Eager to get out of Maisy’s third-degree, I wind through the crowded tables to get to Stone. His two fans notice me coming up to him, their faces falling with disappointment and envy as Stone extricates himself from the table and greets me with a kiss on the cheek.
“Hey, Lavender,” he says.
I cut him with a look. “Don’t be showing this town we’re together.”
Stone’s unaffected by my warning. He gestures to the seat across from him. “After you.”
The girls drool over him a bit longer, then depart, continuing to dart looks in our direction as they order more coffee.
“They’re staying at Birdie’s Bed and Breakfast,” Stone says. “Came from out of town. Made sure I could hear it.”
I lift my head. “They’ve got to be, like, seventeen.”
“Yeah.” Stone scrubs his face. “I forgot what it’s like here. Impossible to disappear.”
I resist reaching over the table to cover his hand with my own. “Your reasons for being in Falcon Haven have shifted. All that’s important is spending time with your mom.”
Stone responds with a penetrating gaze. “And you.”
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t treat you right.”
I lean back in my seat, my stare moving to the table. This was a long time coming. For months, years even, I’d imagined what it would be like to confront him and unleash all my pain. For Stone to feel a fraction of the hurricane going on inside me. But like everyone says, time lessens emotions. It doesn’t get rid of them entirely, but the intensity of the pain, the vibrant red of my soul, is dulled now. Numb.
After a moment of nervous contemplation, I say, “Is that why you wanted to sit down with me? To talk about our past?”
“This is difficult to do. To say. I haven’t thought about us in a long time.”
I weave my fingers together, unable to raise my head.
“I don’t mean it like that. I mean that I couldn’t. Think about us. You.Fuck, this is—I’m not good at this.”
“You mean emotion?” I glance at him through my lashes. “I agree. You seem to have amputated that at the same time you bolted out of here and never looked back.”
“I had to. With what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, my anger, resentment, couldn’t follow. I’m not where I am today because of a hot head.”
“Believe me, I know.”
Stone must take my pointed observations as a reason to continue. “When you told me you were pregnant…”
I flinch. “Please don’t.”
Stone pauses. I’m not looking at him, but I feel him staring at me, assessing whether I’m a deal he has to close or if he should take the loss and walk away.
“When you told me,” he forges on, “it was like a gut punch. You saw how it was. I couldn’t think straight for that entire day, because it was also the day I was offered an internship in the city.”
“I remember.” My voice is scratchy and not my own. “You’d just been bailed out. Again. And Mrs. Stalinski’s teacher friend…”
“Mr. Appleton,” Stone supplies.
“Saw something in you. A gift, the same way I did. You were meant for more. And he looked past your exterior and went straight for your brains. Convinced you that if you didn’t take this internship, you’d be stuck here, your intelligence withering, going to waste, when there was all that capitalism to think of.”
The bitterness flows through me better than coffee. I swallow, stare to the side. I don’t know if I can do this.
“Your news ripped through me.” Stone’s tone is low and matches mine. “We’d always been so careful. I went through all the ways we could’ve slipped up, but nothing came back as the reason. And then I realized there didn’t need to be one. It was happening, whether or not we were prepared. By that evening, I’d rationalized that I could go to the city, nail the internship, get offered a job, and get us enough money to raise this baby.”
Baby. My hands clutch the edges of the table. I can’t hear him say that word. My heart’s empty enough as it is without an actual baby to hold, even all these years later. I turn the conversation back on him. I have to.
