Chapter 2 Colton
TWO
COLTON
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, WEST VIRGINIA
What’s worse than despair?
Hope. Dumb hope that enough time would have passed for old wounds to heal.
Hope that she’d talk to me. Hope that she missed all the same things I missed.
Nights spent pumping each other up for whatever challenges we faced, challenges that seemed high-stakes at the time.
Late night fries dipped in a shared Frosty.
Winking at each other through the glass at my games.
Watching her give presentations, in awe of her brilliance.
My blood felt magnetic, bound to pull me into her orbit.
I stood at the cocktail reception for my college buddy Guy Stelle and his fiancée, Kitty Gatto, surrounded by familiar faces: guys I played against in the league, friends from college, and most notably, Violet Gennari.
I couldn’t stop sneaking glances at her, and she at me.
Violet wore a gauzy floral gown that came to her ankles, dressed up but flowy.
Her tall block heels accentuated her long and lean look, her chestnut hair cut with lighter streaks and pouring over one shoulder.
Her olive skin glowed, a product of her dad’s Lebanese heritage.
She wasn’t quite as tan as she was in college, but she probably didn’t have time for things like sunshine if she followed her dream to get her doctorate in neuroscience. Not an MD, like her family wanted.
From a few drunken late night internet searches, I knew she went the neuroscience route.
Had she looked me up? Did she ever get the itch to find out what I was up to? Did she think of me at all?
She talked to a couple. The woman looked like Kitty but with curly hair, and the man wore a gray suit and cowboy boots.
The woman put out her left hand for Violet to examine her ring.
Violet beamed and put a hand over her heart, fanning her face.
She said something to the man, and all three of them laughed.
Stelle told me Violet would be flying solo to this wedding, and that she hadn’t been seeing anyone. Watching her get emotional looking at someone’s engagement ring awakened that tingle of hope in me.
Maybe she still wanted that kind of commitment. The kind of commitment we used to talk about in the middle of the night. How many kids. What kind of house. What she envisioned for her future, and what I envisioned for ours. Because to me, Violet and I weren’t ever going to end.
Funny how sure you can be when you’re young and in love.
“Had you ever met him before, Jonesy?”
I zoned into the conversation in front of me. My old college roommate, Mikey, stood with his girlfriend, Jessie. “Who?”
“Jack Leroy. That was who just got cussed out by his wife. Wait,” Mikey paused, looking to where my head was turned. “Are you looking at Violet?”
I grimaced. “Maybe.”
“Have you talked to her since college?”
I shook my head, then stared down into my whiskey glass. “Nah. Just kinda fell out of touch. I don’t think she really wants to talk to me.”
But I sure as hell wanted to talk to her. I thought maybe this wedding would give me some closure, extinguish the flame with her for good.
It only took one look for me to know I was dead wrong. Magnetic blood and closure don’t really go together.
Jessie quirked a brow at me. “She’s looking at you, you know.”
“Is she?” I asked, snapping my head up. And there she was, lips curving up as the last rays of mountain sunshine caught the edge of her silhouette. My cheeks already hurt from smiling so hard. It was her. My Violet.
Mikey scoffed and waved at her. “Come on, man. Don’t make it weird. Let’s go over there.”
Mikey gave his usual effusive greeting, a few decibels too loud but charming as can be. Violet beamed, falling into a hug with him. She coughed and looked alarmed when he squeezed her extra hard.
“I just saw you two hours ago, Mike,” Violet laughed.
“Two hours too long,” Mikey said. “Jessie, did you know Violet and Colton used to—”
Violet pushed a belabored sigh through her upturned lips and closed her eyes.
“Oops!” Jessie cut him off and tossed back the rest of her drink. “Looks like I need another drink. Let’s go to the bar.”
Mikey hesitated until Jessie tugged his arm with pleading eyes. He grumbled as they walked away, “Why’d you slam your drink?”
With a shallow breath, my focus turned to Violet. She lifted her palms to ask for a hug, one hand threaded around a white wine glass. Her smile sent an ache to my chest. She was nervous. “Hi.”
I opened my arms and stepped toward her. “Hey, Vi.”
I told myself I’d be cool when I saw her.
I said I wouldn’t immediately launch into some campaign to get her back into my life.
Because even though she hurt me all those years ago, she was the one I compared everyone else to.
I didn’t go for the whole playboy lifestyle that sometimes comes with my profession, preferring to sink into deeper relationships.
But none of the relationships after Violet felt as satisfying.
Was that because I was holding back and protecting myself from getting hurt, or because those women just weren’t the right ones?
It didn’t matter, because the one I never forgot was right here. For the first time since that one awful night, I folded Violet into my arms.
It’s fascinating what my body remembered.
How she fit. How she smelled, a new perfume but still her skin’s familiar scent.
How my hand was too big for the space between her shoulder blades when we hugged, but I could press my middle finger in to touch her spine anyway.
I clamped my jaw to keep from planting a kiss somewhere I shouldn’t, a place I didn’t have a right to anymore.
Violet took that right from me.
The room was loud, but all I heard was her soft, nervous laugh.
It had been years. A whole lot of years.
As much as I tried to forget, tried to move on, I remembered everything about her. It wasn’t fair. Soul-crushing and breath-stealing.
I squeezed one bonus time and stepped back, holding her smooth elbows in my hands for a moment before I let her go. Of course, she would be the kind of person to moisturize their elbows. “You look good, Vi.”
She tipped her head to the side and twisted her lips. “You do too, Colt.”
Remember, Colton. She left you. She broke you. You can’t beg for anything. You don’t even want to. Have some dignity.
I shoved my hand in my pocket to keep from lacing my fingers with hers. I busied my other hand with lifting my whiskey tumbler, but Vi didn’t miss a beat. She rushed to clink her glass to mine. I held her gaze as we sipped, disappointed when she broke it.
“So, give me the rundown,” she said. “What are you doing? Where are you?”
She hadn’t looked me up? Hadn’t asked Kitty where I was, what I was doing, whether I was single? I felt like the wind got knocked out of me.
I cleared my throat. “I’m, uh, in Ohio. Columbus. Hockey still.”
Violet smiled and a shot of warmth ran through me. “Good on you. You like it?”
“As much as always. A few teeth shy of when you last knew me, though.” I ran my tongue over the teeth in question, filled in with prosthetics for the moment.
“Oh, no, they finally got your teeth,” she moaned. “You were on such a good streak of keeping them all.”
I leaned in. “Yeah, but now I have the party trick that I can take my teeth out. Want me to show you?”
“No!” she hissed. She grabbed my wrist to stop my hand, eyes sparkling. “I know this room is full of hockey boys, but please keep your teeth in. The resort might ask us to leave.”
“What about you? Lose any teeth? Cure cancer?”
Violet bobbed her head. “Still have all my teeth, and I have yet to cure cancer. But I’m still in Boston studying cancer.”
My gaze flicked over her, looking for some indication of how she felt about it. “PhD? MD?”
“PhD.”
I grinned and lifted my glass to clink to hers. “Attagirl.”
With a wry smile, Violet tapped our glasses. “Thanks to you, I suppose.”
“Nah. That was all you. I was just there for support.” I sipped my whiskey. My next words were genuine. “Proud of you.”
Her eyes shimmered and she chewed the inside of her lip. “Thanks.”
It had been a big part of what ended us.
Her parents wanted her to follow the family legacy and become an MD.
She never wanted the grueling hours of patient care and the time away from family.
When we met, Violet was pre-med, but she admitted that wasn’t really what she wanted.
I encouraged her to stand up to her parents, and sat beside her at the dinner when she broke the news.
It was my first time meeting her parents, and also the last.
That dinner was the beginning of the end. Those memories had to be surfacing for her too, because a tense silence fell between us.
I cleared my throat and gestured to Guy and Kitty across the room. “They finally figured it out, eh?”
Violet brightened. “Eh? Spending too much time with those Canucks?”
I stuck my tongue out and winked. “Occupational hazard.”
She laughed. “But yeah, you’re right. They worked it out.”
Words I couldn’t say hung between us. I wished we had worked it out. I wished she had never left. I wished she had let me try to earn my spot in her future.
I leaned in. “Do you have the inside scoop? I just got a surprise text one day from Guy that they were engaged and he was playing for L.A. Then I read some stuff online.”
Her eyes lit up. “I was about as surprised as you. But Kitty was surprised too when he came back.”
Violet got animated, catching me up on the details of our mutual friends getting back together, then bringing us all to this wedding.
Then there was a lull. She played with her necklace.
My eyes flitted over every feature on her face. That pouty bottom lip. Those wide eyes, full brows over top. Her nose that I rubbed against my own not nearly enough times.
I fought to keep my voice from breaking. “It’s really good to see you again, Violet.”
She studied me, and I convinced myself it was as intensely as I looked at her. “You too. Look me up if you’re ever in Boston.”
Eight years after we fell apart, I never imagined we’d have a conversation like this. I tripped over my next words, the permission giving me a heady power. “Still got the same number?”
Violet’s cheeks flushed red. “Yep. You?”
“Yeah.”
Violet was so many things at once: the same and different, hadn’t aged a day and all grown up, familiar and strange.
I ached for so much more. Every moment I’d missed with her.
Every stupid second I spent wondering if now she’d changed her mind and might answer my call, all to never pick up the phone and try.
“Catch ya again tomorrow.” She winked and fired a finger gun my way. She did that when she felt awkward. Did everyone else who got to stay in her life know that about her? Did they have her memorized the way I did?
“Save me a dance,” I said.
She chuckled. “Will do.”