Chapter 14
Fourteen
Lacey
"Cole, for the love of god, just throw it away," I snap. "You're never going to need your AP Bio notes."
He growls. "I am not enjoying this, Lace."
I sniff a laugh, wiping sweat off my brow with the end of my T-Shirt; we've spent the last several hours cleaning out the primary bedroom suite and the room he's lived in his whole life.
His dad's room wasn't that bad. Cole did do some work in there after the elder Mannix's death, but he just never got around to finishing.
We bagged up some old clothes, stripped the twenty-five-year-old bedding, emptied drawers and closets, swept, vacuumed, and cleaned the bathroom.
The harder job has been Cole's bedroom—the man is a bit of a hoarder, it turns out.
An organized one, but a hoarder nonetheless—he has all of his notebooks, textbooks, and papers from middle school through high school.
All of his yearbooks. Concert ticket stubs.
Movie ticket stubs. County fair stubs. Photo booth photos.
Baseball gloves, football helmets, lacrosse sticks.
Balls, pucks, skates, gym bags. Paper targets from the range.
He's lived in the same house he grew up in his whole life, but he's never expanded out of the bedroom. He's somehow packed everything from thirty-four years of life into one tiny bedroom.
And he doesn't want to get rid of any of it.
"Can I just ask a question here?" Cole says, tossing into a contractor bag a stack of three- and five-subject spiral-bound notebooks full of class notes from twenty years ago.
"Sure."
"Why do I have to go through all this stuff? If we already cleaned out the other room, why can't I just move my clothes and shit over and be done with it?"
I open a shoe box and find every letter and note I ever wrote him in our three years of dating, and my eyes instantly tear up. "Cole?"
"Mmm?" He hums the question-sound, absently, his focus more on the envelope of photos from the varsity football's trip to the state finals, his senior year. I was already gone by then.
"Cole."
My tone gets his attention, this time. "Whaddaya got?"
I lower myself to the edge of the bed, sorting through a sea of notes and letters; some are full-on letters written on both sides of lined paper, others are notes written on scraps torn from notebooks or on Sticky Notes or receipts from gas stations.
In every single one, I used a tiny heart over every lowercase i. Gag.
God, I loved him.
…Thinking about our future together, CoCo, one reads, pulling from the middle of a long letter from January of our junior year.
I hate that Daddy won't let me off grounding for SnowComing. Maybe I’ll sneak out anyway.
We can skip the stupid dance and go stargazing at Secret Beach.
You bring the blanket, I’ll bring the rest of the ***supplies***.
Here, I used three hearts around the word "supplies. " Not exactly a subtle hint, was it?
Cole takes the letter from me and peruses it. "What were you grounded for? I can't remember. I do remember that we did actually skip SnowComing." His eyes flick to mine, and I know we're both remembering the same thing.
"We drove up to Grand Lafayette and had a romantic candlelight dinner at Luigi's," I say, remembering like it was yesterday how handsome Cole had been in his rented three-piece tux, golden hair slicked back—he wore it longish and shaggy back then, and looked like a stereotypical California surfer boy.
"And then we drove to the lighthouse," Cole says, his voice thick and low and husky. "I set up a pup tent in the back of my truck, and we spent the night out there." His eyes reflect the heat I know I’m feeling, remembering that night.
"I was supposed to be getting my period the next day," I whisper. "That was the first time we made love without a condom."
Cole shoots to his feet, lacing his hands behind his head and stretching backward, gusting a sigh.
"I couldn't believe how fucking good you felt," he whispers, his voice so low I can barely hear him.
"I remember just about everything with you, Lace, but that night?
That night will be burned into my memory for the rest of my life. "
"Cole," I whisper.
"You want to know something, Sweet Thing?" He turns to face me, steps into my space and cups my chin, thumb brushing over my lower lip. "To this day, I've never been bare with anyone else. Not that there've been a lot of others."
"It'd be okay if there was," I tell him, despite the burn of jealousy in my stomach. "I did not and still do not have a claim on you."
"Yes, you do," he snaps, his voice a raspy snarl.
"You owned my heart from the moment I first asked you to homecoming sophomore year.
The moment you said yes, you staked your claim on my heart, Lacey Grey.
That never changed. I…" He lets go and tries to turn away, but I grab his wrist and place his massive, cinderblock-rough paw against my cheek.
"What, Cole? Say it. No matter what it is, just say it."
"I don't know how."
"Try. Please?" I pull him closer, wedge him in the V of my thighs, slip my hands under his shirt to find his bare back.
"I tried to stop loving you, Lacey," he says, his voice hoarse and grating.
"I tried so fucking hard. Best I could ever do was…
pretend I didn't. I've never even really tried to care about anyone else.
I don't know how. Anyone I've ever been with has only ever gotten pieces of me at best. And even then, I was only ever with anyone else because I kept hoping it would help me get over you.
It never did." He scrubs his face with both hands. "So much I don't know how to say."
"Cole, listen to me." I press his palm to my cheek, turn my face into his hand and kiss his palm.
"You have to say the hard, painful things.
It's gonna sting. I might cry. I know there's no guarantee things between us are going to work out.
I don't know if that's even what you want.
If it's even possible. But even if it doesn't, if it's not possible, even if we go our separate ways after this, we need to get it all out. We can't leave anything unsaid."
"Fine. You wanna know the brutal truth? No one has ever been able to measure up to how you made me feel.
Just physically. I'm not even talking emotionally, Lace.
No one else I've ever slept with has ever made me feel as good as you did.
And I've—I've fucking chased it, Lace. I've tried.
I've tried everything I can think of. Drunk, high, sober, doesn't matter. I’ve tried to connect emotionally, too, thinking maybe I need that connection.
But I could never find it—I could never make that connection work.
" His head hangs, chest heaving with ragged breaths.
"And I could never think about you with anyone else. I'd get sick to my stomach, literally."
"Cole," I whisper, splaying my hands on his lower back. "Why have you never moved out of this room, let alone this house?"
"It's the only…" He shakes his head. "I don't know. I tried, after Dad died. I tried to clean his stuff out of that room, thinking I’d move in. I found his notes about Amber’s case and…I don't know, Lacey. I don’t do a lot of self-psychoanalysis.”
"Care if I take a stab at it?" I ask.
He nods. "Sure. Go for it. Lay it on me."
"You're stuck. You have your career, your friends, but…your life hasn't really changed much since high school." I push it out past the hot lump in my throat. "I don't want to take credit where it's not due, but…it seems to me like you got stuck in place after I left."
He nods slowly, heavily. "Yeah, that…that tracks. And it's only now that you're back that I'm actually willing to think about changing anything." He looks around the room. "Fee and Rye have been begging me for years to let them remodel the place."
“You should let them,” I say. "Rent one of those POD storage things and put everything in it and let the boys go nuts. Give you a whole new home, just…where you've always lived. A way to move forward, with or without me."
"And go where in the meantime?" he asks.
I snort. "I'm sure you can figure something out, Sheriff Mannix."
I see him considering. And then he whips out his phone and calls Felix, adding Riley once it's ringing.
"What up, bruh?” Riley says, sounding out of breath. "Don't mind me, just…oh, shit. Just…just, um…working out." A giggle in the background, however, puts a question mark on what "working out" means.
"This is a three-way call?" Felix says.
"Yeah, you guys are on speaker, and Lacey is with me. Um…don't—" he bites off, sighs, tries again. "Just shut up and listen, okay, assholes? No stupid jokes or questions."
"No promises on that last part," Riley says. "But I'll do my best."
"I'm ready to let you guys do the house."
Silence greets this pronouncement.
"Is this a joke?" Felix asks, his voice skeptical.
"No."
"Well, then, I'll have plans, drawings, permits, a schedule, and a materials cost estimate for you Monday," Felix says, all business. "I'll bring it to your office. Rye, make a big hole in your schedule. Cole, any specifics?"
"I, uh…" he sighs. "I dunno. I want it to look like what it is, I guess—a historic farmhouse. Just…different. Better."
Felix laughs. "You trust me, brother?"
"Fuckin' obviously," Cole says.
"Then just trust me," Felix says. "You'll love what I have in mind. Classic, simple, and timeless. It'll feel like home. I'm not gonna turn it into some stark, modernist showpiece, I promise."
Riley's voice cuts in over his brother’s. "What I want to know is what the actual everloving fuck you did or said to get him to finally let us in there, Lace."
"No shit," Felix mutters.
"I…" I meet Cole's eyes, and I know some things need to stay between the two of us.
"None of your goddamned business," Cole snaps, rescuing me from having to figure out an answer.
Riley laughs. "Say no more, buddy."