He couldn’t take it anymore. It was all just too intense. He stood up from the kitchen table, the suddenness of his movement sending the chair screeching back along the linoleum. “I’ll be in the shed, Gavin. See you out there.”
He marched straight out the door without looking back. With his eyes, anyway. He had a feeling that when it came to his brain, “looking back” would be pretty much all he’d be doing that day.
Chapter 3
Luna
“Shit, Gen. I didn’t know he was going to be here. I mean, I knew he might be in town. Just not in your kitchen.”
Luna took a sip of the tea Gen had made for her. She was having a hard time processing Connor’s abrupt departure. His ass had flown up out of the chair so fast it’d practically seemed spring-loaded. Not only that, but he’d all but knocked over Gen’s kitchen chair in his haste to get away from her.
She wasn’t surprised. She’d figured he’d be ambivalent, at best, about seeing her. And she never would’ve chosen to dramatically surprise him in Gen’s kitchen.
Still, it was a little painful to watch him exit the room so fast that he’d practically bust through a wall like a cartoon superhero, leaving a Connor-shaped hole in his wake.
“I know, girl. But you’ve got to understand. You knew there was a good chance you’d see him around town when you came back here. You had time to wrap your mind around it. It wasn’t the same for him. Seeing you here was a complete shock.”
Luna nodded and took another drink of the warm, comforting tea. It was the only thing settling her swirling stomach. Gen ran a comforting hand up and down Luna’s arm, and she looked up to meet her eyes. “Thanks for being such a great friend, Gen. I’ve really missed you.”
“Aw, mamacita! I’ve missed you, too. But I had a feeling you’d find your way back to Valentine Bay someday.”
Luna let out a wry chuckle. “That’s funny. I never had that feeling. In fact, I had the opposite one. But as it turns out, you were the one that was right.”
Gen gave her a playful nudge. “No big surprise there. You’d be surprised how often I’m right since you’ve left. My skills have gotten out of control. Especially since I married Gavin. I’ve been right pretty much all the time since then! Or at least that’s what I tell him.”
Luna laughed. That was the special thing about Gen. One of them, anyway. It didn’t matter how down in the dumps she was, with just a few silly sentences, Gen could have her laughing.
They sat together for a moment, both quiet, until Gen said, “Luna, why have you stayed away so long? You never came back for college breaks. Then, even after graduation, you never came back to visit at all.”
Luna started to answer but Gen put up a hand to stop her and continued, “Before you insult us both by pulling the old ‘busy’ excuse out of your ass, think of something better. I know you’re busy. I’m busy, too. So is damn near everybody except Old Man MacArthur, who doesn’t do much all day but drink beer and yell at Judge Judy on the TV. So come on, dude. What’s the real reason?”
The urge to deflect with a sassy comment was strong, but she held back, sensing that this was a time for sincerity, not sarcasm. Even though they hadn’t seen each other in person for a few years, that didn’t change the fact that Gen was her best friend.
With real friends, you could go for long stretches and not see them. When you did meet up again, it was like no time had passed at all. That was how it was between them.
Luna sighed, pulling air deep into her lungs and letting it out slowly. Even though she still wasn’t entirely sure of the answer, the clarifying breath helped her form the words to explain what parts she did understand. “I don’t know, Gen. Not completely. All I do know is that, at the beginning, I stayed away because I wasn’t sure I’d have the strength to leave again if I did come home, even for a weekend. The pull of this place would just be too strong.
“I had to keep my eye on the prize—making something of myself, making my grandparents proud. Staying here and letting myself get wrapped up in Connor…it would’ve been like a slap in the face to them, you know?”
She stopped and let the silence hang between them. The topic was one of those that was so complicated and multi-faceted that she could probably have kept rambling on about it for hours and not have covered everything. Still, she thought what she’d said was as good a basic explanation as she could manage.
“I know that was important to you. You’ve always talked about it. To me, it seemed like they wanted you to come back. They missed you.”
Luna nodded. “Yeah, of course they missed me. I know they wished I could visit. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to come back here and then have to leave it again. Leave him again.”
After a moment, Gen nodded. “I suppose I can see that. And I know your grandparents went to visit you. So it’s not like you never saw them.”
“Right.”
“And I went to visit you a few times, too. So it wasn’t like you were totally cut off from home.”
“Exactly.”
“And if I hadn’t ever come to visit you, I’m sure you would’ve made it up here to visit me eventually.”
Luna nodded, and Gen narrowed her eyes before continuing, “Okay, that was a much less enthusiastic agreement than I would’ve expected, but fine, I’ll take it.”
They smiled and sipped their tea in silence for a moment.
Gen’s voice was gentle when she finally spoke again. “You know,” she said, slow and careful. “I’m not really the one you should be telling all of this to.”
Luna took in a deep breath as her stomach did a wobbly somersault. If that maneuver had been part of a dive, she was sure it would’ve ended in a belly flop. “I know. Believe me, I’ve thought about it a thousand times. But, Gen...he doesn’t want to talk to me. I mean, come on. Look at how he high-tailed it out of here. He couldn’t have been more clear about wanting to escape if he’d lit himself on fire as an alternative to talking to me.”
“Well, that certainly would’ve been more entertaining, for starters.”
Silence descended as they sipped their tea again. Another thing she’d always loved about Gen when they were younger was that she wasn’t uncomfortable with silence. When they were together, there was no pressure to rush and fill the conversational gaps with meaningless chatter. They could wait until one of them had something worth saying before they spoke. She was happy that dynamic had followed them into adulthood.
“There’s only one problem with your little theory, though,” Gen finally said.
Luna had to smile at her absolute sureness. “What’s that?”
“Why didn’t he leave?”
“He did.”
She shook her head. “Nah. He went out to the shed to work on the car. He didn’t drive off and go home, or even head out of town. He could have. Easily. But he didn’t. He went out to the shed. And more than that, he made a point of saying he was going out to the shed. So, yeah, girl. Whether he knows it consciously or not, he wants to talk to you."