Chapter 9 #2
Lara frowned. Grandma made that sound like a bad thing when Lara didn’t see it that way. It was…smart. It was comfortable, and what was wrong with that? What was wrong with building a life that made her…
Well, if not happy at least safe.
“I think Ty Wagner’s got a lot to teach you about what it is to work hard at things that have no guarantee.”
Lara shook her head. He’d been angry. She couldn’t remember Ty ever being angry at her before. Not like that. It didn’t feel surmountable. “I don’t know that… I think something broke tonight, Grandma.”
“Then I suppose you’ll have to fix it.”
Lara kept her mouth shut because…well, wasn’t it safer to let it stay broken?
“I won’t tell you what to do, Lara. I won’t tell you what to feel. Because no matter what you choose, I love you. You’ve been the brightest spot in my whole life. And nothing that happens, even when I die, can change that.”
Lara swallowed at the lump in her throat. “I don’t want to think about that.”
Grandma made a considering noise. “Well, maybe you should. Maybe it’s time to face that change is coming. Do you want it to knock you out? Or do you want to choose the good things while they’re within reach?”
At first, Ty had walked along the beach trying to find a good center. A good stable place. He didn’t like being angry. It made him feel like his father, so he’d decided to walk until he was calm.
He hadn’t stopped at the cottage. He’d just kept going. Then, eventually, he’d had to walk back. All his things, including his car, were at the cottage. He’d maybe worked off some of his mad, but mostly he still didn’t like the churning in his gut. Still, he could hardly walk all night.
As he approached the cottage from the beach side, he’d noticed a figure out there in the moonlight.
A man seeming to stand on a rock in the middle of ocean. Ty stood there, staring at the thing that couldn’t be—wasn’t—possible, and felt a new swell of anger he couldn’t fully understand.
“Fuck you,” he told the ghost emphatically, then purposefully turned his back on whatever that was.
He couldn’t go back to the cottage, even with all his stuff there. Not tonight. He needed some time and some space to figure out…where a guy went from here. Besides, the living room light had been on, which meant someone was up. Lara or Mary Lou or both.
Yeah, he wasn’t going in there.
So, he’d gotten in his car and driven. At first, he hadn’t had a destination in mind. He’d briefly considered going to his dad’s trailer, but that would be just to start a fight, and why bother?
Now that he’d quit baseball, Dad had left him alone. They didn’t mean anything to each other so why go bother a dormant hornet’s nest? Why not let sleeping shitty drunk dads lie?
Eventually, he ended up at Keane’s. Keane had clearly done some work on the old cabin since Ty had last been out here. It gave him some hope that his friend wasn’t so bad off if he was making an effort to fix up the house.
When Keane opened the door, he didn’t seem surprised. Or particularly sober. Still, Ty walked in at Keane’s invitation.
“Hey, uh, you mind if I crash here a few days?” he asked, feeling awkward in his nice clothes and sandy dress shoes with nothing but his keys and wallet.
“Extra room’s all yours whenever you want it, you know that.”
Yeah, Ty did, but the line of empty beer bottles on the kitchen counter didn’t exactly fill him with welcomed ease. But that wasn’t Keane’s fault. Ty could hardly come into another man’s house and demand he stop drinking.
But Keane was a good enough friend to realize what he was looking at. Keane made a move for the bottles, began to gather them. “Look, you don’t need to worry about that while you’re here,” he said, putting them in a bag for recycling. “I’ll take a break.”
Which made Ty feel a mix of relief and guilt. “You don’t have to do that on my account. It’s your house. Though I wouldn’t mind borrowing some clothes to sleep in if you’ve got anything lying around.”
But Keane didn’t take the change of topic. He stared at Ty, and there was a weird similarity to the hurt on his face that had been on Lara’s.
Ty didn’t think he was the one putting it there, but it didn’t exactly feel good to get that same reaction from two different friends in the same night.
Friends. She just wanted to be fucking friends. After sleeping together. What the hell was he supposed to do with that?
“So I should just be a dick and keep drinking even though I know it makes you think about your asshole of a dad?” Keane demanded.
“No, you’re not being a dick.” Ty raked a hand through his hair. He didn’t want another fight. He just wanted some peace. “You—”
“I’ll lay off a few days, because I am not a dick and don’t want my friend to be uncomfortable. And to prove to you it’s not a problem…” He put the bag of bottles off to the side. “I can go as long as I’d like without drinking. It’s not that big of a deal.”
Ty didn’t have anything to say to that, because he wasn’t convinced. He was a little too well-versed in the lies addicts told themselves. But Keane wasn’t ready to hear that. Maybe…maybe someday he would be.
“So,” Keane said, eyeing him suspiciously. “I don’t think I can even guess why you’d need to stay here instead of with the Townsends.”
Ty tried to laugh, but it was just a bitter sound. Everything inside of him felt bitter and brittle.
“I mean, part of me wants to guess you and Lara finally hooked up, but I don’t know why you’d be here then.”
It wasn’t a surprise Keane might…see through this whole thing. He knew both of them too well, had been around for too much of who he and Lara were. Just like Mary Lou, except…
As much as Mary Lou loved him like a grandson, Lara was hers. Keane might have a decent kind of friendship with Lara, but he was definitely closer to Ty.
Keane was the only person he had as a sounding board that was…not on his side, exactly, but more inclined to understand where he was coming from over her.
So, he laid it out. He left some of the details out, even if Keane had already deduced the hooking up part. He didn’t need to get into the nitty gritty. Just the part where he’d said something as stupid as I love you, and she had insisted they were friends.
Nothing more than friends.
“So what are you going to do? Just avoid her?”
Ty sighed. In the end, a sounding board didn’t give him any answers, but he supposed it gave him a clear head to start finding some. “For a start.”
“Then what?”
Ty didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his life avoiding her. Hell, he wasn’t sure he’d last a week. She was too important to him, even with all this hurt roiling around in his gut.
But was it possible to just go back to the way things were, like she so clearly wanted? He wasn’t sure he had that in him. He understood failure. He’d lived so intimately acquainted with it all his life.
But this wasn’t failure. It was her refusal. It was…pretending something wasn’t there that was. How could he do it?
“You think she’ll come crawling back if you wait?” Keane asked.
He let out a long sigh. Crawling back? No, he really couldn’t picture Lara making that kind of change. And as angry as he was, as hurt as he was, he didn’t want that for her. “She’s been through a lot. Maybe I’m asking for too much.”
“Look, I don’t know shit about…” he waved a hand up and down Ty. “…whatever this is. Love or whatever. But you’ve been through a lot too, Ty. She doesn’t have a monopoly on a crappy childhood. A crappy anything, really.”
Ty couldn’t argue with that, but it was more complicated than that. She had some stuff to work through, and if what had happened tonight made her turn away instead of reach out for him… He didn’t think there was anything he could do to fix this.
No, whatever happened next… It had to come from Lara. Which terrified him. He wanted to march down to that cabin and tell her all the ways she was wrong. But she’d only dig in, build that brick wall thicker.
At the end of the day, she wasn’t rejecting him. She was rejecting…change. Growth. He couldn’t force her to accept those things. So he had to wait or move on.
“I really don’t know. I just know whatever happens next, she’s got to choose it.”
But in that realization, he came to one of his own. He had some choices to make too. Sure, he had chosen her, and she wasn’t ready to hear it. But there were more things to a life than finding someone you wanted to spend it with.
So, he’d choose other things. A job at the school. The coaching position. Wild Rose Point and a future that didn’t involve trying to prove something to a man who was never going to see him as a success.
Damn it, he was a success. If he built a life for himself. Here and how he wanted.
“Do you know any houses for sale?” Ty demanded of Keane.
Keane’s eyebrows winged up. “You’re going to buy a house?”
“Yeah. Because no matter what happens, I’m planting some damn roots here.” For himself.
For the first time in his life, everything he was doing was for himself.
And if Lara came around, if he found a way to get her to come around, that’d be quite the homerun.
But he was stepping up to the plate and swinging, no matter the outcome.