Chapter 38
COLT
We walked back slowly, neither of us in any hurry.
The bonfire was well behind us, the music fading to nothing.
There were only a few people lingering behind.
Couples that weren’t ready to call it a night.
I understood that feeling. Her shoulder was against my arm.
Her sandals dangling from her fingers. I watched her feet in the wet sand and thought about everything she’d said down at the water’s edge.
The question had been sitting in my stomach like a giant pit.
Hard and heavy and super uncomfortable. I wasn’t ready to answer it.
That was the honest truth of it. Not because I didn’t know what I felt.
I knew exactly what I felt. I’d known it since the moment I saw her seven years ago.
And even when I told myself it was over, the second I stepped foot in Surfside, it was all back.
That feeling had never left. And for the first time in four years, I felt whole again.
I knew exactly what I felt for her. That wasn’t the confusing part. It was what to do with all those feelings. Hers and mine. It was easy to pretend this thing we had was simple. We just operated on feelings and that was enough.
Unfortunately, the real world had demands. We couldn’t simply live in a little bubble and expect the world to stop while we enjoyed each other. We were two different people from two different worlds.
We stopped at the bottom of her porch steps.
The light above the back door was on, casting a warm yellow glow across the weathered wood.
The rest of the house was dark as expected given the hour.
She turned to face me, her back to the steps, and looked up at me with those eyes that had been wrecking me since I was twenty-seven years old.
I kissed her. I couldn’t not kiss her. She was an addiction I didn’t want to cure.
I put one hand at the side of her neck and pulled her in slow.
She came without hesitation, her free hand finding my chest. I almost smiled.
She loved touching my chest. It was incentive to keep up the workouts just so I could impress my girl.
The kiss lingered. She tasted like beer and the salt air and that special blend of summer.
When I finally pulled back, she stayed close, her forehead nearly touching mine.
“You want to come in?” she asked quietly.
There it was. And God, I wanted to say yes.
Every cell in my body was voting yes. My cock was making its opinion very clear.
But I could hear her voice from the beach still.
The careful steadiness she’d used to hold herself together while she handed me her heart and asked me what I planned to do with it.
She deserved a better answer than I could give her tonight.
“I need to sleep,” I said. It was the lamest excuse ever. I wanted to eat the words but they were already out there.
She pulled back just enough to look at me. I watched her read my face. Her expression was pretty clear she knew my excuse was bullshit.
“Okay,” she said.
Disappointment was in her tone. Sadness in her eyes. I knew what she was thinking, but she didn’t know the full truth. Yes, I was stepping back, but I wasn’t shutting her out.
“Summer.”
“I said okay, Colt.” She smiled. “I meant it. I’m not going to fall apart because you want to sleep in your own bed. I should probably catch up on some sleep myself. But Colt?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t lie to me, okay?” The words were soft. “I know I dumped a lot on you. I’m a big girl. When you make your decision, tell me. Don’t make up lame excuses.”
She rose up and kissed me one more time, her hand on my jaw. Then she stepped back and up onto the first porch step, which put her nearly at eye level with me. She looked at me for a moment. “You’ll figure it out,” she said. “Whatever you decide. I’ll be okay, just be honest.”
I watched her go inside. The screen door closed softly behind her. I stood there for another few seconds like an idiot, staring at the closed door, before I turned and walked back across the yard toward the property line.
The house was quiet when I came in through the back.
Cody had left a light on in the kitchen, which he always did when I was out.
Old habit from years of keeping different hours.
I got a glass of water and stood at the counter and drank half of it.
I wasn’t drunk. Not even a little, but I felt off. Like I wasn’t thinking clearly.
I picked up my phone because there was one person who would understand my predicament.
It was late. Just past midnight. Texas was two hours ahead, which made it later still, but I scrolled to Charlie’s contact and pressed call before I could talk myself out of it.
He picked up almost immediately, which told me he’d been awake.
“Hey,” he said. “You good?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry for the hour.”
“Don’t worry about it. Olivia’s reading some book.
She’s been saying ‘one more chapter’ for the last two hours, which means I’ve been awake for the last two hours because she insists on the bedside lamp.
” He wasn’t angry. He loved his wife and all the little annoyances that came with sharing a home and a bed with someone. “What’s up?”
“Well, I was actually hoping I could talk to Olivia.”
He was quiet for a second. “Uh, okay.”
“Colt?” Olivia’s voice was surprised and a little sleepy. “Hey. Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Sorry to call so late.” I rubbed the back of my neck and looked out the kitchen window at the dark yard. “I wanted to ask you something. If that’s alright.”
“Of course. What’s going on?”
I leaned against the counter and tried to figure out where to start. “You know I’ve been in Surfside for a while now.”
“Yes, I was there,” she teased.
“There’s a woman here.”
Silence followed by a soft exhale. “Okay.”
“Her name’s Summer. We have history. It’s complicated and it’s also not complicated at all, which is somehow the most confusing part of the whole thing.” I exhaled. “She asked me tonight what my plans are. When the job here is done. Whether I’m going back to Texas.”
“And?” she said finally.
“And I didn’t answer her,” I said. “Because I don’t have an answer yet.
I know what I feel. I know what I want. But I keep thinking about what it actually means.
The logistics of it. What it would cost her, or what it would cost me.
” I stopped because I was rambling and trying to find the real excuse.
Geography sounded pretty lame when I was putting it all out there.
“I don’t know. I called you because you were in her position once.
You were the one who had to make the choice about what to leave behind. ”
Another pause. I heard her exhale slowly.
“That’s true,” she said. “I was.”
“Was it hard?”
She laughed softly. It was the laugh of someone looking back at something that had been genuinely difficult and yet survived.
“Colt, it was terrifying. I won’t pretend otherwise.
I had built a whole life. I had my sisters, my work, everything I’d put together on my own terms. And then Charlie came in and rearranged the entire picture.
” A pause. “There were a lot of tears, if that tells you anything.”
“It tells me something,” I said.
“But here’s what I kept coming back to,” she said with a wistfulness in her tone.
“My sisters have always been my foundation. They are the thing I was most afraid of leaving behind. Not a place, not a job. Them.” I heard her shift again, the soft creak of the bed.
“And what I realized was that the foundation doesn’t disappear when you build something new on top of it.
It’s still there. It travels with you. It’s not geography.
It’s people. You know that saying, ‘home is where the heart is?’”
I stared at the dark window. “I’ve heard it.”
“It’s true. If I had my family, I could live on the moon and be happy.
And I mean my husband and children. I’ll live anywhere because no matter what, my sisters will understand.
We love each other and that doesn’t change because one of us lives a thousand miles away.
God invented airplanes so distance doesn’t matter. ”
I laughed. “I don’t think God invented airplanes.”
“You know what I mean. And as soon as someone figures out teleportation, we’re gold.”
“When I moved to Texas, I wasn’t moving away from them,” she said.
“I was moving toward something. Toward him. Toward what we were going to build together.” A soft sigh, one that said she was happy and content.
“And I had complete confidence that whatever that was, it was going to be beautiful. Because of who he is. Because of who I am when I’m with him. ”
Ouch. That was the thing. It’d been on the tip of my tongue but I couldn’t give it words. She just did.
“You never regretted it,” I said. It wasn’t really a question.
“Not for a single second,” she said simply. “Not even on the hard days.” She paused. “The regret I would have had, Colt, if I’d walked away from him because I was scared of what the change looked like? That would have been so much worse. That’s the kind of regret you can’t come back from.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said.
“She sounds like someone worth answering,” Olivia said gently.
“She is,” I said. “She really is.”
“Then answer her.”
“I will.”
“Congratulations in advance.”
“Thanks, Liv.”
“Goodnight.”
I thought about what she’d said. The difference between moving away from something and moving toward something. Something built to last.
I finished my water and turned off the kitchen light and went upstairs.
I lay in the dark for a long time, staring at the ceiling while the fan turned overhead.
My head was spinning thinking about Summer.
I loved Texas. I loved my big, annoying family and the ranch.
Mom and Dad. Was I a mama’s boy? Probably.
Wasn’t ashamed of it either. Lot of good Texas boys loved their mamas and only wanted their mama’s biscuits and cornbread.
I thought about the family business. Did I have to be on site?
What about all the basic shit that happened on the daily?
None of it was super important, but it was the rituals.
My friends. And what about Christmas? Thanksgiving?
The annual livestock auction. My nieces and nephews birthdays, football games and ballet recitals.
It was all back there. Everything I ever valued in life was there. Home. Texas.
I loved Surfside, but it wasn’t home. Summer would never leave her home for all the same reasons I would never leave Texas. I couldn’t take my mermaid from the water. She would shrivel up. The light in her eyes would fade.
Have I been leading her on this whole time? Am I going to break her heart all over again? Teleportation isn’t a thing and flying back and forth is a lot. Logistics matter. In our case, they change everything.