Page 74 of Under the Lights
In a diner slightly closer to New Jersey than New Hampshire, Chase sat in an uncomfortable booth and watched the sun rise while he drank strong coffee, ate shitty pancakes and missed Kelly.
He’d spent the night in the motel next door, but he hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep. After nodding off shortly after he hit the bed, he dreamed of her and woke before dawn with a hard knot of emotion in his chest. There hadn’t been any going back to sleep.
If he’d known missing her would hurt this much after just one night, he might not have been so quick to leave.
He was a chickenshit. There was no way around that fact. He’d been afraid of being rejected by Kelly—of not being good enough or stable enough or enough of anything else she wanted in a man—so he’d run away.
“You look like you got run over by a truck and just about the time you started getting up, it popped into reverse and backed over you again.”
Chase looked up at the waitress as she refilled his coffee cup. The tag pinned to her T-shirt said her name was Barb, and there was a note of sympathy in her voice that tugged at him. She was a stranger and he’d never see her again.
“I’m a chickenshit.”
“Well, at least that’s something easy to fix. Suck it up and do what it is you’re afraid to do.”
That made him laugh. “You’ve never coached high school football, have you?”
“No, but I had three sons play. You pick up stuff.”
He dumped sugar and cream into his cup and gave it a more thorough stirring than was probably needed. “My life fell apart on me a little, and then I met the woman I’ve been waiting for.”
“Having somebody makes putting your life back together suck a little less. I can speak from experience on that.” She didn’t sit across from him, but she leaned her hip against the back of the other bench in a way that signaled she’d be sticking around for a minute or two.
“She’s looking for somebody whose life is already together.” The words were painful to say.I love her, but she doesn’t want me.
“Oh, that’s too bad. But if you asked her to be a part of your life, no matter what’s going on, and she said no, then she’s not the right person.”
“I didn’t actually ask her.”
Barb put the hand not holding the coffeepot on her hip and gave him a look. “So that’s where the chickenshit part comes in?”
He ended up telling her a condensed version of the story, feeling safe in baring his feelings because, again, she was a stranger he’d never see again. When he got to the kiss on the sidelines, she actually smiled, but she stopped once he got to the aftermath. Especially the part about the parade and her unwillingness to look him in the eye. And his text message.
“There are other ways to look at that, you know,” she said. “She’s there at the barricade, in her uniform, so a lot of people are looking at her. Maybe after your little public display of affection on the sidelines, she was trying to look like she wasn’t looking for you and ended up trying too hard.”
He wanted to believe her, but he couldn’t figure out how to explain how her expression had been different. It wasn’t just that she wouldn’t look directly at him. She’d looked as if she was hiding something—like there was something there she was afraid he would see.
“If nothing else,” she continued, “you should have said good-bye. The text was a mistake and the tone of it was even worse.”
“It would have been too hard to hear her tell me that, basically, I was good enough for a fling, but not for anything more.”
She shrugged. “Harder than wondering for the rest of your life if being a chickenshit cost you the woman you love?”
He took a sip of the coffee, considering. “I thought so. But now you’re making me doubt what I thought I saw.”
“There’s really only one way to find out.” She stood up and started walking away, but paused to look over her shoulder at him. “And not by text.”
Once he’d reached his limit of coffee—which was roughly when it started burning the lining of his stomach—Chase paid his bill and went out to his truck. Once again, he was faced with a decision. He could continue heading south and try to work hard enough rebuilding his life that he’d forget the piece that was missing. Or he could turn the truck around and head back north. No matter what happened, he’d know he had looked her in the eye and told her what was in his heart. No questions and hopefully no regrets.
After backing out of the parking space, he made his way to the parking lot exit and sat there for a few minutes without turning his blinker on. Then, calling himself every kind of an idiot, he headed north and set the cruise control for five over the speed limit.
When he finally, after several stops along the way—including a half hour or so spent at a truck stop cleaning out his truck—reached the Stewart Mills town line, he adjusted his speed down to exactly the speed limit. He wasn’t going to start his second trip into town on the wrong foot this time.
Even over the music blaring from his radio, Chase heard the siren behind him and he slammed his palm on the steering wheel. That damn stop sign.
—
Kelly slammed the cruiser into park and popped the latch release for her seat belt. If Chase Sanders thought he could send her a lame-ass text, sneak out of town, make her spend a whole night crying into her pillow and then run the stop sign coming back, he had another thing coming.
