Chapter 5 – Davis
CHAPTER FIVE
DAVIS
She heard the men before she saw them, their boisterous laughter ricocheting off the dining hall walls, echoing down into the stairwell where she stood. It was strange, the different voices as the men staying with Madigan changed. She didn’t recognize all the new guys yet, and sometimes she missed Sam’s tinny chuckle. She really missed Clay’s booming guffaws. When he was gone, she’d missed Kev’s warm laughter too, the way his eyes would water when he really got going. She’d missed it so much she used to wake up in the middle of the night convinced she could hear it. Like he was back, standing outside her window. Like he’d never left her at all.
It was a confusing kind of pain, knowing she’d miss it again. Knowing that the next time he left, which he eventually would—whether he got better and moved on or got worse and ran again—he’d leave for good. All she’d have of him, of his laughter, of the time when it felt like the sun had chosen to shine directly on her, were the few videos and pictures of him on her phone she hadn’t been able to make herself delete.
Since the guys, and therefore Kev, were in the dining hall, she considered turning around, heading back down the stairs and waiting in her room until they returned to their cabins. But she’d already turned around so many times since Kev had gotten back. Making sure she always worked on a different part of the course than he did. Doubling back on the trails when she saw him about to cross her path. Turning away from the sound of his voice. Sometimes turning toward it when the trees between them were thick enough to hide behind.
Over the last week, she’d developed her own addiction. She’d watch him when he couldn’t see her, relief settling into her when he yanked saplings out of the ground with his bare hands or hurled branches taller than he was into the slash pile. Obsessed with his sun-kissed skin, his rippling muscles, how healthy and alive he looked.
But it was moments like this one that were the hardest. Running into the men in a situation where she couldn’t just wave and ride past. Where she’d need to say hello at the very least. Where her gaze would snag on his, and she’d see it all right there in his eyes. The eagerness. The unspoken words trapped behind his lips.
Because while she wanted to watch him when he wasn’t looking, he wanted to talk to her when she was.
How? How could she make small talk with him? How could she ask him how he liked her grandma’s lasagna or talk to him about the fucking weather when the weight of all the words they hadn’t said to each other, the words he so clearly wanted to say to her but she refused to listen to, pushed her into the ground?
She couldn’t.
So she turned around, heading back down the stairs, until her mom said, “Hey, sweetie.”
Shit . “Hey, Mom,” she said, spinning back.
“Were you coming up?”
Trying to soothe the concerned frown her mom had worn for the last month with the fake smile Davis had perfected over the same amount of time, she said, “Uh, yeah. Just wanted to grab a bite before I head out.”
“You’re going out? ”
There was true surprise in her mom’s voice, probably because even Davis couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone out.
“Yep,” she said with more fake smiling. “I’m meeting Callie and Olivia at Jimmy’s.”
Without another word, her mom grabbed her by her shoulders and pulled her into a big, full-on parent hug. The kind that was a little too tight, lasted a little too long, and meant a little too much. When she finally released her from the hug, still holding on to her arms, she said, “That’s wonderful, sweetie.” Then, quietly, “He’s in there. Kev. They’re just finishing with dinner. I didn’t know if you’d want a heads-up.”
“It’s fine,” Davis said, her arms hanging limply at her sides, her heart beating limply in her chest. “I mean, it’s been a little awkward. But it’s fine.”
Her mom stared at her for a moment, long enough to make it clear she didn’t believe her. And when she opened her mouth, the words are you sure you’re okay? broadcasting from her apprehensive expression, Davis had never been so happy to feel her phone buzz in her pocket. Until she pulled it out and saw the caller ID.
“Who is it?” her mom asked.
Davis’s exhale could have powered an entire wind farm. “It’s Dad.”
“Chuck? He’s calling you?”
Since he’d tried to sabotage Madigan and Little Timber, secretly drugging the men—including Kev—in an unforgivable bid to win her mom back. Since both she and her mom had told him to stay out of their lives, her dad had only tried to text her. Each text, each attempt to reach her, to apologize, filled her with an all-consuming rage. Not only because she was furious with him for lying, for hurting the men—for hurting Kev—but also because, despite her best efforts, she missed him. She missed their weekends. She missed skiing with him, playing cards, going hiking and fishing in the summer.
She couldn’t help it. It was embedded in her genetic makeup, rooted in her brain’s hard-wired insistence on maintaining parental attachment. And he was taking advantage of it by not honoring her request to be left alone, by continuing to text, by progressing to calling.
“He’s apparently unwilling to respect the eighty different ways I’ve asked him to stop contacting me,” she said.
When her phone buzzed again, her mom asked, “Are you going to answer?”
“No.” Clicking the side button, Davis sent the call to voicemail. “I’m not.” Not now. Not ever.
Pressing her lips together, her mom sighed. “Okay,” she said, looping an arm around Davis’s shoulder, squeezing her into her side. “Come get some dinner before you go.”
Once they were in the dining hall and her mom split off for the kitchen, Davis wanted nothing more than to follow her. To disappear behind the counter, hide next to the walk-in freezer, eat her dinner in peace. But how long could she keep that up?
Kev was here. It was a fact. He wasn’t going away anytime soon. She needed to figure out how to be in the same room as him. She needed to feel comfortable in her own home again. It was time to reclaim her space, plant her flag in the ground and say you may have broken my heart, but you haven’t broken me.
With a fortifying breath, she approached Madigan and the men like she was approaching the gallows. Her footsteps were slow, her hands cold and clammy, her heart a riot in her chest. But she held her head high and, with a surprisingly steady voice, said, “Hey, guys.”
“Hey, Davis,” Madigan replied, sitting at the head of the three tables they’d pushed together. “How’s it going?”
“Good.” She made herself smile. Then she made herself meet Kev’s waiting stare, refusing to look away. Refusing to back down even when the ache in her chest made her eyes water. Refusing to do anything but stand her ground and ask, “How’s the lasagna?”
“Fuck. That’s gotta be so stressful,” Olivia said, her hazel eyes going wide under her blunt black bangs while she poured beer into Davis’s glass until the pitcher of Cold Smoke ran dry.
Sitting opposite her best friends since kindergarten in a dimly lit back corner booth at Jimmy’s and with a smile so flat it barely existed, Davis nodded at her friends. She ran her fingers over the cracked vinyl seats, waiting for the house band to get going so the jukebox could stop playing an endless loop of depressing country songs.
Yeah, Willie Nelson, I’m well aware that only memories remain…
Flagging the waitress down for a refill, Callie said, “Seriously. So intense. Like, you just don’t talk to him? At all?”
“Not really,” Davis admitted. “We say hi sometimes. At dinner tonight I asked him how the lasagna was. I mean, I asked all the men, but…”
“Good god.” Olivia’s brows crashed into each other. “What did he say?”
Davis tucked a curl behind her ear, then squeezed the shiver trying to race up her neck at the memory of Kev locking eyes with her, waiting until all the other men had quieted down to tilt his lips into the barest hint of a grin and give her his answer.
“Um, he said it was good.” And my entire body melted into the center of the earth when I remembered the way he used to whisper that word into my ear .
“Good? That’s it?” Callie looked…angry—worried? Affronted? All of the above?—while she toyed with the long blond braid hanging down from her chin-length bob. “After all he’s put you through? The best he could do was good ?”
“Like I said.” Davis shrugged. “We don’t really talk.”
She wanted to say more. Explain that it wasn’t only that she and Kev didn’t talk to each other. It was how much he so obviously wanted to talk to her. How much he maybe wanted to apologize, to explain what happened, to try and make her understand. It was how hard she hid from that apology. Feeling more and more like a coward with every passing day. She wanted to tell them about yesterday afternoon when she’d ridden past his cabin even though she could have taken a much shorter route back to the lodge. When he’d been sitting on his porch, reading a book in his pair of faded jeans and nothing else. Not even shoes.
She wanted to monopolize the conversation, taking the rest of the night to describe the way Kev had looked at her in deliberate, excruciating detail. The way he’d slowly lowered his book and risen from his chair. She wanted to confess the way her gaze had drifted across his bare chest, voyaged down his abs. How she’d nearly fallen off her bike when she reached the muscles cutting like a V toward his jeans. How he’d finally broken his silence when she’d wobbled, shouting, “Are you okay?” Like he couldn’t help himself. Like it was reflexive. She wanted to tell them how she’d cried behind her sunglasses because she hadn’t been able to say a single word back to him. She’d just put her head down, stood from her seat, and pedaled harder.
She wanted to say all these things, but she wondered if her best friends would even understand something she barely understood herself.
“Well, it’s probably easier that way.” Olivia tugged her high pony tight. “I mean, it’s not like you really want to talk to him anyway. Right?”
With matching expectant expressions, her friends stared at her, watching, waiting, wondering. Her third beer was likely to blame, but staying in the Strong Woman Keeping It All Together character she’d been playing all night seemed impossible. She just couldn’t do it anymore. “I don’t really know what I want.”
“Hey.” Sensing her resignation, her bone-deep weariness, Callie reached out to take her hand. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t really know what I’d want if I was in your shoes either. There’s no right or wrong way to get through this.”
Olivia took her other hand. “Seriously, Davis. You can feel however you need to feel for as long as you need to feel it. We’re always here for you. No matter what.”
Davis smiled. She believed them. One hundred percent. But it didn’t make the pressure orbiting her ribs any less intense. “Thanks, guys.”
“You know, there’s only one thing that will fix this situation.” Squeezing her hand, Olivia said, “Let’s go dance until we don’t even know what planet we’re on, let alone if there’s a guy named Kev living on it too.”
Two hours later, hot and sweaty, her silk shirt clinging to her chest, her voice hoarse from screaming the lyrics to the band’s classic rock covers everyone in the entire bar knew all the words to, Davis could almost convince herself that things were normal. That if there was a guy named Kev living on this planet, she didn’t even know him.
“My, my. What have we here?” came a familiar voice behind her.
Spinning around, she shouted, “Cole!” and threw her arms around the timelessly cool older man’s neck, succumbing to the bizarre alcohol-induced belief that anyone you ever saw randomly at a bar was a person you hadn’t seen in years.
“Hey, Cole,” Callie and Olivia said at the same time, still dancing, still laughing.
Easing out of the hug, Cole gave Davis a wry, knowing grin. “Having fun?”
She rolled her eyes at his you’ll regret this in the morning tone. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I am.”
“I guess you needed to let off some steam,” he said, considering her in the worried parent way he sometimes did when he remembered the thirty years that stretched out between them. “Makes sense.”
“Yeah, well…” Davis sighed, then waved at her friends to let them know she was taking a break. “What are you doing here?” she asked, following Cole to the bar.
Hopping onto a barstool while she climbed onto the one next to him, he said, “Mira and Linda are having a mother-daughter spa weekend in Bozeman. Ian’s on a date with Brendan. I got lonely. And hungry. So I came in to pick up some food.” Parental all over again, he asked, “Are you staying in town tonight? ”
“Hadn’t planned on it,” she said. “I was going to Uber back up.”
Cole laughed out loud. “There’s Uber service in Red Falls? You’re kidding, right?”
“There is,” she said smugly, then conceded, “Well, it’s really only Bud with his side-by-side. He lives for any excuse to drive that thing around.”
“I think we’re gonna head,” Callie said, rosy-cheeked, a sweaty strand of hair clinging to her cheek as she joined them at the bar. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay over at my place?”
“Thanks,” Davis said. “But I’m okay. I’ll just Uber?—”
“I’ll give her a ride up,” Cole said.
Davis spun toward him on her stool. “You will?”
“I rode in Bud’s side-by-side once.” He shuddered. “Fucking terrifying. Besides, I haven’t seen Mad in a while.” Pulling out his phone, he moved his thumbs across the screen, then gave whatever message came back to him a smile—the kind that only tilted one corner of his lips. “How about that?” he said. “He’s still awake.”
“Madigan is awake after ten?” Davis gasped, making a show of her shock. “Impossible.”
While Cole paid for his food, Davis gave Callie and Olivia hugs goodbye, then they walked out to his Volvo.
“Hottest. Car. Ever,” she mocked, sliding into the passenger seat.
Clicking his seat belt, Cole scoffed. “This Volvo aggression will not stand, man.”
Davis squinted at him. “What’s that one from? Anchorman or something?”
He made a sharp, throaty noise of indignation. “Sometimes I worry about you young people. It’s from The Big Lebowski . Buckle up, please. Then hand me my burger.”
Aside from PJ Harvey singing about a rooftop in Brooklyn through the speakers and the wind whipping through Davis’s hair, the drive back up to Bluebird was quiet. Not awkward, just quiet, still. Or maybe she was too buzzed to notice the difference.
She had her window rolled down, and her head was tilted out the side so she could see the stars. It took forever to get dark in the summer in Montana, so they’d just come out, bright, twinkling freckles spreading across the darkening sky.
“Are you okay?” Cole asked her at some point.
Another star revealed itself, and she said, “Not really.”
Through her peripheral vision, she saw his head bob. She liked a lot of things about Cole. He was funny, his chaotic energy mirrored hers, and he was a perfect match for Mira. She remembered taking a few pictures of them at Madigan and her mom’s wedding and thinking, Wow, those two are totally going to bang. And then they’re going to get married . But the thing she liked most about him was that he never pried. He never gave her advice unless she asked for it. She trusted him to listen, to just be there. Maybe that’s why she felt safe enough to say, “I miss him, Cole. So much it hurts.”
She’d said it quietly, sending the words up to the night sky above her, to the stars that were always there whether she could see them or not. But Cole had heard them too, his hand wrapping around hers for a silent moment, his fingers squeezing.
“I’m sorry, Davis.”
She breathed in, inhaling the rapidly cooling air—cedar and pine and the mustiness of a dirt road she’d traveled over too many times to count. A lifetime’s worth of memories tangled in the scent. “It’ll get better,” she said, wanting to believe it. Wanting it more than anything. “It has to.”
They pulled into the parking lot, and it was only when she got out of the car that she finally realized how much she’d had to drink. She swayed on her feet, the rudely bright floodlights making her eyes burn and her head ache.
“Oof,” she said, while Cole slipped his keys into his pants pocket. “I think I’m gonna walk around for a little bit. Get some air before I try to sleep. Otherwise, you know.” She twirled a finger through the air. “Spinny head.”
“Probably not a bad idea.” Unzipping his hoodie, he wrapped it around her shoulders. “This one’s my second favorite,” he said while she slid her arms into his soft, warm sleeves. “So you can’t keep it, but you can have it tonight.”
Pulling the zipper up, she said, “Thanks, Cole. You’re a good friend.”
He pointed his chin toward the trees. “Don’t get lost out there, yeah?”
Fairly certain he meant something more than the obvious by the statement, she promised, “I won’t.” Then she gave him a hug. It was tight but brief, interrupted by Madigan shouting, “Yo, Cole!” from the lodge deck.
“Yo, Mad!” Cole shouted back, a smile shooting across his face.
After Cole gave her shoulder a quick squeeze and walked toward the stairs, Davis pulled up her hood, buried her hands in her pockets, and walked the other way into the trees. Hoping not to get lost.