From Scratch (15 page)

SIXTEEN

MY FIGHT WITH
Annabelle is still replaying itself on an endless loop in my head when I wake early the next morning. Clad in sneakers, workout shorts, and an old SMU Pi Phi T-shirt I dug out of the package of clothes Drew sent from Chicago, I sit on a wrought-iron bench at the entrance to the dirt path in Montgomery Park, gearing up for a run. The sky is laced with pinks and lavenders, and the rain from the past several days has cooled the air, making me shiver. Or perhaps it’s my nerves getting the better of me. Now that I’m actually here, about to take Nick up on his offer, I’m not entirely convinced this isn’t a giant mistake, but I refuse to prove Annabelle right. I’m not my mother. I’m not a coward.

Tires crunch on gravel as headlights sweep across the small parking lot. A shiny black Mercedes pulls into the spot next to my Ford truck, which sits there resembling moldy leftovers.

Nick steps out of the car, apprehension on his face. “Lillie?”

“You got rid of Susanna,” I say, grabbing my phone off the bench and walking over.

“Her engine couldn’t survive the summers anymore,” he says, leaning his elbows against the open driver’s side door. “This one’s named Kelly.”

“After ‘Machine Gun Kelly’?” I ask, referring to his favorite James Taylor song.

Nick nods, then gives me a small, rueful smile. “I’m glad you came. I didn’t think you would.”

I shrug and bite my lip, having nothing to say.

“You still run?” he asks, yanking the sweatshirt over his head and throwing it onto his passenger seat. The outline of his pecs is visible beneath the fabric of his T-shirt. My mouth dries a little.

“Not as much as I’d like to,” I say. “My job keeps me pretty busy, so it’s been awhile.”

I touch my toes, and my hamstrings cry in protest. I right myself as Nick is pulling his foot back, stretching his quads, the muscles bunching and flexing in his legs. I follow the lean, hard lines of his body—his toned arms, his sculpted shoulders, his smooth, tan neck that leads to his stubbled jaw.

Nick takes a swig of water and says, “We’ll start off easy.”

Scrolling through the music library on my phone, I select the nineties pop playlist before taking off down the trail, leaving Nick scrambling to catch up. He gains on me quickly, his strides in rhythm with mine. Nudging my elbow, he motions to my earbuds. I put the Paula Abdul track on pause and look at him.

“You good with turning around after crossing Bower’s Bridge?” he asks.

I nod again, resuming the song, and keep my eyes trained ahead. Bower’s Bridge is where I broke my ankle tripping over a loose plank during a game of capture the flag. Even in the eighth grade, the doctor in Nick crafted a splint using a few scraggly sticks and his shirt until my father arrived and drove me to the hospital for a plaster cast.

Sighing, I lean my head back and soak up the sun filtering through the overhang of branches, thinking of all the times Nick patched me up when I was hurt. Even now, the faded scars and slight imperfections covering my body tell secret stories of all the knife cuts he bandaged, the oven burns he soothed, the sore backs and throbbing feet he massaged after grueling diner shifts.

But then, he’s also the one who shattered my heart into so many pieces it shocked my soul into silence.

We jog along the quiet trail. Our shoes pound against hard dirt as we run past a stone waterfall, navigate through a tunnel littered with dead leaves and water puddles, and skirt around a group of picnic benches where my father taught Nick how to play the guitar when he was nine.

So much has changed between us since then. Yet here I am, back in the place where life was simple, just a boy and a girl and a childhood love.

Overwhelming sadness rushes through me. For those kids we used to be, so full of hopeful innocence, clueless about the jagged, rocky cliff looming ahead in their future. For straying so far from where we started. For all we have lost.

As we run, my whole body tingles. A cramp stabs at my right side. Peering over at Nick, I notice his breathing is steady and that he’s barely breaking a sweat, while I’m wheezing like a cow is sitting on my chest and my skin is slick with moisture. He’s obviously slowed his pace so I can keep up with him. His arms are relaxed at his waist, and I can’t help but stare at the way his body moves in beat with his strides—perfect runner’s form.

Our sneakers slap against the warped, weathered planks of Bower’s Bridge. As we cross over, I wonder what would happen if instead of turning around on the other side like we agreed, we let our legs carry us to the secluded canopy of oak trees a hundred yards beyond. The home to so many of our memories. Nick glances at me, and I swear by the flicker in his eyes he’s wondering the same thing. Something deep inside me aches.

We don’t allow ourselves to find out. When we reach the other side of the bridge, we jog in a sweeping circle before crossing back over and following the same path until we hit the parking lot. Resting my elbows on my knees, I take large, gasping breaths. Pain eddies through me, and my legs wobble. Sweat drips from my hair into my eyes, stinging and blurring my vision. Ordinarily I’d be embarrassed at how out of shape I am, but right now I can only concentrate on not collapsing.

“Move around,” Nick says. “It’ll help flush out the lactic acid in your system.”

I nod, too exhausted to reply, and walk back and forth with my fingers linked behind my head. A breeze washes over my face, cooling me, but still my lungs are screaming. I can’t seem to suck in enough air.

Nick strides over to me. “You want your breathing to come from deep in your diaphragm. Right here,” he says, placing one hand on the curve of my back and the other just below my rib cage, applying pressure. “Can you feel that?” His gaze rakes over my face, painfully slow, as though he’s afraid to miss something.

Is he kidding? His palms are burning holes in my shirt, making me dizzy, and he wants to know if I can feel that? Suddenly I go from barely being able to retain oxygen in my lungs to a total inability to breathe at all. I should be shocked that after all this time a simple touch from him has the power to steal my breath, but after what happened between us at the Tipsy Teakettle, nothing surprises me anymore.

Stepping away, I pick up the water bottle lying on the ground by his feet and gulp some down, the liquid sloshing around in my stomach.

“Drink it slowly. Otherwise you’ll throw up,” he says, tugging on my ponytail. My heart trips in my chest at the way his voice dips with his playful scolding. Sticking out my tongue, I squirt some water at him and stretch my aching muscles. Nick does his own form of postrun recovery, which involves some strange yoga poses mixed with light strength exercises. I squeeze my eyes shut when I hear him groan, the sound similar to those he once murmured during sex.

After he’s done, he uses the hem of his T-shirt to wipe his neck and forehead. His chest expands and retracts with his breathing, his skin glistening. I swallow thickly, watching a bead of sweat travel down the length of his torso and absorb into his mesh shorts. Everything about Nick is corded muscle and hard, chiseled angles and lines. My eyes drop to his hands resting on his hips, and I have an overwhelming urge to feel them on me. My whole body clenches as I remember
exactly
what those fingers are capable of.

A dog barks, snapping me out of my haze. I focus on the college-age guy playing fetch with a golden retriever across the park and wait for my heart rate to return to normal.

“It’s okay, you know.”

“What is?” I ask.

“To check me out,” Nick says, smug and without shame. “Don’t think I didn’t notice your little eye dance.”

I balk. “I wasn’t checking you out. You were doing those weird poses, and I was curious.”

He laughs, deep and sexy, erasing all of my common sense. His soles scuff against the gravel as he saunters toward me. He stops and stands so close I can feel the heat radiating off his body and see the faint scar above his left eyebrow—a casualty from back in my diner days when I accidentally opened the freezer door into his face.

When he speaks, his words send a shiver down my spine. “You forget, Lillie, I know your blush.”

My breath hitches, and his smile grows into that destructive grin that’s always been deadly to me. I force my eyes away, over to the other side of the parking lot where a woman is adjusting a set of ankle weights, back to the guy still tossing a tennis ball with his dog, down at my grungy shoelaces, anywhere other than at him.

“At least I used to,” Nick says, low and hoarse. “Before . . .”

He settles a hand on the crook of my neck, his thumb ghosting along my collarbone, and everything inside me ignites, alive and volatile. I look at him, and the intensity in his stare causes a fresh wave of heat to rush through me. I lean toward him, pulled by invisible fingers. His gaze flicks to my mouth, and as if on their own volition, my lips part. My breath comes in shallow gasps, my body humming in anticipation, waiting for him to pin me against my truck and kiss me the way he did at the Tipsy Teakettle. The way he used to.

Nick blinks, then blinks again. His expression darkens, and before I have the opportunity to process what it means, he backs away from me, the imprint of his touch branded on my skin. Without his nearness, the fog in my head clears, even as my heart continues to pound a frantic rhythm against my chest.

Silence stretches between us.

Then I hear myself say, “Except we’re different people now, leading separate lives.” My voice sounds distant, as if it doesn’t belong to me.

An emotion I can’t describe flashes across his features. Nick opens his mouth to reply but quickly closes it. Shaking his head, he turns away.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” I blurt. Just like that, without gathering my bearings first, without practicing it a hundred times in my mind beforehand.

Nick faces me. His gaze is probing, as though I’m an onion whose layers he’s peeling off one by one. Long seconds pass before he says, “Maybe this is exactly how it’s supposed to be.” The quiet confidence in his voice seizes my heart.

I want to tell him he’s wrong, that we were supposed to be each other’s forever, but at this moment, I can’t listen to him tell me why I wasn’t worth the sacrifice. Why it took me moving a thousand miles away for him to find happiness. Why he was able to unfurl his fingers and let our relationship go so easily after we’d spent our whole lives clinging desperately to each other. This time I know once the wound I so carefully stitched together all those years ago is ripped open again, the sharp, searing pain that follows will devour me.

We stare at each other in silence, his words hanging in the space between us, loud and ominous. Finally, Nick rakes a hand through his hair, the roots slightly damp with sweat, and says, “Lillie . . . about the other night. . . . You’re right . . . I shouldn’t have kissed you like that. I was out of line.”

Drawing in the gravel with the tip of my sneaker, I say, “I guess old habits die hard.” I try to make it sound like a quip, but my tone is all wrong—too high-pitched, forced.

“Tell that to Bruce Willis,” he says, returning my awful attempt at a joke with a pun of his own, breaking the tension between us. I’m glad for it.

I look at him. “You seem happier, Nick.”

“I am.”

“What changed?”

He studies me carefully, as if searching for something. “Everything, Lillie,” he says. “Everything.”

I wait for Nick to elaborate further, but he offers nothing.

“Annabelle mentioned your parents got divorced,” I say after awhile. “What happened? They always appeared so solid.”

Nick stares at me with a fierceness in his eyes that makes my throat constrict. “I think we both know the facade is more believable than the reality it hides.”

The implication in his tone isn’t lost on me—the end of our relationship was nothing more than a massive charade. I nod and ask him again about what happened.

Nick rubs the back of his neck. “After you left, everything kind of . . . disintegrated. My parents were arguing constantly. Then it all fell apart . . .” His vague response reminds me of all those times I’d ask him about how his medical school classes or clinical rotations were going. Except before I could even finish my question, he would cut me off with something curt like,
Everything’s fine.
Or,
If I wanted to talk about it, I’d say so.
Or his personal favorite,
Leave it alone, Lillie.

This time I don’t let him off the hook but keep staring until he sighs and says, “I told my mother I was contemplating quitting my surgical residency. She refused to even entertain the idea, reminding me in her steadfast way that there’re six generations of surgeons in our family. That it’s a badge of honor worn by all Preston men.”

My stomach twists. Nick considered abandoning his residency?

“What about your father?” I ask, knowing Dr. Preston’s approval has always mattered most to Nick.

“He was disappointed but understood . . . said he’d support me in whatever decision I chose.” Nick pauses, glances toward the sky, and then looks at me again. “I think my mother saw my father’s response as a kind of betrayal, like he was giving me permission to disown my birthright. They couldn’t keep it together after that. My mother hired an attorney out of New York and moved back to North Carolina shortly after the divorce was finalized. We’re not . . . we don’t communicate anymore.”