By the time Cole had turned fifteen, he could drive anything, with wheels or without. Hell, he could’ve parked a semi in an asscrack. Backward.
He’d been given free rein with the family boat two years before he was legal, and that had cemented his love for all things with an engine.
His mom had worried that they’d bred a daredevil, but Cole had never felt compelled to be stupid.
Just fast. Smart.
And good.
He was still those things, or so he liked to believe. On and off the road. And on and off the water.
But as for real life?
Not so much, apparently.
In matters of the heart, for instance, he was slow as a fucking turtle in peanut butter.
And stupid to boot.
What was real? he’d asked Olivia. Any of it?
She’d actually taken a step back, as if he’d physically slapped her.
All of it…
It’d certainly felt real. Before her, he’d been just floating through life. Living but not experiencing. And then she’d jumped off that dock and nearly drowned him, and he’d thought of little but her ever since.
He had people in his life, good people, and he’d always been loved, accepted. Wanted.
She hadn’t been so lucky.
And yet she instinctively knew how to love, how to give back, and in fact, she was better at it than he was. She’d jumped into the water after a perfect stranger to try to help. She’d given a piece of her past so a little girl in need could have the costume she wanted for Halloween. She’d braved his entire family with a smile and no visible fear—and only now was he realizing just how hard that must have been for her.
Had he accused her of acting her way through life? Jesus, what a complete idiot he was. Her emotions were always there for him to see, whether she was facing him down, laughing with him, or simply making him ache like a son of a bitch as she lay beneath him by moonlight, rocking up into him, eyes locked on his, hiding none of her feelings…
We all create a fiction.
Yeah, she’d been as honest with him as she could. He knew that now.
Could he say the same? Had he given her everything he had or held back out of his own damn fears?
When the real thing comes along, there’s nothing like it.
Until recently, he wouldn’t have recognized the real thing if it’d hit him in the face.
Or jumped onto his head in the water…
But he knew it now. The real thing was back in Lucky Harbor, and he’d let it go.
Let her go.
Two hours into the drive, the rain turned to sleet. And then thirty minutes later, snow. Visibility went down to zip. Cole shifted into four-wheel drive and slowed accordingly to meet the road conditions.
He was one of the lonely few in that regard. Over the next five minutes he watched cars playing Slip ’N Slide across the road.
Damn. He knew what came next, and sure enough, not ten minutes later—during which time he’d gone a whopping half a mile—Oregon Department of Transportation shut the highway down.
He exited into no-man’s-land and found a tiny hole-in-the-wall inn on a stretch of highway across the street from a McDonald’s. No WiFi. The bathroom sink dripped in an uneven rhythm that made him want to crawl beneath it and fix it. The toilet ran. The bedside lamp kept flickering. And there was a low-level hum coming out of the smoke alarm that made him wish for a BB gun to shoot the fucker.
Or himself.
With nothing else to do, he lay in bed and stared at the lights from the McDonald’s arches dancing across the ceiling.
It was six thirty at night, and he was alone with his own stupidity. He played the images on repeat through his mind. Like walking away from Tanner and Sam in anger…The three of them had fought plenty over the years, sometimes quietly, sometimes not so much, and yet they’d never stayed mad. They threw words, and occasionally a shove or two, and they got over it.
No one had ever walked away.
He regretted doing that, hugely.
Drip, drip, drip.
The bathroom sink was going to give him an embolism. That is, if the flickering light of the lamp didn’t give him an aneurism first…
Shit. He rolled out of the bed, pulled a few tools from his cargo pants, and took the lamp apart.
And then put it back together.
And then, because he’d lost all self-control, he fixed the bathroom sink.
He was looking around for something else to fix—or toss through the window—when the power went out. On the bright side, he no longer had to worry about the lamp. And hey, a side benefit—no more slashing yellow light from the McDonald’s across the way, either.
Six forty-five.
He had two bars of battery left on his phone. Nope, make that one bar. Since he was going to die in this godforsaken hellhole, he blew through some time checking email. His mom wanted to get a Christmas list together early this year because she liked to shop on the Internet. Cindy’s laptop was still not working. Sam wanted to know if Cole was over himself yet.
Tanner hadn’t been so politically correct. You’re an asshole was all his email said.
Right. He’d just make a note of that.
There in the dark, he began a fun little game called Torture Yourself by Replaying Your Most Idiotic Moments.
Such as acting like a first-class asshole with Tanner and Sam.
Such as acting like a first-class asshole with Olivia.
And then he pictured Lucille, standing out there by her mailbox in her bright red lipstick and rheumy blue eyes, suggesting he get on the Internet.
He looked at his phone and decided what the hell. Why not waste his last bar doing something productive?