“Oh, you want me to yell at you more? Because I can do that.”
Though Lucas still had a shadow of a smile, his voice sounded sad, the low timbre a haunting sound. “You’re not going to say you miss me too?”
My grip on the towel tightened until my knuckles went numb.
I loved him. I loved him so much that I almost felt crazy, like trying to contain such a strong emotion rendered me near insane. The idea of living my life separate from his was a blow to my stomach, knocking the breath out of me.
And that was the problem.
Lucas must’ve seen something change, because his carefully crafted mask cracked entirely, revealing his raw, pleading expression. “Can we just talk, Blaire? About what happened, about why. If I pushed you too far—”
I quickly cut him off, not allowing my brain to process his words. “You didn’t.” If I went down that road, down memory lane, I wouldn’t be able to pull myself back. “It wasn’t that.”
“If it wasn’t that, then why?”
Why, why, why. Why had I broken up with the boy I loved to pieces? Why had I thrown both of our lives into a blender and pressed the button?
I couldn’t tell him.
So I pulled back, curling my fingers into fists, tucking them in my apron pocket. “Things changed,” I told him evenly, pretending to be unaffected. Never before would I have called myself a great actress, but Lucas bought it. Every. Time. I wanted to shake him for it. He didn’t respond; only watched me. “I’ll have Gram give your mom a call when she gets back in.”
I turned away before he could see my face fall, see the pain clear in my gaze.
“Blaire,” Lucas called after me, but I didn’t stop until I was safely back with my cookies and cupcakes, my ghosts leering at me with their grins. I almost half expected Lucas to follow me, to come into the kitchen and keep the conversation going, but he didn’t.
I gripped the edge of the table with shaking fingers, holding my breath, my lungs straining and burning.
Only when the door chimed and Lucas was gone could I breathe.
When Gram got back to the store, I let her know that Mrs. Avery wanted to add the caramel cheesecakes to her order, only for her to give me a strange look. “I know,” she said. “Mrs. Avery asked me at the Sunday potluck, and I told her it wasn’t a problem. But how did you know about it?”
I drew in a slow breath through my nose, shaking my head ever so slightly. Nice try, Lucas. “No reason.”
One of the perks of living in a small town was there was only one building for the elementary, middle, and high schools. Mrs. Martin didn’t mind the idea of me dropping the cookies off to her daughter’s class—one less thing she had to do.
I dropped off the Halloween cookies as soon as I got to school the next day, and I would’ve given my life for them. It had taken me a while to perfect them—even longer for my hands to stop shaking after Lucas had left.
I easily would’ve shoved a kid out of the way to protect these cookies.
Well, gently shoved. Nudged, maybe.
Maybe.
But walking out of the elementary hallway and moving back to the high school wing had me a little weighed down. I dodged kid after wayward kid as they scrambled to unpack their backpacks and get ready for the school day. Halloween-themed decorations lined the tops of the lockers and classroom doors—the mossy kind of spiderwebs and paper witches flying above the doorways. Kids’ crafts also hung on the walls in the hall, decorated with handprint pumpkins and pictures of jack-o-lanterns. A few hung crooked, as if the children themselves had put them up.
See, down in the elementary hallway, Halloween felt fun and exciting. I could see why kids loved it so much.
With all the love for Halloween in the community, I just wished a little could rub off on me.
I’d showed up to school early to drop off the cookies, so I had about ten minutes to kill before I had to make my way to Mr. Miller’s room. Not a lot of high schoolers showed this early in the morning, everyone trying to sleep in as much as possible. Donnie would show up soon with our coffees; I had to wait.
I reached behind me for my backpack, grabbing my cell phone to send Gram a quick text. I wanted to let her know that the cookies had been delivered without injury. Knowing Gram, she wouldn’t get it until Mrs. Martin called her raving about the treats—Gram hadn’t mastered the art of texting yet—but I thought I might as well let her know.
But instead of my fingers touching the smooth surface of my cell, I felt something papery and wide. Frowning, I latched on to it, pulling it out. Immediately, everything in me soured.
My dad always wrote his words in capitals, so Blaire was emblazoned like a scream across the front of the orange envelope, a festive pumpkin stamp in the top corner. I froze in the middle of the hallway, unable to tear my gaze away from the stupid letter, shaking in my grip.
Gram. She must’ve put it in my backpack. The longer I looked at the letter, the more a bubbling sensation began to rise in my chest.
Gram thought that as soon as I saw this stupid thing again, it’d be game over. I’d fold. I’d read Dad’s letter. I’d write a response. Just by seeing it again, touching it, my resistance would crumble. She was banking on that.
“You okay?”
You have got to be flipping kidding me.
Lucas’s finger cut into my vision and pointed at the return address. “Is that—”
“Don’t.” I shrugged his hand away and pressed forward, my steps more like monster stomps in the high school hallway. I gripped the envelope with tight fingers, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the stupid thing ripped under the pressure. Good.
“Your dad sent you a letter, huh?” Lucas asked, keeping up with my elephant-like footfalls and following me to my locker. “What does it say?”
“I obviously haven’t opened it,” I snapped at him, clenching my jaw shut tight. He only saw the front, my brain reasoned with my personified anger, trying to coax it back within reasonable boundaries. He wouldn’t have seen that the seal hadn’t been broken. “And I’m not going to.”
As I turned down the corridor with my locker, I started toward the trash can.
Gram was wrong. I wouldn’t open the stupid thing just because she’d packed it in my bag. If she wouldn’t throw it away, I would.
I reached to toss the envelope into the trash when Lucas cut around in front of me, body-blocking the garbage can. The familiar teasing glint to his gaze vanished—those blue eyes were serious and trained on me. “Blaire.”
“Would you move?” I shoved at his chest, but the football player didn’t even freaking budge. “Seriously. Move.”
“You don’t want to throw that away.” The edge of his jaw became prominent as his lips tightened. “Open it or don’t open it, but don’t throw it away. It could have something important inside.”
I threw my hands up as everything spilled over. Anger had won out against reason, and it made my tone piercing. “You sound like Gram. This letter? It’s none of your business. So can you drop it? We broke up, and I’ve been perfectly clear on the fact that I don’t want to talk to you. So why don’t you go bother someone else?”
Lucas’s chest rose sharply and fell once. I waited and waited for a sarcastic remark in return, an eye roll, something, but he froze solid. For one heartbeat, two. The paper in my hand became heavier and heavier. I wanted nothing more than to throw it in the trash.