“But you have no intention of staying here, Megan,” I remind her, a vicious edge in my voice that I can’t seem to stamp down. I wave toward the house. “You said so your
self just a few minutes ago...you want out of this town.”
“I thought—”
“You know what, Megan? It doesn’t hurt me that Cardon Springs isn’t the kind of place you want to be. Hell, I have days where I’m not sure it’s the place I want to be.” I reach for the handle and pull the driver’s door open. “What hurts is that you didn’t have the guts to tell me, but you still thought it’d be okay to play around with me while you waited for your chance to escape. Jesus, you were about to come and meet Ellis, even though you knew damn well you had no intention of—” A hollow laugh escapes my throat. “Whatever.”
I can’t explain half the thoughts running through my head, too fueled by the hurt and anger that is flooding my brain and muddling my concentration. I shake my head and attempt to haul myself into my truck, but Megan’s hand juts out, stopping me.
“Craig, just wait,” she pleads through tears. “I can explain. It’s not what you think.”
As gently as I can muster, I pull my arm away from her grip and tug the door closed. Through the open driver’s side window, I reply, “It is, actually, which is kind of humorous in an ironic sort of way. I used to be someone you’d call a player, Megan, so you’d think I’d recognize one when I see one.” I turn the key in the ignition and shove the gear shifter into reverse. “So, maybe what hurts the most is that you were playing me, and yet I didn’t even see it coming.”
I back out of the driveway, leaving the woman I thought I was falling for—the woman I thought was falling for me—standing in the middle of it, tears streaking down her cheeks as she watches me drive away. That’s when my own tears begin to sting my eyes, and I let them.
***
Ninety-six hours. That’s how many hours there are in the span of four days. And that’s how long it’s been since I talked to Megan in her aunt’s driveway.
Since she lied to me.
Since she cried, because I made her cry. Which made me feel even more like a dick than confronting her did. I’ve tried to push that self-loathing down over the past few days, reminding myself that she’s the one who had the intention of getting a piece and then running off back to Dallas, but I’ve been having a harder and harder time of believing that as the days pass by. The woman had seemed genuinely upset by my outburst, and I didn’t blame her for that. I had a wicked temper when I wanted to. She’d wanted to explain, to talk it out and salvage some semblance of friendship from this.
She might have lied to me, but I can see now that I overreacted, too.
And did she lie? Hell, I’m not even sure anymore. Maybe there’s more to it, maybe she wanted to tell me before then but couldn’t.
I don’t even know if it matters now. It’s been four days, and Megan hasn’t tried to call or text me. She hasn’t rounded the corner of Main Street and come to see me at the repair shop.
I haven’t done either of those things, either. Every time I think I should make an attempt at fixing this, a small part of my brain warns me that she kept the truth from me.
Just like Ella did.
There’s no way I can stand for that kind of deceit, not after the monumental lies that came about with Ella. I might have never even known I had a son if it hadn’t been her dying goddamn wish to tell me.
I think that’s what wrecks me from the inside out—it took Ella being moments from death to admit the truth to me. Like I wasn’t worth it before that point. I’ve bounced back and forth between my love for that woman and my hatred for her since the day she died. I’ve heard it’s a fine line sometimes between love and hate, now I fucking believe it.
Ella’s betrayal has turned me into a man that doesn’t know who to believe, who to trust. Then, the moment I trust someone, look how that turns out. The fact that Megan kept her plan to leave Cardon Springs from me, all the while letting me think that maybe this thing between us was something it’s not, just solidifies my heart’s choice to give up on trusting people entirely. It’s safer that way.
“Craig?”
The voice is loud and clear, even from where I lay, under the driver’s side of a Honda Civic.
It’s also very familiar.
“Nancy?” I roll the creeper out from under the car, staring up at her from the floor. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in this shop before. There aren’t any appointment times available for—”
“I’m not here about my car, Craig,” she interjects. “I’m here about Meg.”
I sit up slowly, knowing I’m covered in grease and smelling like motor oil. “Meg. Is she okay?”
Nancy tucks her tongue into the side of her mouth. It makes me think she’s ready to chew the damn thing off just so she doesn’t say the words she’s so close to spitting at me. “Depends on how you define okay,” she replies. She glances over at her niece’s car, still parked in the other garage bay. The parts I ordered showed up yesterday but I’ve been up to my eyeballs in other appointments so haven’t done the work on it yet. “You hurt her, Craig.”
A long sigh falls from my lips, and I struggle to my feet. “Nancy, maybe I shouldn’t have reacted quite the way I did, but Megan didn’t—”
“Didn’t go to the job interview,” she says loudly. “She didn’t go to the job interview, didn’t run back to Dallas, and she sure as hell didn’t ask for you to shove her indecisiveness in her face. The girl’s been through enough.”
In all my years of knowing Nancy, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a curse word come from her mouth. Or anything that resembles a confrontation, for that matter. But here she is, standing in the repair shop that I own, giving me shit and treating me like the ten-year-old she obviously still thinks of me as.