Page 51 of Alone With You
“I remember.”
“And you agreed to be part of it.”
“I did. You also made me an offer of hospitality.”
“To come crash at the Adirondack cabin and help me build this birch bark canoe? Absolutely.”
“So the offer is still good?”
“Man, I’ll buy your first beer!” In his enthusiasm, Dylan had a voice as big as the man himself. “I could use some help stretching these bark strips over the frame of the canoe, they’re impossible to get on.”
That was Dylan the historian, all geeky and hand’s-on, building a vessel from scratch. “I appreciate the safe harbor.”
“Safe from what?”
Heartbreak.
“Logan.” Dylan paused. “Are you running away from something again?”
“I didn’t run away from anything.” He frowned at Dylan’s description. “I chose to leave.”
“Right.”
“And it’s not something. It’s someone.”
Dylan made a sucking sound. “That same someone as before?”
“Yeah.”
“Whoa, dude. Whoa.”
Dylan laid his head against the headrest of the driver’s seat, bouncing it off rhythmically as if to knock some sense into himself. “I think she’s the one.”
Dylan dropped something heavy, it sounded like a monster pile of logs. “When did this happen? When I last spoke to you, I thought you were talking about a girl, but I thought that was just a passing thing. That you were content in your manly solitude in the Pacific woods. What the hell happened?”
“My mind is on fire.” Jenny had branded him from the moment he’d laid eyes on her. “Do you remember that kayaking trip we made after we graduated?”
“Hell, yeah. That was one for the history books, but what does that have to do with this?”
“Remember when we hit the fork in the river? How we couldn’t figure out which way to go?”
“You wanted to go right,” Dylan said, “but I insisted we go left. And I nearly got us both drowned in the rapids.”
“Well, that’s where I am right now.”
“Drowning?”
“Staring down two separate paths and putting my future in someone else’s hands.”
“You’re scaring the hell out of me, dude.”
Logan stared through the windshield at the hospital, misgivings curdling in his stomach. “I’m not exactly feeling like Iron Man right now.”
“You know I’ve already had a wife, right?”
“Why do you think I’m calling you?” Logan figured Dylan was the only one who could possibly understand. Dylan had fallen hard and fast, and had good reason to divorce, but Logan hoped Dylan could inject a little sense into this scenario, before Logan played it out to its uncertain end. “The problem is that I’ve only known this woman for two weeks.”
“Holy hell.” The leaf-crunching steps Logan had heard through the phone stopped short. “You fell fast.”
