Chapter 13
The sound of a bulldozer on the other side of the wall was sufficient to rouse Candace from her bed. She had no idea why a bulldozer was on the balcony of her modest fourth-floor apartment, but Trenton, NJ, was a weird place.
Her brain shook free of its moorings, sloshing around in her skull even though her head was clearly caving in on itself, when she sat up. She toppled right back over, inverted on the bed, cracking her temple smartly on the footboard that had never been there before.
She peeled her eyes open and groaned when she saw she wasn’t home at all. She was hungover in a campground in North Georgia. There was a bulldozer out front and a coffee pot in the kitchen. Her salvation was right down the hall, a million miles away.
Candace lay there dying for several more minutes before fashioning a cloak out of her blanket, cinching it into a tight hood to hold in her brain, and rocking herself up onto her feet.
Her entire body groaned. She was sure if she put a microphone on her knee, the sound would be just as resonant there as from her throat.
Clearing that throat was another crisis.
She assumed she must have eaten an entire bag of flour last night; there was no other reasonable explanation for the utter lack of moisture in her mouth.
Her lips had glued shut, and prying them apart didn’t do much for the tongue fused to the roof of her mouth.
She smacked her lips a couple times to get the saliva flowing and staggered out to the kitchen, where Laurin was throwing pots and pans around in the cabinet.
“I didn’t think you’d be up this early!” he shouted.
“Bulldozer. Out there.” She considered pointing but didn’t have the strength.
He plowed past her to look, his laugh piercing her eardrum as he said, “Just Greg and Mark. Building a bird house, by the looks of it. Weird. Want some coffee?”
She shuffled to the counter and slumped over it, thinking it was a good place to nap.
“Aspirin?” was the next thing she heard. She took them from Laurin’s hand and gobbled them up, only afterward realizing she had no water.
“Right here,” Laurin said, sliding the cup across the counter.
The sound of it, the scraping of glass on Formica, flipped Candace’s stomach right over. She barreled down the hall, crashing into the walls in her panic, barely making it to the restroom before purging the beast from her belly.
Laurin was right there when she croaked on her next breath, forcing air down the wrong pipe and triggering her stomach again. He rubbed her back through it, again pushing aspirin and water on her when she finished.
It stayed down this time. She thought the floor wouldn’t be a bad place to sleep or die, but Laurin kept her upright, dabbing her forehead with a damp cloth. He folded it over and wiped her lips off before tossing it into the hamper. “Do you feel any better?”
“Yeah. I should go back to bed.”
“You should take a shower. You’ll feel better for it.
” He kept a hand on her for stability while he fiddled with the knobs to get the shower going.
When he was happy with the temperature, he said, “Go on now. I’ve got the drain plugged, so you can just sit there and contemplate life for a while.
Close the curtain behind you so I can bring you coffee. ”
“I don’t shower with the curtain open.”
Laurin snorted. “Hangover hasn’t done much to fix your sass, I see. Go on, now.”
Once Candace was under the powerful jet, she couldn’t think about anything but what he’d said.
She did have a bad attitude, a horrible one.
She had cultivated it especially for the challenge, but she’d always been arrogant and stubborn.
It may not have ruined her marriage, but it hadn’t helped any.
These days, she didn’t even have to try to run men off. They didn’t come anywhere near her.
Did it make any difference, though? Laurin was nice, attractive, optimistic, and helpful, but he still didn’t have a ring on his finger. None of his good qualities had kept him with his kid’s mom.
That didn’t even make sense. She couldn’t imagine anyone would want to leave Laurin.
Then again, she really didn’t know what the story was there.
Was he a widower and still grieved? Or was his daughter from a one-night stand, some soccer groupie, and he refused to be baby-trapped, instead getting custody of the girl?
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except a stable, comfortable life. That meant a good business and a nice home; that was it. Candace didn’t want to take over the world. She just wanted peace and quiet.
Laurin returned with the coffee, announcing his presence and making a big show of tugging the curtain tightly so there was no way for it to get pushed aside as he set the coffee on the rim near her head.
He did the same on the other side to unplug the drain so it wouldn’t overflow.
He was careful not to brush the foot Candace had tossed over the side until he deliberately touched the ankle where the tattoo was now exposed, the shower having washed the concealer away.
He traced the dying rose, the serpent coiled around it, the lip of the broken vase, the water draining from it. “That’s . . . intense,” he said dryly. She tried to reclaim the ankle, but then he rubbed the banner going across it. “Fide nemini? Trust . . . ah . . . no one?”
“You speak Latin?”
“No, but I did a couple years of school in France, and French schools like to force students to read Old French. If nothing else, it made me better at translating stuff like this. That’s a very lonely motto.”
Candace carefully sat up to sip her coffee. If humoring his interest in her leg was payment for caffeine, it was worth it. “It’s a very lonely world.”
He grumbled at that. “Only if you make it that way. I get that if you trust too many people, you’re going to be hurt. Even if you trust only a few people, you’re going to get hurt sometimes, but is it worth it to cut yourself off from everybody just to avoid it?”
“I think so.”
She heard the toilet lid close and had a feeling Laurin was parking himself there for a minute. The water was hot, and she had no intention of getting out of the tub anytime soon, so she wasn’t going to argue with him about it.
Even if the proximity and the raw feelings she was still working through were making her heart ache.
“You’re miserable, Candace.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not. You act like you don’t need anyone, but I can see how wounded you are by people rejecting you .
. . and they only do it because you force them to.
I get that you’re probably different when you’re home, but I’m thinking this tattoo shows that you’re not all that different. You push everyone away, don’t you?”
Candace lay back in the tub and stared up at the ceiling. It was aged and warped, patches over patches, years of mildew and leaky roofs and abuse from weekenders. “I don’t usually have to push. Everyone leaves, whether I want them to or not. So yeah, I think it’s worth it to cut myself off.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why? I see you taking in all the strays, making friends with them. The newbies? Maybe one of you will be invited back. It might be you, but Zara? She’s already an influencer.
You’ll never see any of them again. The veterans?
We’ll all use you and turn on you the moment we can use it to our advantage. ”
“This is two weeks. If I maintain a friendship with anyone here, great. If not? I’ll have some good memories. Ten years from now, if I pass Harper on the street, I’ll gladly invite her out for a coffee. But I’m not talking about how we are here. I’m talking about back home.”
Candace laughed callously. “I bet you had tons of friends back in your soccer days, teammates who make serious money now, didn’t you?”
“What of it?”
“You live with your mom. You work with your mom. So what happened to all those friends when you needed someone to help you out?”
Laurin was silent for a while. She heard him stand and pace a couple steps. “Do you think I live with her because I can’t afford my own place?”
“Why else would you live with her?”
“Because I love her? Because she was lonely? Because of Vivvy? I might not have any money left from my football days, but I’m happy with my life. If I wasn’t, I’d change things. You can change things too, you know.”
Laurin wasn’t about to be brought down by Candace’s moping.
He spent the morning prepping food for lunch for him and Candace, cleaning the kitchen, and building a nice fire.
He set their little TV to quiet adult contemporary rock but changed his mind after a double-header of Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift.
He defaulted to light classical. Not his thing, but he figured it would be gentle enough on her brain.
He refilled her coffee twice. She thanked him for that, protested when he topped off the tub with hot water.
“Life’s easier and happier if you accept the kindness of others,” Laurin told her then. His mother had said that to Laurin more times than he could count. Now she said it to Vivvy. It sounded prettier when she said it. Everything sounded better in French.
He blamed the English translation for Candace’s snort of disapproval. “People are only kind when they want something out of you.”
Laurin sighed instead of arguing with her. “You can be miserable in here all day if you want, or you can come sit by the fire and relax. I promise you’ll feel better out there.”
She pouted a little longer, but Laurin heard the water drain soon enough. When she eventually emerged from her bedroom, he did his best not to laugh about the lavender velour onesie she was buried in. Vivvy had one identical to it.
“That your normal pajamas, or are you just showing off your sweet gear?” he asked without looking up from the puzzle he’d scored from the camp hosts.