Austin had a fist against his mouth. Shock was written clear as day across his face. “Jesus, Char, I didn’t know—fuck.”
Char. He called me Char. It shouldn’t have made me feel as good as it did, but… well, it made me feel great. Like we had just taken the fast-pass lane toward whatever we had in the past.
I wasn’t naïve, though, as much as my perma-wide smile seemed to say the opposite. This—whatever this even was between us—was going to take a lot more than just using a childhood nickname to bring things back.
“Thankfully, it’s just those seven years,” I said, mindlessly playing with the napkin on the table. “It’s called retrograde amnesia. I can still form new memories, although I forget random shit way more often now, and I didn’t lose any of my important skills either.”
“Will your memory ever come back?”
“It can, but that’s rare.”
Austin shook his head, slow, back and forth. Those piercing eyes scanned me, as if seeing me in an entirely different light. “What were you doing so high up when you fell?” he asked just as Sanji arrived with the milkshake and a soda.
“Good question.” I took a big gulp through the straw before answering. “I have no fucking idea. I was in a cherry picker, which—why? I’d never been in one of those before. It was down near the lake and extended all the way up. There was a tree nearby, so maybe I was trying to get something out of it? I’m not sure.”
Austin cocked his head. The light from the window cut in clear and highlighted his strong cheekbones, those big lips. The single earring he wore, a small pearl on a tiny golden chain, glinted in the setting sun.
Fucking gay stars and stripes, I’d never seen a man this attractive before.
Except apparently I had.
Fuckin’ amnesia.
“Huh?” Austin asked.
Oh crap, I said that out loud.
“Fucking amnesia,” I repeated myself. “I hate it. I hate having such a huge chunk of my life just ripped away from me. It’s a weird feeling to explain, because there’s nothing really physical I can compare it to. It’s not like I lost a limb or an eye, but… fuck. I can’t remember you or what happened between us that’s got you seeing red.”
“I’m not—I mean I’m—it’s just…” Austin seemed at a loss for words.
“I can’t remember my accident,” I said, steering the conversation back in the intended direction. “And that really sucked once the speculations started.”
“What were people speculating about?” Austin leaned forward on the table. I wondered if I should lean forward, too, so that I could be close enough for a kiss.
I resisted the urge, although it didn’t disappear.
“You know how small towns are. People talk, and they talk fast. I probably hadn’t even hit the ground yet and rumors were already being spread. Some people said I was on drugs, although a simple look at my test results would show that’s false. The one rumor that did pick up steam was that whatever happened wasn’t an accident. That one, well, I can’t really confirm or deny. I don’t even know why I was up there in the first place.”
Austin’s eyes narrowed into slits. “You think there’s a possibility that someone hurt you on purpose?”
I shrugged. My chest felt heavy, and my palms grew clammy. “It’s something I’ve thought about, a lot. But there’s no point. I can’t fucking remember. And the more I try thinking about it, the angrier I get. Like I want to punch at that dark spot in my brain and just get through to the other side.” I took another huge drink of the shake.
“Fuck… Char. If I had known.”
There it was again. My nickname.
“I would have come back,” Austin said, leaning back in the chair. Behind him, the bar was filling up with regulars.
A question popped into the forefront of my thoughts and burned its way to my lips. “What made you leave?”
Austin looked down at his loosely fisted hands. I followed his gaze, admiring his hands for a moment, thinking that they’d fit so perfectly in mine.
Wondering if they ever had?
“We’ve been through some shit, Charlie… I don’t even know where to begin. I’m—I never imagined this would be how we reunited. I thought I’d come back to Blue Creek and we’d avoid each other like the bubonic plague until we couldn’t take it anymore and wind up in a shouting match that could only end in a kiss.”
My brows drew up at that. “We’ve got that much of a past?”
Austin looked at me and nodded, his gaze holding a somberness that sparked with something else. The residual anger that he was talking about? It was beginning to upset me. I couldn’t remember a sliver of what went down between us, no matter how hard I racked my brain.