Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Aiden
I drove around town, down along the water, up through Acadia National Park, my thoughts cycling. She was right. I had the greatest woman in the world, and I’d dumped her. With extreme prejudice.
I parked by a river and pulled out my phone to look at that stupid pity mug shot for the hundredth time. Those big green eyes, so lost, that fiery hair she’d tried to tame, that adorable look of outrage on her face; it killed me. She killed me.
When the sky turned pink in its setting, I was no closer to a way to win her back than I had been when she’d walked away from me on Main. I was a jackass. A doomed, heartsick jackass. There were a few things I could do, though, and it was long past time I manned up and did them.
I pulled up to Katie’s house an hour later. I didn’t go to her door, instead walking around back to the woodpile. I’d made a promise I’d neglected to keep. That needed to stop. A lot of things needed to stop.
Chaucer’s huge head watched from the window, but he had yet to alert Katie to my presence. Interesting. I’d chopped three logs into quarters before I heard the back door open.
“Please, leave me alone. Stop doing this kind of thing.” Katie stepped to the edge of the porch, her arms crossed.
“I promised to chop your wood over a month ago. I’m sorry I’m late.”
She sighed. “Is this some kind of weird Maine tradition? In California, when we don’t like someone, so much so that we feel the need to humiliate them in public, we just stop all contact with that person. We definitely don’t trespass on their property to make kindling.”
“Can you turn on the light?”
Mumbling something about a bat, she leaned in the back door. The porch light flashed on. She grabbed a coat from just inside the door and put it on.
“You should have those things on motion sensors. It’s safer,” I said. Chop, chop, chop.
She peered into the dark beyond our circle of light and shivered. “Whatever. Listen, can you just leave?”
She and Chaucer stood side by side and watched me chop four more logs. When I picked up an armload of quartered pieces and carried it to her wood box, her eyes followed me, brows furrowed.
“Can I ask you a question, Katie?” I put another log on the chopping block.
She hugged herself. “Is it why haven’t I pulled out my granddaddy’s shotgun yet?”
“Can we wipe the slate clean? Pretend we’re meeting again right now for the first time? As if Pops asked me to chop the wood and I came back that same day to do it?”
“No.”
“Can we call it a wash, then? You broke my heart when I was fourteen. I broke yours at thirty.”
“I thought we agreed I was twenty-five. And what the hell are you talking about? I never broke your heart.” She tucked her hands in her jacket and stamped her feet, confusion clear.
“That last summer you visited. It took me nine summers to work up my nerve. I finally approached you to ask you to the bonfire. You turned away from me and laughed, said I was a little kid.” I leaned on the axe, trying to read her face.
“I did not! I would never do that!”
“Except you did.”
Spinning, she stomped to the back door, muttering under her breath. She turned back, arms crossed tightly. “I have no memory of this. None. Are you sure it was me?”
I explained the whole encounter, what was said, what she wore.
She gazed off into the night, confusion obvious.
When her face cleared, she said, “Are you shitting me? I was talking to Daisy about her little brother, her six-year-old little brother who said he wanted to marry me. I never even saw you!”
She moved away again but stopped. “And even if I had done that, what the hell, dude? What’s the statute of limitations on hurting your feelings?
I was fifteen. Are you such a petty man-child that you’d nurse that hurt for fifteen years?
Holy crap! If that’s the case, you’ll never get over being dumped at the altar. ”
My chest hurt.
“Leave. Don’t make me call another cop to arrest you.”