“You’re not them. You’re you. You know that. Don’t fucking insult me.”
“Fine, then, what about you? You get all this time, all this space to sort out your life without your marriage, but I can’t be uncertain?”
“Don’t.”
He turned away from her and started to walk away. She knew that she was safe. She didn’t need him to guide her back to the hotel that was only a few blocks away, especially not with all these people around. So she didn’t follow him. She just stood there. Marinating in her hurt. In her anger. In the absolute disaster of that moment. She had put herself out there. She had thrown her body against his. Had shown him how attracted she was to him. It was embarrassing. Humiliating. He didn’t seem to care. He was demanding more things of her. Nothing she did was right for him. Good enough for him.
Her denial wasn’t right. Flinging herself headlong into it wasn’t right. She refused to go back to the hotel. She wandered around the crowded streets until she couldn’t decide if she was ready to cry or ready to fall asleep, went to an Italian bakery, waited in an endless line and got herself an Italian pastry with a name she couldn’t pronounce. The man who owned the bakery had made her try, and then had laughed at her, though not unkindly. He had given her two for her trouble.
She took the pastries back to her room, and she did not text Logan. Instead she ate them in bed with an ill-advised cup of coffee, and then stayed up far too late reading an e-book on her phone. She wanted to write down some of her feelings, her fantasies, her fears. The feverish idiocy that had overtaken her when she’d kissed that man. But she had determined that she wasn’t going to write about this.
Anyway, she didn’t really want to remember it. She felt awful. Hollowed out and small. An absolute wreck of a person. This summer was a disaster, and so was she.
Why would she hasten to commemorate that? She wouldn’t. That was the simple answer.
When she woke up in the morning, very late, she went to Logan’s room and knocked on the door. She decided that she needed to try and talk to him about what happened, because if she didn’t, then she was just…reverting.
Reverting for a while was understandable. Fine even. A few hours of pastry and hiding was acceptable. But now she needed to be an adult.
Except he didn’t answer.
She texted him and didn’t get a response.
She went to the reception desk at the hotel.
“Can I leave a message for Logan Martin? In room 380?”
“Oh,” the woman said, tapping at the computer for a second. “It appears that Mr. Martin checked out at about six o’clock this morning.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it.
She picked up her phone and typed in two words:fucking coward.
TWENTY-ONE
The Loneliest Road
1954 Rolls-Royce Drophead
Now
She didn’t see Logan during her two weeks in Jacksonville. This time she stayed in the B.F. Dowell House because it was fancy and her whole childhood she’d been curious about it, so the minute it had been made a vacation rental, she’d fantasized about staying in it.
It was a large brick house with a widow’s walk on the second floor and historic furnishings. Gorgeous. And still, mostly she thought of Logan. Which was silly since she never evenalmostsaw him.
Of course, she never went anywhere that she knew he would be.
She avoided bars of all kinds and didn’t go near Logan’s garage.
But the day she knew they were supposed to leave for the road trip, she decided she wasn’t backing down. She wasn’t giving Logan the chance to disinvite her from the trip without doing it to her face.
At five thirty in the morning, she rolled up to the garage. She was taking a risk. It was entirely possible that he had moved the car to his house last night and wouldn’t in fact start from the garage. But she just had a feeling and went with it. When she saw the lights on inside, she felt triumphant. She pulled into the space and walked up to the front door. He had left it unlocked behind him, because it was a small town, and there was no crime to speak of. But he hadn’t counted on her invading his space.
She walked into the garage and saw him, bent over the hood of a big black-and-silver car that looked like something from a gangster movie, his broad, muscular back taking up quite a bit of her mental bandwidth as she watched him.
“What’s up?” she asked, her voice a little sharper than intended in the silent space. “Fucking coward.”
She decided to just lean into it.