20. Ward
20
Ward
H e’d known the moment Rochelle’s message started playing that he and Penny would hear two very different things. Why had he insisted on playing the stupid thing before listening to it himself?
“Hey, baby,” Rochelle had purred, and Ward had known the call wouldn’t be a good one. Not because she’d do something stupid like beg him to take her back. No. She’d probably already done something stupid and wanted him to be okay with it.
For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what it could be. He honestly didn’t care what she did with her life anymore, as long as she lived it far away from him.
Which meant that she needed to stop going by Blue Waters, especially once he got back to California.
If he ever got back there. He wasn’t so sure he was dead set on it anymore.
But of course, Penny would hear the sultry sounds of a woman making sweet with a guy whom her sweetness had worked on in the past. Penny would put together that voice and the picture she’d seen on his phone and come to a very different conclusion.
Why hadn’t he updated his phone like a normal person? Deleted that picture she’d put on his phone as her contact picture? Why hadn’t he deleted her from his phone altogether? Had he really been hoping she’d take him back? Or had he been too lazy to update it? Had he cared too much to let her go? Or too little to bother with it all?
Well, he cared now. He wanted to rip the stupid phone out of his pocket and throw the cursed thing in the lake.
“I mean it, Ward.” Penny set the plates she’d been holding back down on the table and dropped into a chair, like her knees could no longer hold her upright. “I need to—to think. By myself. I need you to go.”
Ward was at a loss. He couldn’t insist on staying, not when she’d made it very clear that she didn’t want him there. He couldn’t force her to change her perception of what she’d heard; even if he explained everything, it still didn’t look or sound good. And she didn’t want to hear it from him, anyway.
“Can I call you in the morning?”
Penny shook her head, and the movement shook loose a tear from each eye. Ward dropped his chin to his chest and squeezed his own eyes shut. He wanted to cry, too. “Will you still have dinner with me tomorrow after work?”
“Tomorrow is Tuesday, Ward,” she said, her voice calm, giving no indication that the tears were now starting to trickle down her cheeks. “You’re going out to eat with your dad.”
“Not if I can take you out, instead,” he rushed to say. He’d forgotten everything except this terrible moment they were in.
She shook her head again. “Please don’t do this,” she said, her voice breaking.
“Can I call you tomorrow night, then? After I get home? I can’t go like this.” He stood there, arms akimbo at his sides. His feet felt like they were stuck in concrete. “I’m not going to just leave everything so messed up between us.”
Penny kept her gaze averted, but she stood again and crossed her arms, hugging herself. “I’ll call you when I’ve thought through this.”
“You promise, Penny? Promise me that you’ll call.” He came closer anyway. He reached over and gently brushed his thumb over her cheek, wiping at the tracks her tears were making. “I need to hear you say it.”
“I promise,” she whispered.
Then, to his surprise, she reached up and cupped her hand around his and pressed her face into his palm. He flinched at the flare of heat—of hope —that tore through him, racing up his arm to land a direct hit to his heart. He moved closer and dipped his head, not to kiss her, but to look into her eyes.
He needed to see her soul.
“No,” she whimpered, her voice cracking on the word. “Stop.” She pushed his hands away. “Goodnight, Ward.”
And with that, she turned on her heel and headed inside, leaving the aftermath of their lovely night still scattered all over the table.
He waited alone on the porch, hoping against hope that she’d have a change of heart and come back out. But when she didn’t, he stacked the dishes in a neat pile for her, swept the crumbs into his hand, and tossed them out into the yard for the birds and other critters to feast on in the morning.
Several minutes later, he was sitting out at the end of his parents’ dock, holding his phone to his ear. He hadn’t even gone inside, not wanting to risk the chance of running into his dad or mom. He couldn’t bear having to answer their eager questions about how the night had gone.
Maybe Penny would look out her dark bedroom window and see him. He wanted to wave, just in case she was there, hidden in the dark behind her curtain. But he restrained himself, and instead, focused on the phone call he was making.
“Hey, Ward,” Rochelle said in a much nicer voice than the one she’d answered his call with last night. “Why aren’t we Face-timing? Here, I’ll switch us over for you,” she said, as though he didn’t have the technical savvy to do so himself.
How many times had he heard variations of those words come out of her mouth? She said stuff like that all the time. “I’ll just do it for you. You’ll never figure it out.” That’s why his phone had that picture of them as her contact photo; Rochelle had put it there. The picture made her look like a model. It made him look like a grizzled old sea captain. Or at least that’s how he felt now as he looked at it. He shook his head, misery wrapping its cold, slimy arms around him.
“I don’t want to video chat.” He hit the ‘decline’ button. “I’m sitting outside in the dark. You won’t be able to see anything anyway.”
“Are you alone?” She said ‘alone’ in about four syllables.
“Yes. What was it you were wanting?” He used her words from yesterday. Apparently, he was going to be rude after all. “I’m kind of in a rush.”
“Well, well, well,” she cooed, even now, her velvet voice sending an unsettling shiver down his spine. “Did I disrupt something?”
Yes! He wanted to rant into the phone at her. You are disrupting my life.
“What do you want, Rochelle?” he asked again.
“Okay. Fine. I’ll get right to it.” She took a long breath and let it out on a giggle.
Rochelle wasn’t a giggler. Was she nervous? Great. What had she done now?
H is business partner answered after four rings, and for a moment, Ward thought he’d gotten his voice mail. “Hey, there, partner,” Johnny practically shouted into the phone. “Everything all right?”
It was a fair question. They’d talked just two days ago, and a second call this soon was unusual. Ward didn’t beat around the bush. “Finally spoke to Rochelle last night.” He waited, hoping Johnny would take the bait so that Ward didn’t have to spell it out.
No such luck.
“You did? How is she? You guys make up?”
Ward groaned inwardly and clenched his teeth together so hard that his jaw threatened to spasm. So this was how it was going to go. “She told me that she’s seeing someone,” he said, forcing the words out past the tightness in his throat. “She didn’t want me to hear it from anyone else.” He hated this kind of cat and mouse game, but that was one of the downsides of confronting a salesperson as skilled as Johnny. He could be slippery, that was for sure.
“Ah, man. Sorry, dude. That sucks. I thought maybe you two might manage to straighten things out between you. You sure there’s nothing there, still? I mean, I knew she was starting to check out the field a little, and I should have told you, but you know, I was rooting for you, man.” Johnny sighed heavily on his end, and Ward could hear a fast-paced clicking sound in the background. The guy always clicked his retractable pen whenever he was working on a deal. “She’s quite a—”
“She told me she’s dating you, Johnny.”
The sudden silence coming from the other end of the line was all the confirmation he needed that Rochelle hadn’t been making it up. Not that he’d really thought she was, but part of him had thought that maybe she was fabricating the whole thing. Maybe she was hoping he’d be jealous and come racing back to California to stake his claim on her.
But Rochelle hadn’t told him about her new romance in a cruel way. She hadn’t waved it in his face. In fact, she’d asked him if he was okay with it, and she’d even said that if he wasn’t, she’d be willing to back off until he had time to get more accustomed to the idea. “I really like him, Ward. And he’s all in. With me, with this town. With this life.”
Her implication was that Ward hadn’t been, and that had stung. It felt like she was comparing the two, even if that wasn’t her intent. She clearly wanted someone who had both feet, both hands, and a hundred percent of their heads planted firmly in her Pacific Coast beach town.
This time last year, Ward would have considered himself to be just that guy. They’d talked about marriage several times, and Ward had thought that was the direction they were moving in. But Rochelle had explained to him that she’d been hesitant to take their relationship to the next level because she hadn’t believed that he was as wholly invested in the life they had together as she was.
“I never felt like I really had you all the way, Ward. Like there was always a piece of you missing, or somewhere else. Or with someone else.” If that was true, then maybe she’d seen something in him that he was only now starting to discover about himself.
“There was never anyone else,” he’d told her. But he hadn’t denied there might have been a some where else. Even if he hadn’t known it at the time, he could see now that Autumn Lake would always have a hold on him, even if he never called it ‘home’ again.
Ward knew he needed to get back to California.
He needed to get back to the helm of Blue Waters, to see for himself that the business was as he’d left it. But now, the thought of it turned his stomach. Because even if things looked great on paper, there had been a mutiny, hadn’t there?
“Man. Ward. I’m sorry. I don’t mean for things to go this way.” Johnny’s voice, for once, was hushed. Careful. Tentative. Words Ward had certainly never before used to describe the man. “It just happened; you know?”
“Don’t pull that with me, Johnny. This stuff doesn’t ‘just happen’. You could have picked up the phone. You could have said something to me at any time during our weekly calls. Instead, you took the cowardly route and threw Rochelle at me.”
“She wanted to be the one to tell you.” Johnny’s voice rose insistently. “I told her we should have talked to you sooner, but she wanted to hold off. To make sure whatever this was between us was more than just a rebound.”
Ward frowned, confounded by what he was hearing. “And you were okay with that? It didn’t bother you that you might be just a rebound?” He used Johnny’s words but threw in a heavy dose of sarcasm.
“That’s not what I meant. I knew I wasn’t a rebound. She wanted to make sure you didn’t accuse her of using me as a rebound. She wanted to talk to you first, to make sure you would be good with all of this. Honestly, we figured you’d take it from her better than from me.” He sounded a little belligerent, Ward thought. Like he didn’t appreciate what Ward was suggesting about his new girlfriend.
Except that Rochelle wasn’t the kind of person to be manipulative that way, and Ward needed to remember that before he went off on Johnny again. “Listen. I’m not good with any of this. I’m not good with my ex-girlfriend dating my business partner. We were together three years, man. How am I supposed to come back and just be good with everything? Isn’t it a little weird for you, too?”
“That’s just it. It’s not weird.” Johnny insisted. He sighed, and then in a gentler voice, said, “It’s not weird, Ward, because you’re not around to make it weird.”
The words hit him like a mule kick in the chest. He pressed his palm to his sternum; he was finding it a little difficult to breathe. “I’ll be back at the end of August at the latest. Sooner, if I can swing it,” he finally managed to say. “I’m beginning to wonder if you and I have very different ideas about what a partnership looks like.”
“Ah, come on, man,” Johnny cajoled. “Don’t do that. We’re adults here, Ward. Things happen that we don’t plan for; there’s no getting around that. It’s how we react that separates us from the animals.”
“You don’t need to sell me anything, man. ” Ward spit the word out, but he used every ounce of willpower to rein in his temper. “I think I’m reacting appropriately. Not like an animal at all, in fact. I’ll be out there in a few weeks, and when I get there, you and I can sit down and compare notes.”
“She’s just a woman, Ward. Don’t get your panties in a bunch.”
Ward froze. “Repeat that, Johnny. I’d like to record you saying that and send it to Ro. She deserves far better.” His voice came out oozing disgust.
“Geez, Ward,” Johnny railed over the phone at him. “I just said it to lighten things up. To get you to call off the dogs, you know? She’s not just a woman. She’s the one and only Rochelle Trebler. She’s amazing, okay? But you and me, man. We go way back. Back before any woman, right? That’s all I meant by that.”
Slippery. That was Johnny Bolton. He could make a person believe just about anything he wanted them to. But Ward wasn’t having it tonight.
“I’ll see you in a few weeks. I’ll let you know as soon as I book my flight.”
“That’s great, man. It’ll be good to see you again. I mean it. We miss you around here.” Something in the way he said the words made Ward shift uncomfortably in his chair. It sounded like Johnny found him expendable, too. Rochelle certainly did. She’d had no trouble casting him aside. Out of sight, out of mind.