Chapter 21 #2
When did he lose the suit? I can’t even remember, and we’ve been together constantly.
He looks up and catches me across the room, eyes only for me.
A secret tremble shoots down my body. When he wants to turn it on, he’s a goddamned florescent light.
“Your usual?”
Maisy’s smoker’s voice, louder than usual, flows into my ear. I force myself to turn toward her.
She’s at the register, staring at me with crossed arms and a knowing smile.
“Sure, Maisy,” I say with an extra-sweet grin. “With extra mayo.”
“I bet. Added some extracurricular to your lifestyle, eh?”
“Maisy, please.”
“Girl, I know a smitten study when I see one, and you’re looking at that boy like you can pour him onto a plate and savor his taste.”
“Maisy!” My mouth opens, horrified. “I am not!”
“Yeah, okay, I believe you.” Maisy’s accompanying look says, Not.
“Your sandwich’ll come up behind his. Go sit down and don’t take any of his slick crap.
You have a sound mind, my girl. Stone or William or whatever the hell he calls himself now likely still leads with his little head and zero brains. ”
Stone glances up over at his name, narrowing in on Maisy suspiciously.
“Your order’s coming right up, darling!” she trills at him before her expression snaps back to flat and unimpressed as she turns to me. “Sex is great, but you be careful with that one.”
“I’m not doing anything,” I defend.
“Uh-huh.”
Eager to get out of Maisy’s third-degree, I wind through the crowded tables to get to Stone. His two fans notice me coming up to him, their faces falling with disappointment and envy as Stone extricates himself from the table and greets me with a kiss on the cheek.
“Hey, Lavender,” he says.
I cut him with a look. “Don’t be showing this town we’re together.”
Stone’s unaffected by my warning. He gestures to the seat across from him. “After you.”
The girls drool over him a bit longer, then depart, continuing to dart looks in our direction as they order more coffee.
“They’re staying at Birdie’s Bed and Breakfast,” Stone says. “Came from out of town. Made sure I could hear it.”
I lift my head. “They’ve got to be, like, seventeen.”
“Yeah.” Stone scrubs his face. “I forgot what it’s like here. Impossible to disappear.”
I resist reaching over the table to cover his hand with my own. “Your reasons for being in Falcon Haven have shifted. All that’s important is spending time with your mom.”
Stone responds with a penetrating gaze. “And you.”
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t treat you right.”
I lean back in my seat, my stare moving to the table.
This was a long time coming. For months, years even, I’d imagined what it would be like to confront him and unleash all my pain.
For Stone to feel a fraction of the hurricane going on inside me.
But like everyone says, time lessens emotions.
It doesn’t get rid of them entirely, but the intensity of the pain, the vibrant red of my soul, is dulled now. Numb.
After a moment of nervous contemplation, I say, “Is that why you wanted to sit down with me? To talk about our past?”
“This is difficult to do. To say. I haven’t thought about us in a long time.”
I weave my fingers together, unable to raise my head.
“I don’t mean it like that. I mean that I couldn’t. Think about us. You. Fuck , this is—I’m not good at this.”
“You mean emotion?” I glance at him through my lashes. “I agree. You seem to have amputated that at the same time you bolted out of here and never looked back.”
“I had to. With what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, my anger, resentment, couldn’t follow. I’m not where I am today because of a hot head.”
“Believe me, I know.”
Stone must take my pointed observations as a reason to continue. “When you told me you were pregnant…”
I flinch. “Please don’t.”
Stone pauses. I’m not looking at him, but I feel him staring at me, assessing whether I’m a deal he has to close or if he should take the loss and walk away.
“When you told me,” he forges on, “it was like a gut punch. You saw how it was. I couldn’t think straight for that entire day, because it was also the day I was offered an internship in the city.”
“I remember.” My voice is scratchy and not my own. “You’d just been bailed out. Again. And Mrs. Stalinski’s teacher friend…”
“Mr. Appleton,” Stone supplies.
“Saw something in you. A gift, the same way I did. You were meant for more. And he looked past your exterior and went straight for your brains. Convinced you that if you didn’t take this internship, you’d be stuck here, your intelligence withering, going to waste, when there was all that capitalism to think of. ”
The bitterness flows through me better than coffee. I swallow, stare to the side. I don’t know if I can do this.
“Your news ripped through me.” Stone’s tone is low and matches mine.
“We’d always been so careful. I went through all the ways we could’ve slipped up, but nothing came back as the reason.
And then I realized there didn’t need to be one.
It was happening, whether or not we were prepared.
By that evening, I’d rationalized that I could go to the city, nail the internship, get offered a job, and get us enough money to raise this baby. ”
Baby . My hands clutch the edges of the table. I can’t hear him say that word. My heart’s empty enough as it is without an actual baby to hold, even all these years later. I turn the conversation back on him. I have to.
“You said all of this to me the day you left. Years separate that moment from now, but I can honestly say I can’t handle hearing it again.”
“No. Wait.” Stone leans back, his corded arms tensing as he grips the table, too. “I’m not trying to make you relive my shitty, selfish self. What I’m saying is, I was a shitty, selfish kid who panicked. I rationalized my way out of Falcon Haven in order to make my real life a little less real.”
“You saw me as a trap.” My brows come down.
My head still won’t rise. “I was a trap to you, chaining you to this town, preventing you from reaching your dreams. Don’t you get it?
I’ve run through this all in my head a thousand times over.
I know why you left, Stone. You don’t have to … I don’t want you to keep?—”
“You were supposed to come with me!”
Stone shouts it, drawing the attention of the other patrons.
I scan the crowded space through lowered brows, silently pleading that everyone go back to their lunch and ignore Stone’s uncharacteristic outburst.
But that’s impossible. Mr. Knox and his wife are by the window, frowning and murmuring their displeasure at the interruption.
Stone’s fan club titters at another table close by, one raising her phone to capture the uncomfortable moment until Stone’s terrifying glance makes her friend smack the phone out of her hands.
High school kids on their lunch period eagerly feast on the rare moment of witnessing a public figure without his professional smile.
The order line consists of Miss Amy, Luanne Smith, Priscilla DeWitt, Randy Berkins …
farmers, teachers, shop owners, residents of Falcon Haven who know me as well as they know each other.
My shoulders droop. I’m trembling in my chair.
And there’s Maisy, standing by the magazine stand with Stone’s handsome face taking up prime real estate on the front page, his arm wrapped around his ex as he enters the Met Gala with IS IT BACK ON?? as the headline.
I can’t escape him. I can’t run away from this moment. I was a fool to think I ever could.
I lift my head and stare straight into the eyes of the boy who broke my heart and the man who keeps on squeezing the pieces between his fists. “You don’t get to say that word.”
“What word?”
I tear past the open confusion on his face, snarling, “ Baby . You have no idea what it was like for me to wake up one day, after weeks of feeling little flutters in my belly, of perfectly normal ultrasounds where I heard her heart, and feel nothing. Not a kick. Not a turn.”
Stone grimaces. He rubs his face as if my words are hurtling toward him for a bull’s-eye.
Good. I hope my aim is accurate.
“When the doctors told me I lost her, my hope ended. Do you understand that kind of world-ending hurt? Maybe you do now, because of your mother, but back then, I was nineteen. She was—that little baby was—” I choke on a sob that turns into a hiccup of sorrow.
It’s hard to breathe.
“Hey.” Stone’s harsh, broken whisper reaches my ears.
I register his movement next to me, the way his arm slides around my back and pulls me in.
“Noa.” My name is a hot exhale over my scalp. “I’m—I can’t defend my actions. To know that I did this you…” He trails off, burying his face in my hair.
Then he jerks back, scraping his thumb under my eyes and scanning the Merc like he’s suddenly conscious of where we are.
“I waited for you at the station,” he says, resuming his seat across from me, his expression more haggard than before.
“I texted you. Called you. You didn’t have to go through that alone.
I wanted you with me in New York and then LA.
You and the bab— her. I needed an answer why you never came, Noa, and I deserve one now. ”
I bristle. “Which answer would satisfy you the most? The one where I tell you that what you wanted was impossible, that we had no money, no plans, a baby in my belly, and no home to give her? Or how about the one where you expected me to leave my dreams behind and adopt yours, living under your shadow and raising our baby while you pursued your career?”
“That’s not fair.” Stone’s expression darkens. He lowers his voice so I’m the only one who can hear. “We were in love. We were young, dumb, and fucking obsessed with each other, and I didn’t want to leave you. I didn’t .”
“You couldn’t have both,” I say flatly. “You had to choose, and you did.”
“Is that why you didn’t come?”
“No.”