Chapter 2
I feel like I should be sorrier to leave, but the truth is it’s a relief. I could never be what everyone wanted me to be at home. I’ll miss the ones I love, but I’d rather be who I am surrounded by strangers than keep on trying to be someone I’m not with friends.
C arson stared at Perry, whose face was as familiar to him as his own. Hell, more so, probably, since he didn’t look in the mirror much. He never took a selfie, but he looked at her every day.
He’d have been tempted to make a joke if that familiar face, those bright green eyes and that mouth that pointed down slightly at the corners, didn’t look so unhappy.
“What do you mean you’re moving?” he asked, pushing his plate into the center of the table.
He’d eaten all of Perry’s crust, so he didn’t need the plate anymore.
“It’s pretty self-explanatory.”
“You’re sitting still,” he said, in spite of himself. If he and Perry couldn’t make jokes even when it was clearly a bad time to joke, then everything was pointless.
“I’m leaving,” she said, a small notch denting that space between her eyebrows.
He couldn’t wrap his head around what she was saying. If someone else had been saying those words, he’d think it meant they were moving away. Leaving town. But Perry didn’t mean that. She couldn’t mean that.
She belonged here. Like the sun, the sky, the mountains. She couldn’t up and leave any more than the trees could pull themselves up by their roots and run off.
But she was sitting there, looking at him like that. Saying that. “You’re moving out of your house?”
She spread her hands out flat on the table. “Yes.” She seemed relieved.
“Down the street or … ?”
“To another town.”
It was his turn to furrow his brow. “What?”
“I need to … I need … something?” She turned her hands over, palms up, spreading them wide. “I have been treading water for … for years, Carson, and I have to stop.”
“You haven’t been treading water. You’ve been sitting at my kitchen table.” Her eyebrows moved up, just fractionally. She said nothing, and he found it annoying. “ Perry .”
Her shoulders shook, as if she shivered. “I want to expand my shop,” she said. “And I found a place in Medford. And I want …” She let out a long breath. “I want to have a baby. Someday. And how am I ever going to get that life sitting here every night?”
He felt like she’d punched him. In his guts. In his face. “Excuse me?”
“I would like to have a baby, Carson. I am thirty-two years old, and it’s time to do something … more.”
“You don’t have a boyfriend,” he pointed out.
“I don’t need a boyfriend to have a baby. All I need is sperm.” The word rolled around in his head for a minute, all alone. Sperm.
It left him feeling … not good.
It was just distasteful to think about that word and Perry, together.
But not more distasteful than thinking of her leaving. Than thinking of her … having a baby. Moving on. From him.
He realized that was a thought that bordered on unhinged.
But she was … his lifeline. His … God dammit, she was his person.
In a way he couldn’t have explained to another living soul.
She wasn’t just a friend. But she’d never been his lover.
She wasn’t a sister. It was deeper. More complicated. It was …
“We aren’t good for each other,” she said softly.
He looked up at her, then down at their empty plates, and back up at her. “What the fuck does that mean? And you’re wrong. You don’t like crust, and I just ate your crust.”
She sighed heavily. “That’s actually the issue, Carson. The crust. That I don’t finish it, but you do. It’s … codependence.”
“I thought it was you being picky and me being raised with an old man who made me clean my plate?” It wasn’t funny. He didn’t laugh. Neither did she.
“It’s … enabling.”
“It’s pizza crust, Per, not crack.”
“For God’s sake!” She slammed her palms down on the table. “You know what I mean.”
He didn’t, though. Or he didn’t want to. Or maybe he did but he didn’t see it as a problem and couldn’t understand why she did.
“Perry,” he said, his tone serious now because she was being ridiculous, and he wasn’t fucking around. “You don’t need to leave to have what you want.”
He deliberately left the implications of everything she said she wanted out of his mind. He deliberately did not imagine her choosing random sperm. Being pregnant.
The image made him think of a desecrated saint. He couldn’t cope with it.
She could get anything she wanted or needed here. She was being dramatic, and for some reason she was making him her bad object, which was a fine fucking thing.
He’d protected her, cared for her, for most of their lives.
For twenty-five years.
They’d hidden from her father in the old barn. Run feral out in the fields and played pirates at the lake.
Life moved on, relentlessly, horrendously, but Perry was like Neverland. His safe and never-changing haven.
He’d tried to be that for her.
Now she was leaving?
“You don’t understand,” she said, looking bleak.
“Obviously I don’t.”
“We can’t keep doing this. It’s not good for either of us. I could have been on a date tonight, but instead I’m sitting here in my childhood best friend’s kitchen, letting him eat my pizza crust.”
“You had a date?” he asked. Her dating life wasn’t really the point of the conversation, but it snagged his thoughts all the same.
“Yes. I did. Stephen Lee asked me to dinner.”
He frowned. He liked Stephen. Which actually kind of pissed him off.
Stephen was good enough for Perry. He was an accountant, and he had his own tax firm.
He and Austin both used him, in fact. He was successful and nice and honest and exactly the kind of man who could give Perry babies and a decent life.
He hated that such a great guy had asked Perry out and that she should have gone with him. Damn, he hated that a lot.
“You could have gone,” Carson said.
“But I didn’t because I knew you and I would have dinner if I didn’t.”
That made his chest glow with warmth. Perry chose him.
But she shouldn’t have—that was the thing. Because all Perry was ever going to get from him was this. Him eating her pizza crust.
That wasn’t true. He’d given Perry more than that.
He’d encouraged her to apply to the college she’d wanted to go to, and he’d been on the phone with her while she did her financial aid and scholarship applications.
He’d offered to pay for her school if she didn’t get enough money so that she would never have to ask her horrible father for anything—in the end, everything had been covered.
He’d promised himself he would always be her hero.
Her father had come to the house looking for her once, wild-eyed and furious, convinced that Carson was messing with his daughter. He’d been seventeen. Perry had been fifteen.
Carson had punched her father in his fucking face, and the man had had to wear a bruise on his face to his job as a mortgage broker. He’d had to sit there with the marks of violence on him in the pew at church.
Just as his wife and daughter had done for years.
Though he’d never struck them where the bruises would show.
His abuse wasn’t caused by a temper he couldn’t control, or anger management issues, it was systemic, controlled violence that wore a smiling face in public while inflicting pain in private.
Carson had never touched Perry in violence or as a sexual object. He’d been determined—always—to be the man who protected her, not took from her.
But the last two years had been complicated.
If he was honest, the last four years had been.
When he’d moved back home with his bride, she and Perry had gotten along better than Carson and Alyssa had behind closed doors. Sometimes he’d felt as if Perry preferred his wife to him, which had been weird.
In the years before that, they’d written while he was on deployment. Actual letters. It had brought them closer, because he’d been able to put things in writing that he couldn’t say in person.
But he’d locked some things away when Alyssa died. Just the same, Perry had relentlessly been there, open and honest as always and his sunshine when the day was so dark he couldn’t breathe through the oppressive weight of it.
And now the only way she could imagine living differently was getting the fuck out of town?
Because apparently her relationship with him was a burden, not a bright spot.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I mean, you don’t have to babysit me every night.”
“I’m not babysitting you. I’m choosing to be here but … I need to expand my life,” she said. “I just do. I need … you know how it’s always been with my dad.”
Yeah. He did.
And he could still feel the man’s cheekbone cracking under his fist.
He relished that memory.
“The day your dad dies, I’m sending a gift basket straight to hell so Satan will spend extra time on him.”
“I’ll add a card,” she said.
She looked up at him with her wide blue eyes, her blond hair all disheveled, and he couldn’t help but think of her as the little girl she’d been when they’d first met—a tiny little thing, only two years younger than he was.
He’d seen her wander onto the property wearing a flowered dress and big rubber boots, and he’d thought to himself: I’m going to keep her .
Like she was a puppy.
But he had kept her, all this time.
“I’m going to do it like Mae,” she said.
“Mae?”
“My five-times-great-grandmother who came out to Rustler Mountain as a mail-order bride.”
“I missed the part of the story where some guy who works in car sales in Medford with an aftermarket spoiler on his Honda sent away to have you come to that mighty metropolis as his bride,” Carson said, his tone dry.
She rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, she struck out on her own and she made her own life, and it’s starting to be abundantly clear to me that that’s what I need to do.”
“You have a shop right on Main Street.”
“And I live month to month because I can only afford one person to help me, and my job is so seasonal it’s painful, and local people only send so many flowers, and and and .”