Page 78 of Love Me Gently

His smile turned cold and then wary. “It’s good you can still recognize them.”

“Robbie.” Cole’s voice was a warning shot.

Robbie kept his gaze on me, and it didn’t soften in the least, but it wasn’t scary. It didn’t make me tremble with fear. He was honest, and I appreciated that.

“Let me get you ladies some drinks,” he said and turned to open the fridge.

I followed more slowly, uncertain on my feet, of my position in this group.

Years ago, it would have felt so normal, but that was before.

In the time in between, they’d all grown up together and stayed close. They had kids. Cole had had awife. I wasn’t part of the crew anymore, and I wasn’t sure I could slide right back into it.

But for now, the moment, the dinner…

It felt good to be included in something clean and pure and good again.

What was the harm in trying to enjoy it?

Twenty-Eight

Trina

What a wild few days it’d been. Dinner and the evening with Ashley and Robbie had gone so much better than I’d anticipated. Like dinner with Cole’s parents, it’d been awkward. Memories were shared that had made me laugh along with them, but for most of the evening I sat back and watched. It was clear their bond had tightened in the last twelve years, and there were moments I wasn’t included at all.

The only dark moments came when the football game came on. I should have known they’d want to watch, considering Cole had said that’s why they’d planned on getting together. Cole and Robbie had loved football. But for some reason, it had taken me by surprise.

I’d frozen, watching the television screen across the table from me in my line of sight to the open living room as the announcers and Thursday Night Football music started. That it wasn’t Georgia playing helped some.

But when I hadn’t been able to relax a few minutes into the game, Cole reached over and hit the remote, blanking out the screen.

“Game isn’t important,” Robbie had said, watching me again with that wariness. “Teams suck anyway.”

He’d flashed me a gentle smile, and I’d excused myself. The kindness, plus the pity, was almost too much to bear.

But dinner hadn’t sucked completely. I’d eaten what felt like my weight in pizza, something that had made Cole smile at me in a strange way. The pizza might have been days ago, and I’d probably eaten since then, but considering what I was doing now, I swore everything I’d eaten in the last few days settled like an anchor in my gut, forcing my feet to stay in place.

And that place was on the sidewalk, wrapped in a thick, heavy coat in the icy cold breeze, arms wrapped around my stomach, unable to move another step forward.

“I can go first,” Cole said, next to me, taking in the house in front of both of us.

Was he remembering the things I was? The afternoons we spent bike riding around this neighborhood all the way to the gas station to grab candy? The snow forts we built by the sidewalk that the plows would eventually smash as they went by and cleaned the roads after a snowfall?

Was he remembering the first time he kissed me? The night he and I went to Boone for our first solo date, and he’d driven me home in his old truck. One hand holding on to mine, the backs of my thighs sticking to his worn leather seats beneath my cutoff jean shorts. His air conditioner hadn’t worked then, and it was the height of summer, so my hair was sticking to my neck, and the hot leather seats had burned my skin when I first sat down, but I’d smiled at him almost the entire way back to Deer Creek, his hand in mine, his smile occasionally flickering in my direction.

He held my hand as he walked me to the door and then stopped me before I reached for the handle. And it was there, at the door right in front of me now, where he bent his head, brushed his lips over mine, and told me wanted to be my boyfriend.

“What?” I swore he said something, but I was lost in memories. Good ones this time.

Ones I’d thrown away and forgotten until I was forced to face them again.

“I can go first,” he said. “Talk to them if you need me to.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I have to do this.”

Cole was getting his kids back tomorrow. My dad would probably be at the church working on his sermon. Kari could be anywhere, and it was because of her I hadn’t called to give my parents a heads-up.

I needed to see them, but Kari would be too much. She and her perfect life and her own kids and husband. She and I had never been close growing up. She was older than me, our age separated by multiple miscarriages my mom had, so she’d been too old to be my friend, too old to share clothes and yet she was too young to babysit me like other older siblings. We were separated by that perfect gap where I was always the annoying little sister who invaded her perfectly clean room and irritated her when she had friends over.

---