven years of feelings scratched their way to the surface a little more every day, despite how hard I tried to keep them buried.
I’d go home late to a fixer-upper of a home, eat a microwaveable meal, and bury myself under more work.
I’d go until I was so tired I couldn’t see straight.
The pure exhaustion meant I didn’t dream and didn’t obsessively think about Harley.
I didn’t dissect every moment and try to strip it of the meaning I wanted to find.
And most days, I pretended not to notice the sour candy. He thought he was subtle, but he wasn’t. I’d catch the way his jaw ticked and he drew in unsteady breaths before the candy became a quick and quiet lifeline.
I never said anything.
But secretly, I liked being able to give him that safety net.
Between getting sober and surviving prison, the anxiety I’d struggled with as a kid had come back with a vengeance—louder and more intense than I remembered it being.
At first, it was debilitating, completely pulling me out of my element and rendering me useless.
Sour candy had been a trick I found online.
I’d been convinced it was one of those fake hacks until I found the reasoning to back it up: shock the senses, ground yourself, and bring your mind back to the present.
It worked, and it became an easy solution to a problem I couldn’t afford to have people find out about.
As far as Frank’s customers knew, I just had a sweet tooth. I could live with that.
Mid-afternoon, I was in the downstairs bathroom fixing the cabinets when Harley appeared in the doorway.
“Do you know where I can rent a truck in town?” he asked quietly.
“What kind of truck?” I replied. I leaned back on my heels and pivoted slightly to better look up at him.
Every day, I also pretended not to notice how worn down he was.
It became more and more apparent the longer I was with him.
There was a strain in every inch of his body, like he was actively working to hold himself together. It killed me to see him like this.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I don’t need the furniture, but I figured it made more sense to donate it rather than toss it.”
“It is nice furniture.” Nicer than what most people had around here. “How much stuff are you needing to transport?”
“Um,” he made an awkward gesture to the house, “everything. At some point. I was just going to start bringing stuff over to the thrift store little by little. I didn’t have a plan.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding slowly. I pressed my lips together as I silently ran through my schedule to see what I could offer him.
“We can use my truck if you don’t mind waiting until the end of my day.
Frank wants me off the clock by six every night—something about labor laws and that crap.
The thrift store closes at seven usually, so we could load the truck and head over there as soon as I’m done. ”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know. It won’t be every night.”
“Of course not.”
“Sometimes I have plans.” A.A. counted as plans. I really needed more on my calendar besides A.A., Bobby, and work. Maybe I’d go hang out with Eduardo just to put something more in my schedule.
“Are you sure?” Harley asked. From the look on his face, he wasn’t convinced that my offer was legitimate.
To be fair, I wasn’t even sure it was a good plan.
Boundaries should’ve been a thing between us, especially with the rising emotions inside me, but when I saw how overwhelmed he was with the house, I just wanted to help.
Call me a simp. I couldn’t help it.
It was becoming real clear that five years hadn’t changed a damn thing where my feelings were concerned. No matter what happened, I’d always care about Harley.
“Yeah,” I told him, keeping my tone casual. He didn’t need to know of the tiny internal war I was having. I turned back to the cabinet and fussed with the hinges, using it as a much-needed distraction.
We made it to the thrift shop just before seven, barely squeezing in before closing. We unloaded the couch and two chairs while the store owner opened the back of the building for us. They were all that could fit, even after I’d removed every piece of equipment from the bed.
Sweat clung to the back of my neck, and my muscles ached after a long day of work. A small, treacherous part of me regretted offering to help. At this rate, we’d be making dozens of trips per floor in his house.
At least it was for a good cause.
I just kept telling myself that.
The brash decision to ask him to dinner came out of nowhere. I was quick to clarify that it wasn’t a date and made things awkward in the process. Two people who knew each other could have dinner, I’d told him. Fuck, I didn’t even know how to classify our relationship at this point.
I took him to The Boathouse and opted for the overhang, sitting us right out on the lake.
Its surface rippled gently below us, reflecting the soft colors of the fading sun.
The air was a cool reprieve from the sweat drying on my skin, and I welcomed its openness.
It sure as hell beat the awkward proximity of being locked in the truck with him.
I was acutely aware of everything Harley as we sat in silence over our food. The way he breathed, the way his brows furrowed in thought, the way he picked at his food. He never ate a lot, and that worried me.
“Can I ask you a question?” Harley said finally as he set down his fork, pulling me out of my thoughts.
“I guess that depends on the question, doesn’t it?” I replied around a bite of my burger. The response was a deflection—an easy way to say that I wasn’t sure I could handle whatever he was about to ask.
“I know that my mother had something to do with you going to jail,” he began quietly.
I stilled and waited, unsure of where he was going with this.
This was the landmine we’d been avoiding at all costs.
We talked about the most mundane things, but we never touched this conversation. “I don’t know exactly what happened…”
I crossed my arms and leaned back in my seat to stare at him. He stared right back, his expression full of uncertainty while he waited for an answer. I knew what he wanted of me, but I didn’t know if I could give it to him.
There was a laundry list of things I should’ve told him. If I were smart and ruthless, I would’ve ripped the band-aid off and told him everything. I would’ve shown him the kind of woman his mother was.
But I knew that’d hurt him.
Over the past two weeks, I had become aware of the situation with his mother.
He was a good man trying to take care of the woman who had slowly chipped away at him for years, but I could see the toll that goodness was taking on him.
Every conversation he had with the assisted living center left him frantic and worked up.
I pretended not to know that he’d escape to the bathroom to have a panic attack.
It was easier if I just kept focusing on what I could fix for him.
But this? I couldn’t give him this.
The truth of who she was would’ve ruined him. If I told him how she had weaponized our relationship, it would’ve crushed him. He was barely hanging on by a thread when it came to her. I didn’t know if he’d survive that truth.
And that weight was one I already knew how to carry. Nothing would change if I didn’t tell him the whole truth.
For Harley, I could be the bad guy.
“I made a mistake, Harley,” I told him. “I did rob your family to help my brother. I did it so Aidan wouldn’t hurt Clifford.”
The words weren’t the whole truth—not by a long shot—but they were close enough. They’d get the job done.
“Oh,” he whispered.
And there it was.
The moment everything clicked in his head as the wrong memories resurfaced—the phone call I could never take back. I could see him replaying it in his head right in front of me, and I hated it.
“The phone call was a lie.” The confession slipped out before I could stop myself.
His gaze snapped to mine, searching for some kind of inclination that I was lying.
“I was angry, Harley, and I… I just took it out on you because it was easier to hurt you than it was to be honest about my mistakes. You didn’t deserve that. ”
I sighed, pushing out a long breath while I worked out the right words to say, because how did I explain this to him? The truth was that I couldn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I let out, my chest tightening. “You deserved better than me, Harley.”
That line placed the blame solely on me, as it needed to. Him knowing would do no good, and I kept that thought on repeat in the back of my mind.
He nodded, absorbing the words carefully as he turned toward the lake, a myriad of emotions dancing across his pretty face. His jaw clenched, and his throat worked as he swallowed hard.
And me? I did nothing because that was my role in all this. I went back to eating, I pretended not to notice the quiet breakdown unfolding across from me as Harley dissected my confession.
“Did you ever love me?” The question cut through every barrier I’d built to protect myself, and I glanced at him. He pointedly watched the water, those blue eyes unnaturally bright in the sunset. “I just need to know if any of it was real.”
Okay fair. I could understand that.
“Yeah, I didn’t lie about that,” I whispered. The words felt too small for something that had once consumed my life.
His mouth parted slightly as if he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to either. Heavy emotions unraveled dangerously inside me, and I scrambled to get them under control before I did something stupid.
I wanted to reach across the table and take his hand.
I wanted to comfort him and tell him that I’d never stopped loving him—that loving him was the easiest thing I’d ever done and losing him was the hardest. I wanted to confess that the biggest lie of my life was how hard I worked every day to pretend like all those things weren’t true.
But I couldn’t.
So I remained still, letting the silence build uncomfortably between us. It lingered all the way back to his house as I dropped him off. He barely said a word when he got out or while I put my equipment back in the truck. I couldn’t blame him.
I carried the soul-crushing weight of it home with me, taking winding roads all over the place just to avoid stopping. I knew the moment I stopped, it’d hit me, and I wasn’t sure I’d survive it.
Unfortunately, none of that mattered as my phone lit up on the dashboard with a single text message from Harley.
HARLEY: For what it’s worth… I never said it back then, but I never stopped loving you either.
There it was… the bomb to detonate everything between us.
Because for one: Harley loved me.
And two: he knew I still loved him.