Page 52 of Love Me Gently

“You ready?” Cole asked.

I glanced at my hands, empty of any belongings, and shrugged. “Not like I have anything to bring with me.”

It wasn’t a cut at him, and since I couldn’t bear to look at him any more than necessary, I had no idea how he reacted, but there was a beat and then a heavier pause before he sighed. “I can get you a phone. You’re not a prisoner here. Valerie and Kip thought it’d be better for you.”

That didn’t take a genius to figure out, and having my wallet or phone or whatever else was in my Hermès bag, an apology from Jonathan for a bruised rib last year, wouldn’t do me any good anyway.

“Whatever.”

Like I needed my failures thrown in my face. Who cared if I had a phone? I had no one to call. No one to miss me. No one to talk to. Other than Valerie, I no longer had a single person in my life who cared about my existence.

Cole had offered me his, along with suggesting I could use it to call the therapists Dr. McElroy left for me.

That list was in the trash, and his phone had gone unused outside the two talks with Valerie.

I didn’t need therapy. The last thing that would be good for me would be totalkabout my decisions. I wasn’t an idiot. I had made choices. Born of greed and fear and worry and dreams and fantasies, but I’d made them all the same. There was nothing to discuss.

I was a stupid person who made worthless and destructive choices. No amount of therapy could change who I was at the core.

“Let’s just go,” I mumbled. I hadn’t been this surly since I last left Deer Creek. “The sooner we go, the sooner you can get rid of me.”

“I don’t…never mind. Truck’s in the driveway,” Cole said, and he stepped toward me, reached around and opened the storm door. My body locked as he moved and didn’t release until he stepped back.

He saw that.

I knew he did, and yet he never said anything.

Of course he wouldn’t.

I was now the woman he pitied, and that’s all I’d be to him. A pitiful excuse for a woman.

Who could blame him?

The town was different.So vastly different I could barely recognize many of the streets we drove through. Cole lived on the northwest side of town, in an older neighborhood Ididrecognize because many of my friends had grown up in the area, but as we drove south toward the old downtown, there were vast differences.

Additional lanes and stoplights at intersections that had once been two-lane, four-way stop signs. Gas stations that had never existed. There were rows of townhomes going up on my left that used to be trees we’d spend all day exploring as kids. A new YMCA sat across the street from at least four baseball fields.

It was unnerving. As much as I’d quit believing I’d ever be able to return to Deer Creek, a small part of me had hoped I would and that it would feel like home.

Cole’s truck had a country music station playing at a low level, something easy to talk over, and yet my gaze was stuck outside my window.

“It’s different, huh?” It was the first thing he’d said to me since we got in his truck and pulled out of his drive. If he was expecting me to answer, he didn’t act like it because he kept talking. “Town’s growing. Doubled in size, at least, since we were kids, and our old high school is the new middle school. New high school is on the other side of town off Mountain Road, and all that side of town that was Traventine’s farmland is now school and homes and businesses. We’ve also got a new library finished last year so we don’t have to drive all the way to Boone.”

As he spoke, he turned left on the main road that went east-to-west through town. We took a bridge over the lake that had my already stressed nerves tighten further.

We’d hung out at the small beach at that lake, bemoaned the lifeguards that kept us from having too much fun, we’d laid on the grass as close to the private airstrip as we could get and watched the small private planes fly overhead. We snuck off onto worn mountain trails and made out in the woods. Some of that land backed up to homes…one in particular I knew too well.

“Don’t,” I rasped, as we came to the turn that would take us there.

I couldn’t. Couldn’t bear to drive past my own neighborhood.

Without missing a beat, Cole turned in the opposite direction. Years ago, this had been a dirt road that led to land and homes that had enough acreage for horses or small, family homesteads. It was now paved, like the rest of the town, but as he turned away from my childhood home, the church that’d be nearby where I spent as much time in as my home, my lungs released like a valve.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“They love you, you know. Never stopped. They were never angry with you. Worried maybe, but never angry.”

I’m not angry… just disappointed. I couldn’t count the amount of times my dad or mom would say those words. It’d be followed by Bible verses about how we should live, a teaching moment and a quick prayer and then all would be forgiven. It hadn’t been a bad childhood…but it’d been a small one.

---