“Goddamn, Maxfield. I don’t know what to say.”
“Pearl was my friend too—I wouldn’t have made it through high school without her help. So… how about you tell me what’s really going on? I know she was a challenge for you in high school—the one girl you wanted who wouldn’t give you the time of day—”
“That’s not exactly true.”
He lifted a brow.
So I spilled it. Not all of it, because some things are meant to be private. But I told him about the day I saved her life and how she saved mine by being the one perfect thing in my nearly twenty-three years, and I admitted that she’d ruined me for any other woman the summer before she left for college.
“Wynn—she’s living with you. Have you told her how you feel? What you want?”
Not unless taking her to my bed counts. “I’ve got nothing to offer her. Not now.”
He sat back and rolled the bottle back and forth in his hands, stabbing me with the icy look that’d scared people shitless in high school. Came in handy when the two of us were collecting overdue weed payments for Rick Thompson. I was grateful on more than one occasion that I’d made a friend of him because he’d had a side of crazy even I wouldn’t go to. People saw my wrath coming if I was gunning for ’em. Maxfield’s just fucking exploded out of nowhere.
“Whatever happened to I’m Boyce Fucking Wynn?” he asked. “That guy wouldn’t let anything get between him and something he wanted this bad.”
I barked a laugh. Ah, damn. Boyce Fucking Wynn. My high school motto. “I’m not that idiot anymore, man.”
Glancing around the overcrowded bar, he bit the spot where that lip ring used to be. I’d learned it to be his one tell—fucking with that thing with his teeth or tongue or a finger. I waited for whatever blunt truth he was about to shell out, set to be kicked in the gut by it, considering his hesitation to spit it out.
“Here’s what I’m hearing. Ownership of that garage made you feel worthy of her. For the first time, maybe.” He signaled Brit’s coworker for another round as my heart pounded slow and hard. He leaned up, eyes locked on mine. “I worship the ground Jacqueline walks on, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I love her, man. If that’s how you feel, all I can say is don’t give up. Don’t fucking give up.”
Pearl
Boyce’s kitchen wasn’t as welcoming since it had become Ruthanne Wynn’s kitchen. It felt off-limits to me unless he was there too. She didn’t say anything to that effect, but the hostile weight of her silence when we were alone in that small space said it all.
At first I attempted to study in Boyce’s bedroom, but the lighting wasn’t ideal. Two of the windows were inches from the brick wall of the garage, and the third was shaded by a crepe myrtle that hadn’t been pruned in years. He and his brother had grown up on an island just as I had, but no one would have ever have known that from their dimly lit, barely ventilated bedroom.
I began studying on campus after morning classes and lab research—either in the library or the glassed group-study area between the offices, labs and classrooms. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I had evening shifts at the inn, I didn’t bother to come home between school and work. Days I wasn’t scheduled to work at all, I came home after six when Boyce closed down the garage for the day.
Though Ruthanne and I didn’t have conversations—our exchanges were limited to the barest need for words—I got the feeling she thought I was working some angle to take what was hers and encouraging her son in that direction. Admittedly, if I could have conceived a strategy for him to regain what he’d worked so hard to build, I’d have suggested it to him. My motives would have surpassed her comprehension, though, as they had nothing to do with taking from her and everything to do with giving back to him. I’d always believed mothers sacrificed for their children to keep them safe and happy. Ruthanne’s mothering heart—if it beat in her chest at all—seemed to lack that impulse.
Those musings yielded anguished thoughts about Mama and how much our falling out hurt. My birthday was coming up—a day she’d always, always made a fuss over. I couldn’t think about her without my eyes stinging. She’d built a nice life for herself, yes, but only after she ascertained I would benefit as well. If Thomas hadn’t been prepared to love me too, she’d have kicked that door shut with no hesitation. I decided it was time I extended an olive branch. I wouldn’t alter my academic course. That was set. But I could open the door for her pride to forgive me for it someday.
Ruthanne’s sidelong looks extended to any time Boyce and I were together, especially when we came in from our new nightly routine—sitting out on the step where we talked about our days while he smoked and I sipped iced tea. I didn’t ask why he’d stopped going to bed before I got home, assuming it had to do with her tendency to watch television until almost midnight from the sofa he slept on.
“I feel bad that you can’t go to bed at your usual time,” I told him one night, stirring the granules of sugar in the bottom of my glass. I also missed watching him pad across the living room in the early dark, sweaty and pumped after a workout and heading for the shower. In the bedroom, I slept until my phone alarm told me to get up. By then he was at work in the garage. “If you’d take the bed, you wouldn’t have to rearrange your schedule. I go to sleep later than you anyway. I can bed down on the sofa after she goes to her room.”