Page 22 of Denying Davis
“They’ll probably enjoy getting a call from you about me.”
I laughed. “Really?”
“Well, I mean, Iwasa pretty wild teenager. Remember?”
A delicious chill ran through me at his mention of the past. “Yes, you were.
But I won’t call them tonight. Not this time.”
“Thank you for not adding to my reputation.” He gave me a mock bow. “And I suppose you wonder why I keep tracking you down.”
“Yes.”
Davis stepped into the street, and a large floodlight on the adjacent property tuned on, illuminating his fine features. His nose was sharper than I remembered, his jaw squarer. “I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something. I never got to say goodbye when you left, but it’s not only that; I want…closure. You were my best friend, Sam. I’ve missed you. Will you tell me why you had to leave?”
I gulped. I didn’t have time to dwell on the way that my name sounded on his lips, or the way his voice made me feel whenever he spoke it. Instead, we’d suddenly arrived at the impasse I’d hoped to avoid with him—the direct question about why I’d been evasive and noncommittal since seeing him again. I pushed down the twinge of nervousness in my stomach. “Like I said before, it’s complicated.”
“Tell me something that isn’t.”
“I don’t want to get into this.”
“Too bad.” He scrubbed his face with one hand. “Listen, I’m not going to stop bothering you until you tell me why seeing me again seems to make you so nervous and upset. Your body language alone, well, I’ve never seen someone react so strongly to me, in such a negative way.” He glanced at the street, shaking his head. When he lifted his eyes again, I thought I saw an ounce of desperation in them. “But if you tell me why you’re so upset around me, I promise I’ll leave you alone for good.”
Somehow, I doubted that. The Davis Armstrong III I knew had more stubbornness than he liked to admit.
He closed his eyes. “You know what I keep thinking about? What I can’t get out of my mind? I keep remembering that night, when we were thirteen.” He opened his eyes. “The night I knew I felt differently about you than I did the girls at school.”
“What night?” I cocked my head, flipping through my memories. “When we were thirteen? I don’t remember—”
“You wouldn’t. And I don’t expect you to. It’s such a small thing, really, but it was the night everything changed for me. Your mom took us to get ice cream at Harper’s Shop on Clematis. We walked there from the island because it was a nice night, not too hot.”
“I used to love going there.” The memories surfaced, and I recalled the way the creamy ice cream tasted, and how much of a treat it had been to go to Harper’s. “Mom liked it too. She’d go there whenever she had a little extra money in the budget.” I paused. “But I haven’t been there in years.”
“That’s too bad. It’s still there. Same spot, best soft serve ice cream in South Florida.” He waved a hand. “Anyway, your mother was feeling generous and insisted on paying for my cone, even though I had plenty of money. You got a strawberry swirl, and I got a chocolate. It was all going fine until we walked out of the store.”
I sucked in a deep breath. I could guess what he was going to say next, but I wanted to hear it from him—hear how he recalled it. I hadn’t expected him to remember something I considered trivial so vividly.
“If I remember right, you were about to take a bite of your cone, and you saw a little girl staring at us,” he said, his voice falling a little bit in volume. “And something about the expression on her face made you give it to her. Right then and there. You offered your whole ice cream to her, and her mother was shocked. She said they’d just moved to West Palm from Puerto Rico, and that was the first kind thing anyone had done for them.”
Blood warmed my cheeks, and I felt embarrassment flush through my body. “It was”—I looked away—“it was nothing.”
“No, it wasn’tnothing, Sam.”
“Anyone would do something like that.” I allowed my eyes to meet his. “She looked hungry, and she was in worse shape than I was. It was—”
“It was selfless. Kind. A good thing to do. And I think it was the first time I saw anyone go out of their way to be nice to a total stranger.” He stepped closer to me. “It’s how I knew you were different.”
“It was one time. Once out of maybe a thousand memories—”
“It changed things for me, and that’s all that matters.” He regarded me under the unyielding brightness of the floodlight. “I knew whatever happened next, I wanted you around. First as my best friend, and then—” He waved a hand. “Never mind. It didn’t work out the way I hoped. In fact, it barely worked out at all.”
“I’m sorry I walked out of your life.” I gulped. “But I had to.”
“Tell me why, Sam. Give me the reason. I deserve that at least.”
He was right, he did. Trey wasn’t the problem in all of this—it was his father. He wasn’t the one who sent lawyers to our house that night and demanded we sign a document that irrevocably changed our lives. He didn’t offer us money in exchange for silence. His grandfather did. And his father.
But his father was dead.
