Sweet Forty-Two(43)

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I never told her.”

“What?” My shock offended two nearby seagulls, who flew away in a tizzy.

“What?” Regan cleared his throat, looking concerned at my sudden trip into intensity.

“All of that talk about being in love before you even knew what to do with yourself and you never told her?”

The pained look in his eyes signaled I’d done it. I’d pushed too far.

“Well ... I didn’t exactly get the chance to, Georgia. I felt it so deeply that I was afraid if I told her that soon then I’d push her away. Then—”

“I know.”

Regan reached his hand across my lap, grasping my knee. “Let me talk about it.”

“Okay,” I whispered.

“Then ... she died. She. Didn’t. Make it. Jesus.” He sniffed and inconspicuously wiped under his eye. “Words have never hit me like that before. I’d been shot, I was sure of it. Every time I took a breath it felt like the air was leaving my chest through a hole before it ever got to my lungs.”

It was time for me to regain some emotional control over this conversation. We’d passed my comfort level at the intersection of love and certainty.

“Was there an exit wound?”

He turned to me with a perfectly quizzical look on his face. “Huh?”

“An exit would. From feeling like you were shot. Did the bullet leave your body, or do we need to go fishing for it?”

“I...” Regan shook his head slowly, looking between me and the ocean with his bottomless eyes.

“Sew yourself up if it’s gone, Regan. That’s the only way you’ll move on. If you want to move on. Come on ... the muffins are done.” I stood, brushing crumbled gravel from my jeans, and walked back toward the bakery.





Georgia

“And that was it? That’s all you said to him? And all he said to you?” Lissa shook a martini like her life depended on it as we navigated an annoyingly busy Friday night.

I shrugged. “Yep. That was it. Then he went back to his apartment and I haven’t really seen him since.”

“Did he take the card?”

“No.”

“Do you still have it?” She slid the martini to her customer in an uncharacteristically impersonal manner, more interested in the mild excitement she judged in my life.

“Of course I have it. What the hell would I do? Throw it away?”

It had been an awkward week in La Jolla. Regan hadn’t spoken a word to me since he left the bakery on Sunday. Well, actually, after our chat on the wall before the second batch of muffins was done, he never came back into the bakery. He got up, looked me up and down with a disturbingly unreadable expression on his face, and went back into his apartment.

Saying he hadn’t talked to me was slightly dramatic, given I hadn’t actually seen him. But I heard him. He’d taken to practicing his violin in the wee hours of the morning. On nights I came straight home after work, I could hear him. It sounded like the notes were crying. Given our conversation on the swing set, it was hard to tell if he was escaping from something or putting pressure on himself.

I determined I wouldn’t push him about the card from Rae. He knew I had it, and that was that. I’ve found that if you push people, they have an uncanny tendency to push back.

Lissa slid by me, lightly smacking my butt. “You’ve got skills, sister.”

“Skills?”

She chuckled. “You spent all that time with him inside the bakery and you managed to avoid all discussion about it, its theme, or your mother whatsoever.”

I roughly set a rack of glasses at the edge of the bar. “It’s not just him. I don’t talk about my mom. To anyone.”

“Why?” She put her hands on her hips, as though we hadn’t had this conversation every few weeks for the duration of our friendship.

“You know why. No one gets close enough.”

“You don’t let them.”

I growled under my breath. “Liss. You know why.”

Visibly frustrated, Lissa grabbed my arm and pulled me into the small entryway to the kitchen. “You can’t use circular reasoning, G. You keep people away because of your mom, and you don’t tell people about her because no one is close. Then, this amazingly nice and clean-cut guy comes in here, is clearly interested in you, and you still insist on pushing him away.”

“Who? Regan? You saw how he nearly drank his face off over his dead girlfriend the other night. I’d hardly call that a place of moving on.” Crossing my arms, I leaned back against the greasy wall.

“Whatever. I haven’t heard him mention her once. If he’s opening up to you, he trusts you. And that look he gets around you? The one where his pupils double in size?”

“How the hell can you tell what his pupils do in this light?” I challenged.

“Because,” she smirked, “I can’t stop looking at them.”

I rolled mine. “Lissa, I don’t even know what the point of this conversation is anymore.”

“Georgia,” her voice lowered to a purr, “the first night he was in here with the band, I saw the looks you two were giving each other. I chalked it up to fresh meat, something new.”

“Romantic,” I murmured.