Chapter 44
forty-four
Georgia
Maisy is bright-eyed and bouncing around like she’s on her third cup of coffee by the time I walk into her house.
Even though this was my home for only a few months, the familiar sandalwood scent stirs up memories I don’t feel like revisiting.
I thought nostalgia required a few years to build, but apparently not because being inside Maisy’s bungalow, with its shadowy light and walnut window trims, makes me long for my early days here in Shafer, each day marked by the nerves and excitement of being new to campus.
And, of course, the jumble of emotions Cash packed into those few weeks: longing, thrill, guilt. The full spectrum.
“Whatever you want, it’s yours,” Maisy says as we stroll through the house, looking over the furniture and decor and kitchenware she’s getting ready to sell now that her lease is up and she’s moving back home.
“I don’t know why you’d want any of this cheap stuff, but if you spot just the thing that’s going to get that house sold, it’s all yours. ”
I stop in front of her kitchen table, where she’s assembled a collection of candlesticks in bright, fresh colors, and pick up a set of wooden candleholders that look distinctively Scandinavian.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. My real estate agent suggested making the place look more lived-in.
I think it already does, though maybe it looks like it was lived in back in 1925, who knows?
I thought maybe a few modern, younger-looking knickknacks might make the difference. ”
She produces a paper bag from under the table and takes the candleholders from my hands to tuck them inside the bag. “Take them. Let’s get this done. Campus is going to be so depressing after graduation, I don’t want you here any longer than necessary.”
“I don’t have to stay,” I remind her and myself. Susanna assured me I can head back to Jersey as planned, and that being remote will change nothing. “But I want to be around to say goodbye to the house once we finally find a buyer.” I glance at Maisy. “Kinda stupid.”
“Oh, stop. That house is all over your heart. You should say goodbye in the way that feels right.”
I nod, withholding the part about how now that it’s actually time to move out, I’m fighting the fierce desire to stay.
My phone vibrates from my pocket, and I pull it out to find an unknown number. I send it to voicemail and look over Maisy’s kitchenware.
“Wait, since when do you have one of these stand mixers?” I say, noticing the seemingly unused mixer painted a shiny royal purple. “I never saw this beauty.”
“It’s been in the back of my closet since I moved in. A gift from my aunt who thinks it’s a crime girls don’t have to take Home Ec in high school anymore.”
“You won’t use it?”
“Never! Take it.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice.”
Maisy presses a blue sticky note to the mixer and grins, satisfied. “Goodbye, old friend.”
As we head upstairs, my phone pulses again, this time with a text from the same number that just called.
UNKNOWN: Hi, Georgia, it’s Harmony McKenna. I know this is random, but can you give me a call when you get a chance? I feel like I should explain a few things that I wasn’t able to at the party. Hope you’re well.
Uh, vague much? I hate when people don’t spell out what they want. Of course, if she wanted to be intriguing, she had the intended effect.
“Who can’t leave you alone?” Maisy asks when we reach the landing.
“My relative. She wants me to call back so she can ‘explain some things,’” I say, using air quotes for effect.
“Ew, fuck those people. She probably heard the house is about to sell and wants to get her hands on some of that sweet cash. Are you going to call back?”
I shrug and pocket my phone. “Probably not. I’m ready to end the attempting-to-reconnect-with-family chapter of my life.”
“Sorry, Georgia. Maybe it’s best for now.”
“Oh, it definitely is.” I gesture toward my old room. “Come on, I want to claim that adorable nightstand.”
In the little bedroom I called home for a few weeks, I slap a sticky note on the nightstand and the wooden clock that sits on it, then peruse the collection of blue glass animals that have been collecting dust since the day I moved in.
“I never looked closely before, but they’re actually kinda cute,” I tell Maisy. “You don’t want to take them?”
She scrunches her nose in distaste. “I’d be forever grateful if you took them off my hands. My mom gives me one every year for my birthday, and I don’t have the heart to tell her their eyeless faces creep me the hell out. Why do you think I stuck them in your bedroom?”
I laugh. “Wow, thanks. Now that you mention it, they are kinda nightmare fuel.”
“Right? I can’t believe you let them stay—”
“Maisy?”
I freeze up at the sound of Cash’s voice out in the hallway.
Maisy whips her head toward me, and I must be wearing an expression of utter fear because her face softens with sympathy.
“Shit,” she whispers, but then there he is, his imposing figure filling the open doorway, and all I can do is stare.
Maisy forces a pleasant expression onto her face and turns to her brother.
“Hey. Georgia and I are just going through some stuff I have for sale.”
“Nice.” He scans the room while I stare at him, reminded once again of what perfection looks like in human form.
The color of his eyes is devastating in the morning sunlight, and the navy-blue Cowboys T-shirt stretching across his chest reminds me of the future we’ll never share.
Like it takes everything he has, Cash finally looks over at me and nods. “Georgia.”
My heart pounds with all the same nervousness, excitement, and thrill as when I first came here and Cash would show up, when we had our rapidly growing secret.
But back then, the feelings were the best thing I’d ever known, and now they’ve curdled into something I don’t recognize.
I think about his scent, how I first found it on his sweatshirt in this very room.
How it pulled me under from the first breath, how I never could have imagined the ways it would change me.
“Hi,” I say in a small voice that still somehow gives away far too much.
“Congratulations on the draft, by the way. I forgot to say it the other day, but that’s huge.
” The words are horribly inadequate, and my mind paints a vivid picture of how I would have congratulated him before everything went wrong: my body wrapped around his, skin on bare skin, my lips making him groan like he used to when my tongue was inches from his cock.
“Thanks,” he says into the long, empty stretch of space between us.
As he shifts, sunlight catches on the chain around his neck, half hidden by his T-shirt.
Like I’ve shot back in time, my fingers tingle with the memory of the fine gold loops as we lay in bed, the metal as warm as the bare skin it rested against. I know exactly what that necklace feels like, the way the tiny links curve over the swell of his shoulder and down into the valley around his collarbone, the way it pooled at my throat when his body covered mine and he lowered his head to kiss me.
I draw a shuddering breath and force myself to grab a few of the glass animals on the dresser. “Well, I’m gonna add these to the bag downstairs and head out.”
“You don’t have to leave,” Maisy rushes out.
“No, I need to. I have to clean for tomorrow’s showing.
” I turn for the doorway, realizing too late I have to pass within centimeters of him to get by, and that’s only if we both awkwardly shrink our bodies like the idea of touching is disgusting.
But at the last minute, he steps back into the hallway to give me space, his eyes never leaving me.
I tell myself to find the words to say goodbye and wish him well, but armed with the knowledge that this could be the last time I talk to him, I can’t seem to do anything but disappear down the stairs.
“I’m sorry,” Maisy says when she finds me in the foyer a minute later. “I didn’t know he was stopping by.”
I wave it off. “No, don’t be. It’s fine. Awkward, but—” My body betrays me as my voice breaks and tears spring to my eyes. I clap my hand to my face, angry at these feelings.
Maisy wraps her arms around me and sighs like this is all to be expected. “Georgia,” she says soothingly.
My shoulders shake as I take a deep breath. “You were right,” I say bitterly. “He and I never should have…” I don’t bother finishing the sentence as tears spill down my face again.
“No I wasn’t,” she scolds.
“You were. Maybe your reasons were off, but the message was right. It was never going to work. He and I were a mistake from the beginning.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you might actually convince yourself it’s true. And that’s the worst thing you could do. Don’t lie to your own heart.”
But my heart can’t be trusted. It longs for things I can never have, remembers things I’m better off forgetting. And it won’t stop insisting that every move I make lately will go down as another regret.