I step back before I can give in to the impulse, and her cheeks blaze to life, her blush as cute as the rest of her. That’s the word for her: cute. Sweet smile and peppy ponytail, she exudes cuteness.
Except her ass. Her ass doesn’t even land in the same stratosphere as cute, and those tight little pants do nothing to hide its soft, round curves. And her breasts. There’s definitely nothing cute about the way her T-shirt stretches across their fullness. Or her go-for-miles legs. Not to mention the narrow strip of skin exposed between the hem of her shirt and waistband of her pants. Just looking at the single inch of flesh below her navel, and I practically taste strawberry wine.
Moonlight. Her warm skin under my tongue. The sound of her moan as my mouth dips lower.
The memory grabs hold of my senses and won’t let go.
Fuck. I can’t even lie to myself. Nothing about her says cute. Everything about her says sex. And mine.
“Directions?” she asks. “To my father’s house?”
“Do you want me to walk you there? It’s close.”
I immediately regret the impulsive suggestion. I should be giving her directions, putting her in the car, and sending her back out of my life. But I want to be close to her for a minute, to prove to myself that I’m bigger than a seven-year-old shit breakup.
Or I want to prove to myself she’s more than just a dream.
She worries that plump bottom lip between her teeth because, obviously, she’s trying to torture me. How can I want her so much when I thought I hated her?
“I don’t bite, Cally.”
She mutters something I can’t quite make out. It kind of sounds like “Damn shame,” but I can’t be sure because she’s grabbing her purse and avoiding my eyes.
“Are you staying long?” I ask as we start walking. My voice sounds too damn hopeful and I hate that, but what are the chances she’d show up here again, let alone find herself lost right in front of my house?
She’s here to see her dad, I remind myself. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, but as far as I know this is the only time she’s been back since she moved away.
“No. Not too long. Maybe a couple of days. I…my mom died, and I need to get my sisters settled in with my dad.”
I stop walking and turn to face her, all my bitterness and aggravation falling away.
She’s looking at the ground, those worry lines making an appearance again. I grab her hand and squeeze. “I’m sorry.” I don’t ask what happened. Having lost both of my parents when I was a kid, I know how quickly that question gets old.
“Me too.”
We both know there’s not much else to say, so we walk instead. She follows me, and we cut through my yard to the paved path down by the river. I resist the urge to point out my house, to show her how well I’ve done for myself. It would be mostly a lie anyway.
“So you still live here in New Hope?” she asks softly.
“I came back after undergrad.”
“Anybody else stick around?”
I narrow my eyes at her. Does she already know my screwed-up history with the Thompson family, or is the question sincere? “Some of the guys from the team—Max, Sam, Grant. And all the Thompson girls except Krystal. She just moved to Florida with her boyfriend last month.”
The mention of her old friends brings a smile to her lips and lights up her face, making her look like her old self. “Lizzy and Hanna are in town?”
“You should see if you can hook up with them before you leave. They’d love to see you.”
She doesn’t reply, but there’s something about the way her face changes that tells me she’s not going to seek them out. I wish I didn’t need so badly to understand why. Cally didn’t want to leave when her mom moved her away. She didn’t want to leave her friends or her family. Didn’t want to leave the life she had here. She was determined to keep in touch with us all, even talked about coming back here for college. She hadn’t been gone but a couple of months when all that changed, and suddenly she would have nothing to do with any of us. Even me.
Arlen Fisher’s cabin is along the river just off New Dreyer Avenue. The original road was closed in favor of creating some common green space for the new construction. This, of course, was code for putting some distance between the old rough neighborhood and the ritzy new one.
When I point to Arlen’s house from the trail, she frowns.
“It’s really…small.”
Her dad’s a rough man. Simple to the extreme. His cabin sits in the trees just beyond the flood zone. It’s small, no-frills, and falling apart.
“Are you nervous?”
She’s slowed her steps, consciously or not. “I’ve only seen him a handful of times since we moved.”
That surprises me. Someone would have told me if she’d been back, as there aren’t exactly secrets in this town, but I would have expected that her dad took trips to Nevada to see all three of his girls. “Really?”
She shrugs. “It wasn’t what we intended, but things just never worked out. You know my dad. He has other priorities.”
I remember, vaguely. The man liked books and studying religious texts. He liked to spend his time meditating and his money visiting psychics and spiritual leaders. “That sucks.”
“The road goes both ways,” she says, and I don’t know if she’s reminding herself of her own responsibility to the relationship or his.
“How do your sisters feel about moving back here?”
She leans over and picks up a gnarled tree branch. It’s as long as her legs, and its beautiful knots stand in contrast to the smooth skin of her hands. I already wish I had my camera.
“He sent me my ballet slippers,” she says softly. “After he found out about Mom’s death. I didn’t even know he had them, and they showed up in this package—these tiny little slippers Mom and I had picked out together before my first lesson.” Her lips curve in a smile. “I was only five, and I remember him telling me, ‘If you want to be a ballerina, just believe you will be.’ It was always that simple with him.”
Once, it was that simple with Cally, too. I was drawn to her because that unfettered optimism radiated from her. After spending my formative years in my cynical grandmother’s house, Cally was a breath of fresh air.
I look up at the house. The sun has dropped in the sky, and the little cabin looms darkly in the shade of the trees. “Are you ready?”
“I think so.”
“Want me to wait here?” Again, I surprise myself. I should be itching to get away from her, from the reminder of what she did to me, but it all seems so long ago and unimportant under the pall of the crappy last couple of years. And next to the news of her mother’s death, my old resentment seems downright trivial.
Her shoulders drop with her exhale. She’s nervous. “Thanks.”
She maneuvers through the trees and up the steep wooden stairs to the house. After knocking on the door twice, she turns the branch in her hands, waiting, fidgeting, while I wait in the trees. This whole thing should feel much more awkward than it does.
She knocks again, leaning forward this time to peek in the window.
Two minutes later, she gives up and heads down the stairs.
“Y’all looking for Fisher?” someone calls when Cally reaches me.
Cally perks up. “Yes. Do you know when he’ll be home?”
I recognize Mrs. Svenderson from my grandmother’s beauty parlor. She swats away gnats as she moves toward us. “Dunno when,” she says. “He just left, so I ’magine it’ll be a few days, least. Usually is.”
I watch Cally as she digests this. Emotions flash across her face one by one—disappointment, sorrow, frustration, and finally anger, settling in around her jaw and eyes.
“Thanks. I appreciate you telling me.”
“I thought you were too good to come visit your old dad,” Mrs. Svenderson says. “What’s brought you here now?”
Cally gives a polite smile but doesn’t answer the question. The old women around here don’t beat around the bush. They figure life’s too short, I guess, and ask what they want to ask.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Cally says, as if the woman didn’t just insult her. “Thank you for your help.”
When she reaches my side, we turn together and make our way back along the river.
“Did he know you were coming?”
“He knew.” Again, anger flashes in her eyes, and it looks comfortable there, as if this Cally is angry a lot. The girl I knew wasn’t like that, but a lot can change in seven years.
“Do you have a place to stay? Where are your sisters?”
“I dropped them at the little motel back by the highway. I wanted to make sure Dad was ready for us. They’ve had enough surprises lately.”
What motel by the highway? “Wait. The Cheap Sleep?”
She shrugs. “Sounds about right.”
Cally and her sisters certainly aren’t living large if that’s where they’re staying. “You know people don’t actually sleep there, right?”
She chuckles. I like the sound of it. It’s not the girly laugh she used to have, but neither is it an adult’s carefully crafted facsimile of a laugh. It’s soft. Sweet. Honest. “We’ll be fine. It’s just for a few nights. Until Dad returns home and I can get them settled with him.”
We walk in silence for a few minutes, the only sounds the rush of the river and our shoes scuffing against the paved path.
“Do you live around here,” she asks, “or are you in town with your grandmother?”
When we cut back through my yard to her car, I nod to my house. “That’s mine.”
It’s odd, seeing it through her eyes. I’m proud of the home I built—a two-story, brick behemoth with a gorgeous flagstone patio in the back—but as I watch her take it in, I’m almost embarrassed at the excess. Cally and her family never had much. In fact, they rarely even had enough. And now they’re staying at the Cheap Sleep, and her dad is living in that dilapidated old cabin. Not much has changed.
She forces a smile. “It’s beautiful. I’m very happy for you.”
She steps away, but I grab her hand fast.
“Cally.”
She turns to me, those big brown eyes, those perfect pink lips.
There are a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t want anything to do with her, but I have two, maybe three days before she disappears from my life again. Maybe for good this time. I can’t handle the idea of this being the end, and I’ll be damned if I’m letting her stay at that shitty motel. “Why don’t you and your sisters stay with me?”
She snorts. “You surely don’t have room for us and your wife and two-point-four children.”
“No wife. No kids. Just me and way too damn much space.”
She shakes her head. “That’s sweet of you, but we’ll be fine. You’ve already done more than most would have.” She walks to her car, slides into her seat, and pulls away without another glance my way, leaving me alone with my memories of strawberry wine.
STRAWBERRY WINE.
I can practically taste it as I drive away from Will and back to the motel. It’s the taste of my old life. Of careless teenage rebellion and first love, of starlit nights on the dock behind the old warehouse on Main. William and I would sit on the cool concrete and sip strawberry wine he snagged from his grandma’s wine cellar (an impressive 500-bottle collection of Boone’s Farm). We’d watch the moonlight play off the water and drink straight from the bottle. Sometimes we’d just look at each other. On cloudy nights, we could hardly see at all and had to let our hands do the looking—his thumb skimming across my lips, down my neck, under my shirt.
That was where I told him I loved him the first time. Where he splashed wine on my stomach and bent to lick it off. It was where he first unbuttoned my jeans and kissed his way down my body until he pressed his mouth—hot, wet, and so slow I wanted to die—right against the damp cotton of my underwear. And the night before I had to climb into the U-Haul with my mom and two little sisters, it was there on the dock that he kissed me softly, like I was this fragile thing he feared he might break. He ran his mouth down my neck and cupped my face in his hands and whispered, “Hello.”
Strawberry wine, William Bailey, and a life so much simpler.
When I get back to the hotel, my fifteen-year-old sister, Drew, is sprawled on one of the two double beds, tinkering with her iPod, earbuds in her ears. She’s wearing a white tank and cotton shorts that say “You Wish” across the back and show more of her ass than they conceal. Her long, dark hair falls over half her face like a curtain, hiding the features that look so much like Mom’s.
“Did you find him?” she asks, lifting her head and popping out one earbud. “Dad better live in a big-ass house with a live-in cook and on-site spa.”
I snort. “Okay, Pampered Princess.”
“This so-called hotel is disgusting. Pretty sure they’re renting rooms by the hour here, Cally.”
If Extreme Bitchiness were a sport, my sister Drew has spent the last month training to be the world champion.
She’s dealing with losing Mom. It’s something I must remind myself of again and again. Instead of spending thousands of dollars we don’t have to visit a shrink, who would tell us this is her way of dealing with her grief, I just need to accept it. I need to be patient until my still-bitchy-but-much-more-bearable sister comes back.
“He’s out of town,” I say. No need to tell her how unequipped the man is for company, let alone to take in and care for his youngest daughters. I couldn’t see much through the little window, but my view into the old living room let me know there wasn’t much to see. Books, books, books. Not even a f**king couch.
Except her ass. Her ass doesn’t even land in the same stratosphere as cute, and those tight little pants do nothing to hide its soft, round curves. And her breasts. There’s definitely nothing cute about the way her T-shirt stretches across their fullness. Or her go-for-miles legs. Not to mention the narrow strip of skin exposed between the hem of her shirt and waistband of her pants. Just looking at the single inch of flesh below her navel, and I practically taste strawberry wine.
Moonlight. Her warm skin under my tongue. The sound of her moan as my mouth dips lower.
The memory grabs hold of my senses and won’t let go.
Fuck. I can’t even lie to myself. Nothing about her says cute. Everything about her says sex. And mine.
“Directions?” she asks. “To my father’s house?”
“Do you want me to walk you there? It’s close.”
I immediately regret the impulsive suggestion. I should be giving her directions, putting her in the car, and sending her back out of my life. But I want to be close to her for a minute, to prove to myself that I’m bigger than a seven-year-old shit breakup.
Or I want to prove to myself she’s more than just a dream.
She worries that plump bottom lip between her teeth because, obviously, she’s trying to torture me. How can I want her so much when I thought I hated her?
“I don’t bite, Cally.”
She mutters something I can’t quite make out. It kind of sounds like “Damn shame,” but I can’t be sure because she’s grabbing her purse and avoiding my eyes.
“Are you staying long?” I ask as we start walking. My voice sounds too damn hopeful and I hate that, but what are the chances she’d show up here again, let alone find herself lost right in front of my house?
She’s here to see her dad, I remind myself. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, but as far as I know this is the only time she’s been back since she moved away.
“No. Not too long. Maybe a couple of days. I…my mom died, and I need to get my sisters settled in with my dad.”
I stop walking and turn to face her, all my bitterness and aggravation falling away.
She’s looking at the ground, those worry lines making an appearance again. I grab her hand and squeeze. “I’m sorry.” I don’t ask what happened. Having lost both of my parents when I was a kid, I know how quickly that question gets old.
“Me too.”
We both know there’s not much else to say, so we walk instead. She follows me, and we cut through my yard to the paved path down by the river. I resist the urge to point out my house, to show her how well I’ve done for myself. It would be mostly a lie anyway.
“So you still live here in New Hope?” she asks softly.
“I came back after undergrad.”
“Anybody else stick around?”
I narrow my eyes at her. Does she already know my screwed-up history with the Thompson family, or is the question sincere? “Some of the guys from the team—Max, Sam, Grant. And all the Thompson girls except Krystal. She just moved to Florida with her boyfriend last month.”
The mention of her old friends brings a smile to her lips and lights up her face, making her look like her old self. “Lizzy and Hanna are in town?”
“You should see if you can hook up with them before you leave. They’d love to see you.”
She doesn’t reply, but there’s something about the way her face changes that tells me she’s not going to seek them out. I wish I didn’t need so badly to understand why. Cally didn’t want to leave when her mom moved her away. She didn’t want to leave her friends or her family. Didn’t want to leave the life she had here. She was determined to keep in touch with us all, even talked about coming back here for college. She hadn’t been gone but a couple of months when all that changed, and suddenly she would have nothing to do with any of us. Even me.
Arlen Fisher’s cabin is along the river just off New Dreyer Avenue. The original road was closed in favor of creating some common green space for the new construction. This, of course, was code for putting some distance between the old rough neighborhood and the ritzy new one.
When I point to Arlen’s house from the trail, she frowns.
“It’s really…small.”
Her dad’s a rough man. Simple to the extreme. His cabin sits in the trees just beyond the flood zone. It’s small, no-frills, and falling apart.
“Are you nervous?”
She’s slowed her steps, consciously or not. “I’ve only seen him a handful of times since we moved.”
That surprises me. Someone would have told me if she’d been back, as there aren’t exactly secrets in this town, but I would have expected that her dad took trips to Nevada to see all three of his girls. “Really?”
She shrugs. “It wasn’t what we intended, but things just never worked out. You know my dad. He has other priorities.”
I remember, vaguely. The man liked books and studying religious texts. He liked to spend his time meditating and his money visiting psychics and spiritual leaders. “That sucks.”
“The road goes both ways,” she says, and I don’t know if she’s reminding herself of her own responsibility to the relationship or his.
“How do your sisters feel about moving back here?”
She leans over and picks up a gnarled tree branch. It’s as long as her legs, and its beautiful knots stand in contrast to the smooth skin of her hands. I already wish I had my camera.
“He sent me my ballet slippers,” she says softly. “After he found out about Mom’s death. I didn’t even know he had them, and they showed up in this package—these tiny little slippers Mom and I had picked out together before my first lesson.” Her lips curve in a smile. “I was only five, and I remember him telling me, ‘If you want to be a ballerina, just believe you will be.’ It was always that simple with him.”
Once, it was that simple with Cally, too. I was drawn to her because that unfettered optimism radiated from her. After spending my formative years in my cynical grandmother’s house, Cally was a breath of fresh air.
I look up at the house. The sun has dropped in the sky, and the little cabin looms darkly in the shade of the trees. “Are you ready?”
“I think so.”
“Want me to wait here?” Again, I surprise myself. I should be itching to get away from her, from the reminder of what she did to me, but it all seems so long ago and unimportant under the pall of the crappy last couple of years. And next to the news of her mother’s death, my old resentment seems downright trivial.
Her shoulders drop with her exhale. She’s nervous. “Thanks.”
She maneuvers through the trees and up the steep wooden stairs to the house. After knocking on the door twice, she turns the branch in her hands, waiting, fidgeting, while I wait in the trees. This whole thing should feel much more awkward than it does.
She knocks again, leaning forward this time to peek in the window.
Two minutes later, she gives up and heads down the stairs.
“Y’all looking for Fisher?” someone calls when Cally reaches me.
Cally perks up. “Yes. Do you know when he’ll be home?”
I recognize Mrs. Svenderson from my grandmother’s beauty parlor. She swats away gnats as she moves toward us. “Dunno when,” she says. “He just left, so I ’magine it’ll be a few days, least. Usually is.”
I watch Cally as she digests this. Emotions flash across her face one by one—disappointment, sorrow, frustration, and finally anger, settling in around her jaw and eyes.
“Thanks. I appreciate you telling me.”
“I thought you were too good to come visit your old dad,” Mrs. Svenderson says. “What’s brought you here now?”
Cally gives a polite smile but doesn’t answer the question. The old women around here don’t beat around the bush. They figure life’s too short, I guess, and ask what they want to ask.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Cally says, as if the woman didn’t just insult her. “Thank you for your help.”
When she reaches my side, we turn together and make our way back along the river.
“Did he know you were coming?”
“He knew.” Again, anger flashes in her eyes, and it looks comfortable there, as if this Cally is angry a lot. The girl I knew wasn’t like that, but a lot can change in seven years.
“Do you have a place to stay? Where are your sisters?”
“I dropped them at the little motel back by the highway. I wanted to make sure Dad was ready for us. They’ve had enough surprises lately.”
What motel by the highway? “Wait. The Cheap Sleep?”
She shrugs. “Sounds about right.”
Cally and her sisters certainly aren’t living large if that’s where they’re staying. “You know people don’t actually sleep there, right?”
She chuckles. I like the sound of it. It’s not the girly laugh she used to have, but neither is it an adult’s carefully crafted facsimile of a laugh. It’s soft. Sweet. Honest. “We’ll be fine. It’s just for a few nights. Until Dad returns home and I can get them settled with him.”
We walk in silence for a few minutes, the only sounds the rush of the river and our shoes scuffing against the paved path.
“Do you live around here,” she asks, “or are you in town with your grandmother?”
When we cut back through my yard to her car, I nod to my house. “That’s mine.”
It’s odd, seeing it through her eyes. I’m proud of the home I built—a two-story, brick behemoth with a gorgeous flagstone patio in the back—but as I watch her take it in, I’m almost embarrassed at the excess. Cally and her family never had much. In fact, they rarely even had enough. And now they’re staying at the Cheap Sleep, and her dad is living in that dilapidated old cabin. Not much has changed.
She forces a smile. “It’s beautiful. I’m very happy for you.”
She steps away, but I grab her hand fast.
“Cally.”
She turns to me, those big brown eyes, those perfect pink lips.
There are a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t want anything to do with her, but I have two, maybe three days before she disappears from my life again. Maybe for good this time. I can’t handle the idea of this being the end, and I’ll be damned if I’m letting her stay at that shitty motel. “Why don’t you and your sisters stay with me?”
She snorts. “You surely don’t have room for us and your wife and two-point-four children.”
“No wife. No kids. Just me and way too damn much space.”
She shakes her head. “That’s sweet of you, but we’ll be fine. You’ve already done more than most would have.” She walks to her car, slides into her seat, and pulls away without another glance my way, leaving me alone with my memories of strawberry wine.
STRAWBERRY WINE.
I can practically taste it as I drive away from Will and back to the motel. It’s the taste of my old life. Of careless teenage rebellion and first love, of starlit nights on the dock behind the old warehouse on Main. William and I would sit on the cool concrete and sip strawberry wine he snagged from his grandma’s wine cellar (an impressive 500-bottle collection of Boone’s Farm). We’d watch the moonlight play off the water and drink straight from the bottle. Sometimes we’d just look at each other. On cloudy nights, we could hardly see at all and had to let our hands do the looking—his thumb skimming across my lips, down my neck, under my shirt.
That was where I told him I loved him the first time. Where he splashed wine on my stomach and bent to lick it off. It was where he first unbuttoned my jeans and kissed his way down my body until he pressed his mouth—hot, wet, and so slow I wanted to die—right against the damp cotton of my underwear. And the night before I had to climb into the U-Haul with my mom and two little sisters, it was there on the dock that he kissed me softly, like I was this fragile thing he feared he might break. He ran his mouth down my neck and cupped my face in his hands and whispered, “Hello.”
Strawberry wine, William Bailey, and a life so much simpler.
When I get back to the hotel, my fifteen-year-old sister, Drew, is sprawled on one of the two double beds, tinkering with her iPod, earbuds in her ears. She’s wearing a white tank and cotton shorts that say “You Wish” across the back and show more of her ass than they conceal. Her long, dark hair falls over half her face like a curtain, hiding the features that look so much like Mom’s.
“Did you find him?” she asks, lifting her head and popping out one earbud. “Dad better live in a big-ass house with a live-in cook and on-site spa.”
I snort. “Okay, Pampered Princess.”
“This so-called hotel is disgusting. Pretty sure they’re renting rooms by the hour here, Cally.”
If Extreme Bitchiness were a sport, my sister Drew has spent the last month training to be the world champion.
She’s dealing with losing Mom. It’s something I must remind myself of again and again. Instead of spending thousands of dollars we don’t have to visit a shrink, who would tell us this is her way of dealing with her grief, I just need to accept it. I need to be patient until my still-bitchy-but-much-more-bearable sister comes back.
“He’s out of town,” I say. No need to tell her how unequipped the man is for company, let alone to take in and care for his youngest daughters. I couldn’t see much through the little window, but my view into the old living room let me know there wasn’t much to see. Books, books, books. Not even a f**king couch.
