“Don’t.” Just the sound of her name on his lips had her wanting to give in. It was ridiculous. “We’re both adults here, and there’s no reason to make this messy, especially not here.”
Making nice with Irena was hard enough; she couldn’t play pretend on two fronts. The other woman had done the whole kissy-face, we’re-the-best-of-friends thing and she’d played along for Carlo’s sake. For whatever reason, he’d picked Irena to be his wife in name only and who was she to judge? It wasn’t like her love life was anything to brag about. Exhibits A–Z were sitting right beside her and making her nerves jittery and her body electric. In his dark-blue suit that set off his gorgeous though tired eyes and only made his already broad shoulders look even stronger, he didn’t even have the common courtesy to look like the scumbag he was—even with the edgy energy stringing him tight. It wasn’t fair to still want him after what he’d done, but she did, and it just pissed her off more than she already was.
“We need to talk.” He paused, his hand coming to rest on her knee under the table and sending a jolt of awareness through her. “Please.”
Not melting under his touch took all the energy she had at the moment so she could get out was a single word. “No.”
The vein in his temple throbbed, and his gaze grew heated. “That’s it, just no?”
The possessivenes
s in his voice made her thighs clench. Dammit. She was smarter than this. She knew what was at the end of this path. He only wanted to be with people who mattered. She was just fun. Like mother like daughter, except she wasn’t going to end up like her mom, devastated and broken, so she gathered the anger still burning in her veins.
“Yeah.” She plucked his hand off her knee and let her working-class, not-the-kind-of-person-who-matters accent deepen. “That’s it.”
Then she turned to Carlo’s nonna and switched to Italian, freezing out the man on her left—or at least doing her best to ignore his every movement that she seemed to catalog anyway. Why? Because life wasn’t fair, and her heart was still making a case for the schemer who would only break her heart again and again because no matter what, she’d never stop being Riverside through and through. It was who she was, and if he couldn’t accept that, then Kiki was right and he didn’t deserve her even if she was already in love with him. Happy endings were just BS.
…
After dinner, instead of turning left onto Marlowe Avenue, Tyler merged onto the bridge leading to the one place he always seemed to find his way back to no matter how hard he ran in the other direction—home. Traffic lightened up once he passed over the bridge and got off the parkway at exit nine. People were bundled up on the sidewalk on their way from the train station to the commuter parking lot. Farther on, he turned onto Brookside Avenue and drove past the shop windows with snow spray-painted on the windows and the couples strolling down the sidewalks to one of the many restaurants that punctuated groups of shops like commas in a sentence that didn’t end for blocks and blocks.
It wasn’t Harbor City’s famed shopping paradise with elaborate Christmas windows that went up right after Halloween, but it also wasn’t as dependent on appearances or the need to strive to be bigger and better and more astounding than the display next door. The library he’d hung out in as a kid was two blocks to his left, right past the middle school he’d attended. The house he’d lived in was four blocks in the other direction, and as he drove past it, he spared it only the briefest of glances. A new family lived there now. Hopefully a happier one where a kid getting a scholarship to a prep school across the harbor was cause for celebration instead of derision.
He drove past the park where he’d had his first beer in the shadow of the spiral slide and the high school where he’d lost his virginity while parked in the football stadium’s shadow. Three more blocks with a four-way stop sign on each corner and he pulled to a stop in front of Frankie and Finian Hartigan’s two-story bungalow. Their parents were a few blocks to the north. The other siblings were scattered around in a ten-block radius, all except Felicia, the ant scientist, who’d fallen for Sawyer’s younger brother Hudson and was the only Hartigan to ever leave Waterbury. They were all smart and outgoing, able to take on bigger things, and yet they’d stayed in this working-class township so close to Harbor City they could see its skyscrapers’ lights twinkle in the distance.
His phone vibrated in the car’s cupholder. He hit talk. “Yeah?”
“You gonna stay in your car like some weirdo stalker or come inside and have a beer?” Frankie asked.
Tyler looked toward the house where Frankie stood in the open front door. “Is it good beer?”
“It’s free beer; is there a better kind?”
Ten minutes later and he and Frankie—Finian was on duty at the firehouse—were sitting out on the deck as close as possible to the fire pit in a failed attempt to stay warm as the pre-winter night gave them a preview of what was ahead in the next few months.
“Tell me again why we’re out here instead of inside where it’s warm?” Tyler asked, already halfway done with his first beer.
Frankie grinned at him, a little bit of that Hartigan crazy sparkling in his eyes. “Because we’re men and we’re tough.”
The number of dumb plans he’d agreed to when they were teenagers because of that line were too numerous to count, and also some of his favorite memories. “There is something wrong with you.”
“Nothing I can’t live with.” Frankie sipped his beer and looked out at the yard. “So what has you on our side of the bridge twice in one month?”
Shit. He must look rough if Frankie was asking him in dude code if he was all right. “Just got in the car and ended up here.”
Silence punctuated by the snap and crackle of the burning wood in the pit filled the night air. There were too many streetlights around to see any stars in the sky, but they both stared upward anyway. Looking at each other would just be too weird.
“You should have brought your girl along,” Frankie said, breaking the silence. “She makes you more fun.”
He took a swallow of beer that suddenly tasted like sawdust and chalk. “She’s not my girl.”
“Dumped your ass already?”
“Pretty much.” He downed the rest of his beer.
“That sucks, man,” Frankie said, and handed him another.
No “I’m sorry.” No “what happened.” Just acknowledgment and moving on. It was exactly the reaction he’d expected from one of his oldest friends who knew without being told that Tyler didn’t want to talk about it. Not that Frankie was the kind to push for details anyway—at least not of the bad-news variety. He’d always kept his life simple and easy. Tyler kind of envied him for that—especially when his own self-made complications fucked up his world.