Of course, she’d find me. I couldn’t even be surprised.
Because deep down, I wanted her to.
“How’d you know I was here?” I asked.
Meg cocked her eyebrow. “You’re not that hard to read, Ducate. When you’re upset, you become predictable.” She looked around the clearing. “And I recall this being a place you liked to go when you were upset.”
She was right, of course.
She ran her hands through her hair, smoothing it back away from her gorgeous face. God, how I loved to look at her.
I turned away.
“You wanna talk about why you’re in such a bad mood?” she asked. She was completely oblivious that my mood had everything to do with her, that she dictated the tides of my emotions. When had I relinquished so much control to her?
“Not really,” I replied shortly.
She was silent for a beat. “That’s fine. We don’t have to talk. We can just float here together if that’s cool.” She went onto her back, and I noticed that she had stripped down to her bra and panties. The material had become see-through, and I could see the dark ring of her nipples and the dark apex between her thighs.
Of course, I wanted to fuck her. I always wanted to fuck her. But right then, there were more important things than sex.
Her company was enough.
Because I loved more than her body and the way she made me hot and horny. I loved how the sound of her breathing instantly relaxed me. How the smell of her hair was like coming home. How deep down, even after all these years, she knew me better than anyone. And when I said I didn’t want to talk, she wouldn’t push it. She let me be. But she stayed by my side, offering silent understanding and support. We had always been a strong team.
I realized that we still were.
We floated, our limbs outstretched, and the silence wasn’t awkward.
“Do you ever feel like you’re speeding down the road toward a brick wall with no way to stop?” I asked her after a while.
“Every day,” Meg said softly. Then, almost as if in unison, we simultaneously reached out, our fingers clasping in the cold water.
“But you’ll figure out how to turn the car. You always do, Adam,” Meg said, and I could tell she meant it.
When had she started to believe in me again? It felt good. Better than good.
It meant everything.
We floated on our backs for a long time, our fingers laced together like we used to do when we were kids.
And for a little while, things were simple.
Chapter 18
Adam
“Guess what I brought.” Meg and I had climbed out of the water. I tugged on my shirt but left it unbuttoned. Meg had put her shorts back on, but still only wore her red bra.
We sat on the bank of the river, my legs stretched out in front of me, Meg’s hair drying in thick tangles down her back. She reached into the canvas tote she took everywhere and produced a pack of playing cards. I laughed, feeling the last coils of tension release inside me.
Meg smirked. “I was looking at the tallies on my wall, and it seems you have some catching up to do.” She took out the cards and started to shuffle them.
“That’s because you didn’t record the games accurately,” I argued, picking up the seven cards she dealt me.
“You keep telling yourself that, Ducate,” she retorted, immediately laying down three queens.
I groaned. “You’re such a cheater. How do I know you shuffled properly?”
“Because I don’t need to cheat to beat your sorry ass,” she countered with a grin, picking up a card.
We fell into our familiar trash-talking banter. She even did her celebration dance when she won the first game by twelve points. She drew a line in the dirt. “One game to me,” she bragged.
“You’re going down, Galloway,” I threatened teasingly, picking up the cards to shuffle them.
Three games later, I had only won one of them, but I didn’t care because we were laughing and joking together like we were still sixteen.
“I’ve missed this, you know,” I said, picking up my cards. The air was starting to cool, and the shadows grew longer. I had no idea how long we’d been out there. Hours most likely. But I was in no rush to leave and get back to the real world. Because in that world, Meg would leave me eventually.
But here, at Old Grourer’s swimming hole, we were just where we needed to be.
Meg glanced up at me, her eyes were warm, if not a little sad. “Me too, Adam.” She let out a sigh. “I tried really hard not to miss this, but it’s always felt as if there was a giant hole, right here.” She pressed her finger to the center of her chest. Right over her heart.
I put down a run of clubs but refrained from rubbing it in. “You hated me that much, huh.” I didn’t pose it as a question. It was more of a rhetorical question. I already knew the answer.
Meg gave me one anyway.
“Yes, Adam, I hated you. So much. Mostly because I cared about you so damn much.” She ran her fingers over her cards before discarding one. “I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to get over that.”
I sucked in a breath before asking my next question. “And have you? Gotten over it?”
She lifted those green, green eyes, and I felt like I was hanging on the edge of a cliff waiting for her to drop me over.
“You know I planned to tell you that I loved you that night. At Homecoming.” She looked away. “I stupidly thought you felt the same way. Especially after that day here. In the water.” Her expression hardened slightly. “I thought you were going to kiss me.” She laughed without humor. “But you’d already been seeing Chelsea for what, two weeks by then? I was such a goddamn idiot.”
I swallowed thickly. “Yeah, I guess I had been.”
Meg closed her eyes, shaking her head. “I felt like such a mug. It wasn’t just about you being with someone else—though that was bad enough—it was that you were with her. You knew how much I hated her. You broke my heart, Adam. And you used her to do it.”
I put my cards down and reached out to take her hand. I was relieved when she didn’t pull away. “I was going to kiss you that day, Meg. You weren’t, nor have you ever been a mug.” She wouldn’t look at me. God, I wanted her to look at me. “I had been in love with you for years. That kiss in your bedroom when we were thirteen wasn’t an accident. I had been planning it for months.”
Meg’s lips quirked slightly as she tried to bite off a smile. “You’d think after months of planning you would have executed it better.”
I took her chin between my fingers and turned her face towards me. Her eyes were bright as though she were trying not to cry. “I thought of nothing but your face for years. You were my whole world. Don’t you get that?”The confession felt good. I had been waiting to tell her this for far too long.
“Then why, Adam? Why Chelsea?”
This was where we’d always end up. Back here. At Chelsea.
“Because she was everything you weren’t,” I admitted, hating how harsh the truth sounded.
Meg flinched. “Ouch, Ducate. That hurt.”
I lifted her hand to my mouth, kissing the knuckles. “I had given up on you loving me back, Meg, but you were tormenting me. You were this gorgeous, fierce, crazy smart girl that I needed to be with, but I thought it was a dead-end road.”