Chapter 4
Opinion: An old friend is evidence that your whole life hasn’t been a mistake.
—Delilah Dune, opinion writer
L yla didn’t move for a second. Even though she was only thirty, she must be having a midlife crisis of some sort. That, or when she’d been struck by lightning, she’d hit her head. Perhaps she had a concussion or a mild brain injury. Or she was in a coma, and all of this was an elaborate dream.
Yep, that had to be what was happening right now. Because she and Travis had watched the movie Sleepless in Seattle three times that last summer together, and now it was playing at the local theater. And that same summer, she’d gotten a flat tire on her bike in the middle of a rainstorm after being chased by Sonny. And Travis had come to her rescue driving his dad’s old, blue pickup truck. Just like now.
“No. This isn’t happening.” She clutched her handlebars and continued pushing her bike forward, trudging through the mud and breathing hard.
The man reached out and gently grabbed her arm. “Lyla, it’s me—Travis.”
The touch zinged up her arm. That was real. She turned to look at him, searching his face. How long had it been since she’d looked into those golden brown eyes? At least a decade. He had the same tiny mole on the upper right cheek and the scar that ran straight through his right eyebrow from a fishing trip gone wrong.
“You’re really here?”
“Unfortunately, yeah. And I’m getting wet, same as you.” He grinned wickedly, dimples carving out little holes in his otherwise chiseled cheeks. He looked just like he had all those summers ago. Then he picked up her bike as if it weighed nothing and carried it to the back of his truck.
Lyla looked around, wondering what she should do. She didn’t have a choice either way, and if this was a dream, what did it matter? She followed him to his truck, her sneakers squishing around her feet. This dream felt so real that she could even smell the rain. She could taste it as it ran down her face and across her lips.
“Passenger seat!” he called across the truck. “Get in!” Lyla did as he asked, sliding into the right side of the truck. The seat immediately became a pool of water beneath her. “Sorry,” she said, glancing over. Was this actually happening?
“Don’t worry about it.” Travis ran a hand over his face, clearing the rainwater. Then he looked at her across the center console. “I wasn’t sure it was really you. I was going to offer you a ride either way, but . . . Wow, it’s good to see you, Ly.”
Her whole body shivered, partly because of the truck’s A/C hitting her damp skin, and partly because this moment felt surreal. “This is too weird to be true.”
Travis furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re still driving the same truck you did when you were eighteen. It can’t still be working.”
“I’ve been working on her for the past few months now. Just got her running again. She’s as good as new.”
Lyla remembered that Travis had always referred to his truck with female pronouns. “But that’s not the only thing that’s weird. The same movie is playing from that last summer. At the old movie theater. They’re playing Sleepless in Seattle .” Lyla wiped the raindrops as they ran off her hair onto her face. Surely that proved she was in a dream right now. Even so, she didn’t want to sound out of her mind by mentioning the other things that had repeated since she’d returned to Echo Cove. Or the tiny fireflies that seemed to be popping up out of nowhere in broad daylight.
Travis laughed lightly. “That’s what happens in the summer. Theaters play old reruns for a couple bucks. You okay, Ly?”
She pressed a hand against her chest where her heart was beating out of control. She wasn’t sure if she was okay. In fact, she didn’t think she was. “If this is really happening, then what are you doing here in town? I heard you moved away.”
“Bailey’s getting married in a couple weeks. I’m walking her down the aisle. I kind of have to be back.”
Lyla blinked. “Your sister was getting married that last summer in Echo Cove too.”
He ran a hand through his dark hair, tousling it and making a few overgrown strands fall messily at the top of his head. “Totally different circumstances. She was being forced into a shotgun wedding to save my dad’s reputation.” He formed air quotes around the last word. “This time the wedding is Bailey’s choice.”
Lyla closed her eyes, willing herself to wake up. She only opened her eyes again when Travis spoke.
“Hey. This isn’t a dream. I’m really here, Ly.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him, taking in the angles of his face. Last she’d seen him, he’d still had a boyish softness to his jawline. Now he was a man. Was her childhood best friend truly sitting next to her right now? If so, his second first impression of her must be of a drenched rat who was maybe a little bit out of her mind.
Without second-guessing reality anymore, she leaned across the center console and threw her arms around his neck, breathing in his woodsy scent. “I can’t believe you’re here. I’ve missed you.” The truth spilled out like a secret she’d kept from even herself. She’d missed Travis Painter, more than she’d realized. Sharing the air between them made her feel like she somehow hadn’t taken a full, deep breath in years.
Travis’s arms closed in around her, but only for a second. “I’ve missed you too, Ly,” he said in a quiet voice. Then he pulled back, his posture becoming suddenly stiff. There was something guarded in his eyes as he glanced away, not giving her his full attention. “You look good . . .”
“Good?” she repeated, looking down at herself. “I seriously doubt that.”
He looked good, though. Wow. Her prankster best friend now filled up the driver’s seat of his truck, making the space almost look too small for him. His shoulders spanned beyond the back of the driver’s seat. His head nearly reached the truck’s ceiling.
“You’re staring.” The corners of his lips subtly curled up.
“I can’t help it. You’ve just . . .” Fumbling over her words, she tried to speak. “You, well, I—You’re different.”
When he glanced over this time, his gaze stuck for a long moment. “You look exactly the same. Although I don’t recall you being so—”
Lyla felt her confidence shrivel. She was older than her eighteen-year-old self. She had more sun spots than freckles now, and there was no way she could fit into those skinny jeans she used to wear.
She waited, dreading whatever he was about to say. Her ex had a way of commenting on the less attractive parts of her body without being openly critical. It was a talent of Joe’s. He could say something in a nice way, making it very clear that he was subtly judging her. Your hair looks good—not so frizzy . . . That skirt hides those extra pounds from the holidays. It looks nice . . . If Lyla ever called Joe out on the backhanded compliments, he’d persuade her that he was doing her a favor, claiming his honesty was an attribute.
“A woman always says she wants an honest man, until he’s honest about her.” Joe loved to say that. He’d thought it was so clever that he once seriously pondered creating bumper stickers with that phrase. He’d even suggested Lyla use it for her column, as if any female would even share that opinion.
Lyla braced herself for what Travis would say next, remembering that he liked these long pauses in conversations. Pauses that begged for her to fill in the blank. “You don’t recall me being so what?” she finally asked.
He pinched his chin between his thumb and index finger. “Wet. I don’t remember that part about you.”
Lifting her eyes to meet his, she broke into more laughter. Then she swatted his arm and leaned forward again. “Well, let me dry myself off on you some more.”
He leaned out of reach. “I also don’t remember you being so . . . grown up.” He cleared his throat. “Lyla Dune had a glow-up. My best friend is a woman now. How bizarre.”
“Did you think I’d still be eighteen?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “That’s exactly what I pictured when I thought of you all these years.”
Lyla looked down again. There was this electric buzz running through her body. That was part of what had freaked her out at eighteen. The moment her insides had started to sparkle at the very sight of him, like fireflies in her belly, things had gotten weird. She had big dreams though, and they didn’t involve a small-town boy. Self-sabotaging herself by falling in love was not part of the plan.
She’d had opinions before she’d become a well-known columnist. Women should never flex their aspirations for a man. In fact, back then, she’d thought Just Say No to Drugs included the self-made kind manufactured by love—oxytocin.
Travis asked now, leaning slightly forward. “What’s that on your chin?”
She touched her chin and flinched at the subtle ache there.
“It’s a dark spot, like a bruise.” Concern darkened the color of his eyes. “You okay, Ly?”
“No one’s hitting me, if that’s what you’re asking.” She flinched when she pushed the spot he was referring to.
“Good, because if they were, I’d find them and give them a matching dark spot.”
Her knight in shining armor.
Opinion: Women don’t need rescuing. But sometimes it feels good.
“If I recall, you had a bruise there the last time I saw you too. I teased you about growing a beard.”
“I remember. You called me the bearded lady.” She rolled her eyes. “Such a bad joke.”
“I admit it. So, how’d you get this one?” He reached out and tapped his finger to her chin. Instead of an ache, there was a zing.
“Oh, I, um, fell earlier. This little dog tripped me, and I was kind of struck by lightning, actually.”
Travis lifted a brow. “You always did have wild, unbelievable stories.” He pointed in her direction. “But I always believed them.”
“I was the liar, and you were the prankster,” she teased. She hadn’t been known as a liar in a bad way. It was just her wild imagination that no one understood. Except Travis.
“It’s good to see you, Ly-la-la-la-laaaa.” He sang out the last syllable in a deep baritone voice.
She covered her face with one hand and peeked at him between her fingers. “I’ve already seen Ms. Davis. She hopes that I’m no longer hanging around you. You’re a bad influence.”
“Well, I hate to disappoint Ms. Davis.” He squared himself off in the seat. “You staying with your parents?”
“Yes. Well, I’m staying at their place. They’ve left town to travel the world. It’s just me until their house sells.”
Travis snickered. “I’m surprised they’d leave you to watch the house again after that last time.”
He was referring to the blue hair gel that led to the flooded downstairs. In all likelihood, it was mostly the bad eel rolls that had ruined her parents’ vacation that summer. She’d just gotten the blame.
“Yes, well, I’ve grown up,” Lyla said. “I’ve become a responsible adult since the last time you saw me.”
“Unfortunate.” Travis put the truck in motion, driving slowly as the rain beat against the windshield. “They’re selling, huh?”
“Mm-hmm. They want to enjoy their retirement.” And if anyone deserved an extended dream vacation, it was her parents. “I have to pack up my old room this week, which I think will be more work than I realized. My teenage self was a bit of a packrat.”
Not her adult self though. Joe had despised clutter, and Lyla had gotten used to letting go of all the things she would have once deemed sentimental.
“Being a packrat is a sign of a creative person, you know?” Travis said.
She looked at him for a long moment. “You always had a way of doing that.”
“Doing what?” he asked.
“Flipping something that I felt bad about and turning that thing into something positive. I’ve never known someone else who could do that.”
Dimples formed in Travis’s cheeks as he smiled again. Those deep pockets in his cheeks were the only boyish thing left about him. “Is that a good thing?”
“You have no idea how much of a good quality that is.” She secured a lock of her hair behind her ear. “In addition to clearing out my bedroom, I had to dig a hole in the backyard to find a certain 7-Up bottle that was buried there. It’s my time capsule.”
He chuckled under his breath. “I can’t believe you actually did that. You adored Ms. Davis. I’m half surprised you didn’t grow up to be her.”
Lyla had considered going into the teaching field because of Ms. Davis, but that wasn’t her calling. She was more of a writer than a teacher. “I adored her, but she didn’t like me very much. Primarily your fault,” she said, gently shoving his shoulder.
“Sorry about that.”
Something told Lyla he wasn’t sorry at all. “I haven’t finished going through the contents of the bottle yet, but I found our last summer bucket list.”
He looked over with interest. “Wow, I haven’t made a bucket list since that summer.”
“I haven’t made one either.” The list was a give-and-take between them, and neither had ever given the other grief for whatever they’d deemed worthy of the summer bucket list. “It just didn’t feel right without you.” She returned her attention out the passenger window as he drove. “So Bailey’s getting married for real this time?”
Travis’s older sister had nearly gone through with the shotgun wedding. If not for the hurricane that had rolled up the day before the big day, delaying the ceremony just long enough for Bailey to come to her senses, she might have made the biggest mistake of her life. It’d taken three days after the storm to find her. The whole ordeal had been scandalous in a town as small as Echo Cove. Lyla remembered the whispers in town the last week she’d lived here. Instead of making an example of his son that last Sunday service she’d attended, he’d torn down his own daughter as she sat in the front row, just barely showing in a flowy flowered dress.
“Is Bailey marrying the same guy?” Lyla asked.
“Heck, no. That guy disappeared right after she had the baby.”
“Mom told me about that,” Lyla remembered. Pastor Painter couldn’t have been thrilled about that either. “So who is she marrying?”
Travis pulled up to a STOP sign and offered Lyla a mischievous glance. “Some guy named Jimmy Zitnik. You better believe I’m going to give her grief on that one.”
“Why?” Lyla asked.
Travis continued driving. “ Zit-nik? Come on. Maybe we’re not teenagers anymore, but that’s still pretty funny.”
Lyla had forgotten about Travis’s juvenile sense of humor, as well. “Well, I’m happy for her.”
“Are you, uh, someone’s wife these days?” Travis asked, his voice going quiet.
Tension buzzed in Lyla’s chest. She wasn’t sure why she hesitated to discuss her personal life with him, but she did. When they were younger, she’d never withheld anything from Travis. “No. You?”
“Someone’s wife?” Travis shook his head, a wide grin carving out deep dimples in his cheeks. “No. No one’s husband either.”
“Never?” she asked, feeling the same dread she’d felt when she’d thought Travis was going to insult her a few minutes earlier.
“I’ve been what one might call a wanderer, a nomad of sorts. About a year after you left, I packed my bags too.” He glanced over. “Most of the women I’ve met have wanted roots—a house, a fence, a dog.”
“You don’t even have a dog?” Lyla teased as he turned his truck onto her parents’ road.
“I had one, but it ran away.” Humor danced in his light brown eyes. “Even a dog wants a home without wheels, I guess.”
It took a moment for Lyla to process that statement. “Your home has wheels?”
He grimaced slightly. “It’s an RV. I’m like a turtle who takes their home with them wherever they go.”
Lyla found this interesting. She wasn’t exactly surprised, because Travis had always told her he wanted to see and do as much as possible. He loved adventure even when they were teenagers. His bucket list items were always more active than Lyla’s. She might have put seeing a movie four times on the list, while he put things like sneaking out after dark. Skinny dipping in Memory Lake. Catching a fish, cleaning it, and cooking it over a campfire. She had, however, added skating on their last list together, knowing that skating was to Travis the equivalent of jumping off the Pirate’s Plank for Lyla. Travis had broken his tailbone in a skating rink and that doughnut seat cushion probably still popped up in his nightmares the way the Pirate’s Plank did for Lyla.
“RV life sounds fun,” she said, her mind immediately working to turn that statement into an opinion for her column. Her mind was always twisting words and comments, trying to decipher their value for “Delilah’s Delusions,” or rather, their value to her editor, Bob.
Travis locked his hands behind his neck for a moment, his bent elbows stretching out as he expanded his chest and seemed to contemplate his response. “Life on the road is interesting, to say the least. You meet a lot of different types of people.”
“What do you do for work?” she asked.
“Odd jobs here and there. You’d be surprised how little it takes to support yourself.” He lowered his arms back down to his side. “Gotta admit, the women I’ve met haven’t liked that aspect of my lifestyle. I guess RV life isn’t considered stable, but that’s a misconception. Stability is determined by me. When I look for the work, it’s always there. I usually don’t even have to look for it.”
“Is it lonely? Being in a town full of people you don’t know.” The question rolled out of Lyla’s mouth before she considered it. Waving her hands, she shook her head. “I’m sorry, don’t answer that. It’s none of my business.”
“Nah, it’s okay. It can be lonely.” He pulled into her parents’ driveway and parked. Rain was still tapping his windshield, coming down much more softly now. “I was lonely before I chose the lifestyle, though. I never found another friend quite like you, Ly.” He glanced over.
Her whole body felt like there was an electric current running from her head to her toes as he watched her.
“Can I ask you something?” he finally asked.
“Sure.”
“Why didn’t you ever call me, Ly? Or write me back? I emailed. Why didn’t you reply?”
Guilt washed over her, covering every square inch of her body and flooding her cells. She looked out the windshield, searching for the right answer. The one that wouldn’t hurt his feelings. “A long-distance best friend wouldn’t be as good as the real thing.”
He looked out the windshield too. “Did you even open the emails and read them?”
It was a yes-or-no question, but the true answer would have required full-page essays. It was complicated, so she just gave him the easiest response, even if it was a lie. “No.”
His gaze lowered to his lap. “I see. So you just left town and erased me from your memory altogether? All of our years of talking every day and sharing every secret.”
That wasn’t true. There was one secret she hadn’t told him, because it would have changed everything. She’d only told her diary and Ms. Hadley’s little ankle-biter, Sonny.
“That’s what happens, Travis. After school, people go their separate ways. They grow up. Did you think we’d still hang out every break and pull pranks on each other and the people in town?”
Some part of that scenario sounded wonderful to her, and that was what had scared her so much back then. Lyla had big-city dreams, and the way she’d felt about Travis threatened everything she’d always wanted.
There’d been these moments when she’d felt like he could make her laugh for the rest of her life, but Travis certainly wasn’t going to end up in any big city. No. That wasn’t who he was. Falling for him would have been like stepping into quicksand, just like her parents. Love wasn’t just love. When feelings were at play, one thing led to another. It was inevitable—fate. Lyla’s mom had wanted to chase her own dreams, but instead, she’d gotten pregnant and had a baby, Lyla. And she’d never left Echo Cove. Until now.
The muscles along Travis’s jawline bunched and released. “Is that all you thought of us? A couple of pranksters.”
“Don’t do this. It’s nice to see you again, Trav. I don’t want us to fight.” They’d never argued before. Why start now?
“You’d probably rather we be polite, civil, and for you to leave town again and never look back.” He’d never used a harsh tone with her before now. His voice wasn’t raised, but his words were pointed.
Lyla sighed. “Not you too.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Apparently, I’m the worst person to ever grace this stupid town.” At least according to Ms. Hadley and Bernie.
“I don’t think so, Ly. I got that rap a long time ago, thanks to my good ol’ dad.”
“See you around, Travis.” Pushing his truck door open, Lyla stepped out into the rain.
“Yeah. I won’t bother trying to stay in touch this time,” he called after her.
She looked at him across the center console as the rain poured all around. “Me either.”
“Well, at least you’re consistent.”
Lyla didn’t need any more guilt. Slamming the door behind her, she headed to the back to retrieve her bike, fumbling with the tailgate’s latch.
“Here, let me.” Travis met her around the back of the truck.
Lyla couldn’t even look at him. Her face was soaked, and she was pretty sure half of the wetness was tears. She didn’t feel great about what she’d done all those years ago, but at the time it’d felt like it was the right thing to do. “I can’t turn back time, Travis. I wish I could. I wish I would have been a better friend.”
She wasn’t sure why she’d cut off all contact. She’d started having feelings for Travis that she’d never had before. Things were changing between them, and her mom’s voice kept playing in her head as that summer sizzled to an end.
“I had dreams once, too, Lyla. But then I met your father and, well, sometimes it’s a choice between falling in love and chasing your destiny.”
Lyla was terrified the same thing would happen to her.
“I wish that too,” Travis said, breaking her from her thoughts. He lifted her bike out of his truck and placed it on the pavement in front of her. “Have a nice life.” Without another word, he turned his back to her and climbed back into the driver’s side of his truck and slammed the door, leaving her in the rain with her bike and a million regrets.
June 20
Dear Diary,
Travis and I got into a fight. That hasn’t happened in forever and I don’t like it. He wanted to discuss what will happen after this summer, when I go off to college. How will we continue our friendship? He wanted to make a plan, which is so unlike Travis. Travis Painter only plans pranks. He doesn’t plan out weeks ahead or even days ahead.
He told me he’d drive down to see me at college every other weekend, but I’m not sure that’s what I want. What if these feelings of mine keep growing, and I end up pregnant and dropping out like my mom? What if continuing my friendship with Travis ruins my life?
It’s not impossible. It’s not even that unlikely.
Sincerely,
Lyla