Chapter 7
Hudson
Hazel eyes, dusted with gold and wide with a shadow of anticipated pain, stared at me as Olivia waited for my answer.
An answer I didn’t want to give her. To admit that Jessie and I had split because she wasn’t Olivia.
Because I could never love her. Olivia had left a trail of wreckage in my heart that had never healed, no matter how I tried fooling myself into believing it had with every attempt at dating.
Reality slapped me in the face each time it hadn’t, and I’d given up, knowing it never would.
“It didn’t work out,” I mumbled.
Her sight drifted to Jessie, a flicker of something akin to sadness and jealousy in those delicate irises.
“It was seven years ago,” I added. “She’s married to Carl now, who runs the auto shop in town. And she’s happy.” I dropped my eyes when Olivia looked back at me. “Something I couldn’t make her.”
Because I had buried my heart too far below the walls I’d built around it.
Walls that had locked away Olivia’s claim on it and kept it too far from anyone else’s reach.
It had sucked to admit, but I’d realized years ago that I couldn’t shake her hold on it.
No matter how much I hated what she’d done to me.
“Oh,” she said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear her.
For a moment, she looked like she had when she’d returned home from break each time. A fragile girl who needed protecting. Wounded. I’d never understood what happened in that house, and she’d only ever told me her father was hard on her. Cold and distant.
Swallowing, the urge to fold her into my arms like I used to flared up. To hold her tight and tell her I wouldn’t let anything in while I had her. That had been my promise to her, the only thing I could do since she kept me from it.
“I never loved her,” I found myself saying, not knowing why I had the need to explain myself when Olivia had been the one to end our relationship. But that didn’t stop me, especially when those hazel eyes lightened like I’d lifted the weight of the world from them.
“Did you love anyone?” she asked in a whisper that dug at the fortified buttresses of my heart.
“Did you?”
Her lips parted, and my gaze fell to them, remembering how lush they were, how soft and sensuous.
“The two-egg special for both of you,” Jessie said, placing the plates in front of us and destroying the moment.
Olivia pressed her lips together as she studied the food.
“Thanks, Jessie.”
She gave me a wink and left me with a pouting princess who reminded me not to let my guard down again.
“What is this?” she hissed.
I stabbed at my sausage patty, not bothering to cut it, and brought it to my mouth, enjoying her horrified look.
“It’s breakfast for lunch,” I said, between chews. I’d told her what I’d ordered, but she still looked like I’d thrown a dead animal in front of her and told her to eat it.
“It’s a fat-laden, cholesterol swamp.”
I snorted and took another bite.
“And who orders breakfast for lunch?” It was like she was just digesting the words I’d told her earlier when I’d named off the contents of our meal.
“Me. Now eat your food like a good girl.” Shit, there I went again. Her eyes widened as a shudder went through her, and I almost dropped my fork and reached over to kiss her. That shudder was seductive, reminding me of how my words alone had broken her.
I needed to stop because she’d only been here a few hours, and I was already slipping. Being with her again sent my defenses crumbling too easily. She looked down, picked her fork up, and pushed the food around, averting my eyes.
“Eat,” I repeated, taking another bite of my sausage.
“Are you sure they don’t have anything else? Maybe a smoothie…”
I glowered at her, stopping her words. She looked as if she never ate. Thinner than she had been, still beautiful, but it left her features sharper.
“Do you eat at all?” I asked between chews.
“Of course I do.”
“Coffee and what? Crackers?”
“Too many carbs,” she said absently as she studied the butter dripping from the egg when she held it up. “Do you eat anything healthy? How is it you haven’t had a heart attack with all this grease?”
“Because you destroyed it years ago.”
She dropped the egg, her eyes flying to mine, and I suddenly regretted my words. Words that had come quickly, sharpened with edge and anger from fifteen years of regret and pain that haunted me.
“Is there a bathroom?” she asked, her eyes so wounded it was almost as if they reflected my own scars.
I cleared my throat. “I didn’t mean—”
“Bathroom, Hudson.”
With a sigh, I nodded behind her. She was up and hurrying from the booth without a word. I sat back, rubbing my stubble with my hand.
“I can see why you never got over her,” Jessie said after the bathroom door slammed.
She came over and sat on the edge of the booth.
“I don’t know what you’re going on about.”
“Don’t give me that,” she said. “We’ve known each other too many years. You can feel the tension across the diner. It’s heating Dennie up in the back.”
“It’s nothing more than annoyance.”
She laughed, standing and putting her hands on her hips.
“You never let yourself be happy, Hudson. So content to walk around with that cloud over your head, to keep your heart locked away. She’s the reason, and I think she’s the only one who can lift that cloud.
It’s time to let yourself be happy again.
” She glanced back at the bathroom. “Not everyone gets a second chance. Take it, Hudson.”
“There’s no second chance with her.”
“That heat and those looks you’ve been exchanging tell me otherwise.”
“Jessie!” Dennie yelled from behind the window.
“Go get your order and stop interfering, or I’ll tell Carl you’re at it again.”
“I was right with Shirley and John,” she said, walking away just as Olivia came out of the bathroom.
“Who are Shirley and John?” Olivia asked as she sat.
“Did you really use the bathroom?”
Her eyes flew to me, proud and guarded.
“No, I would never. I needed to check my lipstick.”
I shook my head. “Do I want to ask why you would never use a restroom? And how do you go to the bathroom when you travel?”
Her lips pursed as she considered me, and I couldn’t help flicking my sight to them again.
“I don’t travel.” She said it so matter-of-factly, like it was a bullet point on her resume. “Unless it’s for business, like this.”
“What happened to Italy?” I asked, remembering how she went the first year we were dating. That summer had just about killed me, having her so far out of reach. But the trips stopped the next few years, and I just assumed it was because her mother’s death had disrupted them.
Her sight drifted to the window, and a forlorn look crossed her features.
“We never went back.”
I lowered my coffee, staring at her. She’d loved those trips, coming back that year tanned and relaxed, her hair almost golden from her time in the Mediterranean sun. Talking to me nonstop in broken Italian. Going on about her cousins, and the beaches.
As her eyes turned back to me, the light hit them, turning them a greenish-brown. Her lips lifted slightly.
“Until this year.” She played with her napkin, and I could see the change, the mask slipping. “Tori somehow convinced my father to give her the information, and Gabe and I went back with her and Reid in tow.”
I wanted to keep her in this moment, to have her stay like this. Wrapped in a happy memory.
“Reid?” I asked, afraid to move. Fearful that she’d snap back to the aggravating woman who was nothing like the girl I had loved.
“Their son.” Her smile grew, lips curving to highlight the freckles that she had covered with makeup.
The ones I used to brush my thumb over, following their path with my mouth.
“He’s a pain in the ass. You know he wakes me up at the crack of dawn, like he’s some kind of annoying alarm?
I swear Gabe sends him to my room on purpose.
” She laughed, and a crack formed in the wall that guarded my heart.
“He knows I like to sleep in. The little shit.”
“Your nephew? That’s a bit harsh to call a kid.”
Another laugh that threatened to obliterate that wall. “No, silly. My brother. He’s a little shit.” And the smile slipped, her mood darkening. “Interfering ass is what he is.”
Her eyes shifted back out the window, and I wanted to reach over and grab her hand, to tell her to come back to me. To tell her how much I missed that laugh and the smiles that came with it. How much I missed her, even after all she’d done.
“So, your brother married and had a son?” I asked, thinking of how we would have been married and happy if she hadn’t massacred our future. My fork clunked as it stabbed my egg, and she glanced down at it.
“A little more complicated than that, but yeah. They got married in April. Lots of pink and fluff. Not my color at all, and I told Tori that.” She stared at her nails, their mauve color almost too dark.
My fork hung in stasis between my hand and my mouth. “You always looked pretty in pink,” I said before I could stop myself. The memory was there, vivid and raw, and I couldn’t stop it from taking form.
“You look beautiful tonight,” I said, dragging Olivia into my arms. “Pink is definitely your color.”
I kissed her shoulder, nudging the thin strap of her dress down as my pulse quickened.
The awards banquet for the lacrosse team had given me an excuse to see her all dressed up.
And it was worth every unsolicited glance from other team members that I’d had to endure because she was the sexiest thing there.
“You think so,” she sighed, tipping her head back as I scraped my mouth up her neck.
“Fuck yeah.”
“Language, Hudson,” she playfully scolded.
Three months together and she was still scolding me for my swearing. It wouldn’t stop me. In fact, I loved how it riled her up. Capturing her mouth, I lifted her, forcing her to wrap her legs around me and the dress to stretch up high on her thighs.