Page 79 of Fight for Me
Probably not.
He zipped the bag closed and turned on his heel, trying to forget.
“Now, Logan, this is not the first time Andrew and Jacob have fought.”
Grandma Ruby’s voice drifted down the hallway as Jake approached the kitchen.
“No, but it’s the first time they’ve done it as grown men in front of all their living relatives,” his father snapped.
“Andrew has had it coming for ages, and you know it,” she went on. “Now, should they have gone at it in the driveway while the whole family was watching, probably not.”
“They didn’t have to watch,” Jake muttered, pausing outside the kitchen door to grab a coat from the hall closet.
Grandma Ruby chuckled, even as Jake’s father glared at her from across the room.
“Look, son,” he started. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you boys over the last few years, but it’s a shame you can’t figure out how to get past it.”
His chair scraped the ground as he pushed it back, and then he headed for the front door without giving Jake a chance to answer. “We’re driving ourselves, for obvious reasons. You have two minutes to be in the car, or I’m making you walk,” his father added, disappearing through the kitchen doorway.
Jake heard the screen door snap shut and the engine of his dad’s work truck roar to life a moment later. Sighing, he went to the coffee pot and filled his thermos to the brim. As he tightened the cap, he caught sight of his reflection in the microwave door. His face wasn’t as swollen as it had been earlier, but that didn’t mean it was pretty.
“If something Andrew did is why Lexie ran scared, then he deserved every bit of what he got and more,” Grandma Ruby said, nodding her head with a decisive jerk.
Jake turned around, surprised. Lexie’s abrupt departure had been somewhat overshadowed by the mayhem that followed. He’d told his parents something had come up and that she’d needed to get back to campus, and they hadn’t pressed the issue. Even hearing her name made his chest ache.
“You think she was scared? I think she was glad to get out of here,” he muttered, snatching his coffee off the counter and hurrying toward the door.
The last thing he wanted to do was walk to the cattle barn in the rain.
17
One day passed,and then another, and before Jake knew it, final exams were over. He checked his phone on his last day of work before winter break, finding nothing from Lexie, as usual. It had been two weeks—fourteen days—since he’d stood in the driveway of his parents’ house and begged her not to go. Two weeks since she’d left him behind like an old teddy bear damp from the rain. Two weeks of silence that weighed heavy on his soul.
In a moment of weakness, he forgot to watch where his feet were taking him, forgot to avoid the paths where he was likely to find her, and looked up to find himself standing in front of her empty desk, her computer already shut down and her materials stacked neatly away. There was a dust-free rectangle in the back corner where a picture frame had once rested, the photo of them now tucked away who-knew-where.
“Julie?” he asked, the word coming out before he could stop it.
“Yes, Jake?” Lexie’s boss replied from her office nearby.
“Where’s Lexie?”
“Oh, she took off after her last exam—said she’s going to the mountains with some girlfriends,” Julie said.
Jake turned toward Julie’s office and saw her look up with a funny look on her face.
“You didn’t know?” she asked, a crease forming between her eyes.
“No, I didn’t know,” Jake mumbled, looking down at Lexie’s empty chair. He didn’t know anything these days. He’d been waiting in suspended animation, hoping to hear from her, but her life had been moving forward. She’d been planning trips, leaving town, enjoying herself... all while he was curled in a ball like a bear in hibernation, conserving his energy and waiting for the ice to thaw.
In the end, there was nothing left for him to say. No words he hadn’t already used, no grand gestures he hadn’t already made. Lexie had washed their slate clean, clearing him away as easily as wiping frost from a windowpane, not even bothering to say goodbye.
And that hurt worst of all.
“I still can’tbelieve it cost over a hundred dollars just to park my car at the airport. We could have stayed another night in Jackson Hole for that amount!” Olivia complained, shouldering open the door of their apartment and dropping her bags on the floor with a thud.
Lexie wandered in behind her, stepping over her friend’s mountain of luggage and rolling her own suitcase down the hall.
“You’ve said that about a thousand times since we got on I-40.”
