Chapter 11 #2
“I didn’t scheme it up, I just suggested that Lila go on the trip, because I thought it would be good for her to meet some guys her age. She’s constantly surrounded by people in their thirties doing people in their thirties things, and she should be out with the youths.”
“You make it sound like we have a generation gap,” Nolan said, something hard in his tone.
“You don’t have a generation gap necessarily,” Marlowe said. “But she’s only twenty-five. She should be doing goofy, silly twenty-five-year-old things.”
“Because you did a lot of those?” Cody asked Marlowe.
“No,” Marlowe said. “I didn’t. And I kind of regretted it.
I was in a long-term committed relationship at that point.
So maybe I’m just projecting. I wanted Cara to go out and have some fun, and look at her.
She’s engaged to the most taciturn man on the planet, and absolutely not going out for drinks.
And I think it’s wonderful, because it’s what she wants, don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing anybody.
But I do feel a little bit like somebody begging at least one of the footloose and fancy-free youths around me to let me live vicariously through them. ”
“Did you need to date around before we got married?” Cody asked, his tone dry.
“No,” Marlowe said. “The ship has sailed. I’ve already had a whole divorce. I don’t actually want to do any of those things now, I just kind of wish I had done them then, because it would have saved me a lot of heartache by the time I got to you.”
“Yeah, it would have,” Cody said. “But you know what they say. Sometimes it’s the broken road that leads you where you needed to be all along.”
She heard Marlowe’s voice soften. “Did they say that?”
“Well, I do. I think all the struggles that both of us had are part of what brought us here. And so no matter how hard any of it was, we were supposed to go through it. So we could be the people we are now. The people who are meant for each other.”
“You ought to put that in your vows,” Nolan said.
His voice was sincere, but slightly detached. And Lila looked at his profile, trying to figure out what he was thinking, but she couldn’t catch his eye. She had a feeling that was by design.
When they arrived at the Velvet Slipper, it was overflowing, and Nolan made some harsh comments about town drunks and proceeded to park three blocks down.
Then they all got out of the truck and walked through the lit streets toward the bar.
Town was just generally busy for a Thursday night.
A whole lot busier than anyone would have naturally suspected that it would be.
When they pushed into the bar, it was overflowing, and they snagged a little table in the corner, which was probably only free because a lot of people were dancing.
“Well,” she said, “at least we can make a toast to you, even if we don’t want to stay that long.”
It was perfect, actually, because they didn’t want to stay that long.
“Right,” Cody said, looking at Marlowe with a skeptical expression on his face.
“I’ll go get some drinks,” she said.
She returned with four bottles, but Nolan’s was just a craft soda, even though she was sure he would have been able to drink a beer and drive just fine. He took the cola out of her hand and gave her a dead-eyed stare.
She shrugged.
“Safety first,” she said.
“Yeah, thanks for looking out,” he said, taking a sip.
“To Marlowe and Cody,” Lila said. And she actually felt herself getting choked up, which was silly, because this was just the decoy moment, but she still had some things that she wanted to say.
“Cody, I never had it as bad as you. And the reason is that I had you. So... For me, things never seemed quite so scary, quite so insecure. I had the best big brother in the world, who always took care of me, and you deserve this, you deserve love and happiness more than any other human being I know. And Marlowe, I’m so lucky that he found you.
Because you’re so... independent, and you could live without him.
You just choose not to, and I think that’s the best thing for him.
Because he had a whole bunch of kids who depended on him, who needed him more than they needed anything.
To know that somebody is with him just because they choose it, also to watch someone be with him who appreciates all the things about him, and who gives back to him, that means so much to me as a sister.
I haven’t had very many women in my life.
And now I have you. And you even brought Cara.
I’m so lucky. And I’m lucky because of you both. ”
Nolan nodded, and Cody looked a little bit emotional, had to glance away from them. Marlowe was openly weeping.
“Me next,” Nolan said. “Everything Lila said, I feel too. I was the sad kid living with a grandma who didn’t have the energy to give him much attention.
When your family moved in next door, everything changed for me.
In a good way. You guys were family in a way that I never had otherwise.
Family that chose me, and otherwise having family that chose to turn their backs on me, you have no idea how much that meant.
How much it still means. That you let me be part of this at all, that you’ve let me be a continued part of your family.
You’re one of the most important people in my life, and that means that now Marlowe is too.
Because anyone who loves my best friend, my brother, that’s somebody that I love too. ”
They clinked their bottles together, and Cody cleared his throat.
“Well, damn. Now you don’t have to say all that at the wedding.”
“But we might,” Lila said.
“Nah, there’s no need. We got it all out of the way already.”
“Well, come on,” Lila said, checking her watch. “We can go now.”
“Really?” Cody asked.
“Yeah. It’s a lot more crowded than I thought it would be. Honestly, we could just go finish up at Painted Ridge Dining Room.”
“We drove all the way out here,” Cody said.
Nolan suddenly pulled his phone out. “Oh, I... Yeah. I need to head back, actually.”
“Why?”
“Just got a text. There’s actually a woman waiting for me at my house.”
Lila’s head snapped toward Nolan. “Are you serious?”
He looked at her straight on. “Yeah. She told me she might come by when she was in town, didn’t expect her to be in town.”
“You’re cutting off celebratory drinks with your chosen brother because there’s a woman waiting naked in your bed?”
“I don’t know for sure if she’s naked, Lila.”
Right then, she realized Nolan was lying for the sake of the plot, and that she was an idiot who had jumped to an insane conclusion because she was jealous. She hated herself for that then. She really did.
But, she supposed her being mean about it lent credibility to everything, she was just going to have to convince Nolan later that she knew the whole time it was a ruse. And it didn’t stop her from feeling bruised and stupid as they paid for their drinks and left the bar.
Cody and Marlowe got hung up inside, getting congratulations, and Lila stepped outside. Nolan was close behind her.
“You know that that wasn’t true,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “It’s called acting,” she said, lifting her palms up and doing jazz hands.
“Well, you’re pretty good at it.”
“You’re not,” she said, turning and elbowing him in the stomach. “That whole thing about Zane was over the top. It was like soap opera acting.”
“Oh, come on,” he said.
“As you know, Bob,” she said.
He gripped her wrists and held her hands up, turned her toward him, and she struggled against him, though only teasingly, acting like she was trying to punch him, and he backed her up against the support beam outside the bar, and her stomach plummeted.
His eyes were intent on hers, and suddenly where he was holding her wrists felt hot. Way too hot.
Whether he was about to say something or she was, she didn’t know, but the bar door burst open, and Marlowe and Cody came out, and he released his hold on her like she had scalded him.
“Ready to go?” he asked too brightly.
And Cody looked between them in a way that made Lila itch.
“Yeah, let’s head out,” she said.
She was trying her best to catch her breath, trying her best to keep everything together.
She walked away from Nolan quickly, and headed back toward the truck. Everybody else was keeping a pretty slow pace behind her, but she didn’t stop.
She was shaking.
The way that he had looked at her, it wasn’t the same as usual. It wasn’t the same sort of playful annoyance that he had always come at her with. And it wasn’t...
It hadn’t been platonic. She was almost entirely sure. She had experienced that—not quite platonic—with Jason on that trip, and now she recognized it.
Nolan had been looking at her like he wanted to kiss her.
The realization made her stomach swoop low, bottom out.
That didn’t seem possible. But she couldn’t ignore the... The way that it had made her feel. Yes, she had been wandering around with a whole lot of unrequited attraction for a very long time, but that meant she knew how it felt. She knew how it felt, and this wasn’t it.
It was something more, something different.
It was something coming from him, and she didn’t think that she was making it up, and she refused to gaslight herself about it, except that now she was closed into the cab of the truck with him, she didn’t know quite what to do with the realization one way or the other.
“Well, I can drop you all off at the resort, and you can have another round of drinks,” Nolan said.
Everyone was acting like this was completely okay, but Lila had to assume that Cody thought it was kind of egregious behavior.
Nolan wasn’t pure as the driven snow by any metric, but Walker was definitely the bigger hoe, so this seemed somewhat out of place, because it just wasn’t like him.
Though, Lila now knew and believed that it was part of the ruse.
She didn’t want to closely examine the way that she had felt when she’d believed...
“This girl’s special to you or something?”