Misadventures of a Curvy Girl (Misadventures #18)(31)

“So we went to college and dated around for a while,” Caleb continues. “And it was at the end of freshman year that my dad took me aside to have a chat. Turns out our little college flings had made their way through the town gossips back to him.”

I grimace, and Caleb just laughs.

“Don’t worry, he didn’t kill me. Instead, he told me about Mrs. Parry’s sister.”

“What about her?” I ask, a little confused.

“She lived with two men on the other side of Holm for fifty years.”

“Oh,” I respond in a surprised voice. “That’s unusual.”

“The more unusual part is that I guess the town got used to it. She and her two men were part of everything—church, Rotary club, town picnics. And my dad told me if Ben and I wanted to live that way, the town would accept us. And he said if we wanted to be a couple, just the two of us, then he’d make sure the town accepted us that way too.”

“And did they?” I ask. “Accept you?”

“Yeah,” Caleb says with a smile. “They did. Mackenna lived with us for four years after college, and we never had to hide it. Not here in Holm, at least. People stared a bit in the beginning, when the three of us would hold hands or share a blanket during the town parade, but they got used to it fast. Maybe even bored with it. And after she left, when it was just the two of us together, it was the same way.”

“Huh.” It goes against everything I’ve ever thought about small towns, being a city girl myself, but maybe there’s something about a tightly knit community that can absorb differences in surprising ways. “When did Mackenna leave? Why did she leave?”

Caleb’s smile drops and drops fast. He looks out the window and rubs the back of his neck again. “She left nearly five years ago. Honest, it doesn’t keep me up at night, but for Ben—well, Ben’s the reason she left.”

“Why? Was he a jerk to her too?” I ask a little bitterly.

“No,” Caleb says simply. “He just…wasn’t. Wasn’t anything. When we met her in college, Ben was still that sensitive boy, but after each tour, it was like less and less of him came back. When he came back home the final time, he was sealed off so tight he could barely breathe. Mackenna always was an impatient kind of person, and it only took a few months of trying to bring him back before she gave up. She moved to the city, and that was that.”

Even though he was a dick earlier, my heart still twists a little for Ben, the sensitive boy who went to war and came back a shell. “Has Ben…you know. Seen anyone? About what happened to him?”

“He’s been going to a therapist weekly for five years now,” Caleb says, a touch of pride in his voice. “He sees a psychiatrist too—meds for his panic attacks and sleeping problems—and he’s in a community support group with other veterans. He’s been working on himself for years, Ireland, so he hasn’t just been lying around broken waiting for someone to fix him.”

“I never said he was,” I shoot back, ruffled. “Just that today he seemed awfully sealed off. And a lot like an asshole.”

I watch as a certain kind of defeat scrawls itself across Caleb’s face. “I know. I think—I think seeing the town gutted like that brought back some hard memories. And I think when that ceiling fell on you—well, fuck, Ireland, even I thought you were dead for a moment, and it hurt like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”

I want to cling to the maybes his words raise in my mind—I want to cling to them too much, I can already feel it. Just like I can feel the tears burning at my eyelids when I ask, “If that’s true, then how can you say goodbye?”

He rubs at his beard, his jaw tight and his eyes shining. “Because we start things together, and we finish them together. I’m sorry, Ireland, I really am, but that’s the way it has to be.”





Fifteen minutes later, I’m in my Prius, bumping toward the interstate. In my rearview, I still see Caleb’s truck and him standing outside it. He refuses to leave until he sees me safely on my way. I know that’s what he’s doing, and it’s the final straw.

I finally let the tears flow now. Now, when it won’t be awkward. Now, when I can save my pride.

Everywhere there are signs of the storm and the destruction it scattered around the countryside. Branches down, big green road signs crumpled as if by a giant fist. Leaves and twigs everywhere, along with a scattering of things that are far, far from their homes. An Easy Bake oven lodged in a tree. A mattress blown against a fence.

And yet nothing the storm has left even comes close to matching how messy and broken I feel right now.

I think I fell in love. I think I fell in love in a single night. I think I fell in love with two people instead of one, and all of it is ridiculous, so fucking ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop it from being true.

Doesn’t stop it one bit.

Soon, Caleb’s truck is out of sight, and I’m turning onto the paved county road that will take me back to the highway. Across the junction is a grassy field, but through the plot of knee-high grass waving in the sunny breeze is a meandering swath of flattened stalks, bent and speckled with flung mud. It’s a near perfect depiction of the path of the tornado, and there’s something singularly striking about it.

Possibly the lonely destruction matches my mood.