One Last Time (Loveless Brothers 5)

There’s a long, considered silence.

“I wish your mom was still around,” he finally says. “I miss her sometimes, even now.”

I exhale, my breath blurring the sky.

“Me too,” I say.

“You’re so much like her,” he says. “I think by now, you’d be great friends.”

I can’t help but laugh, my head still back against the wall. When she died I was fifteen, and I was an asshole in all the ways fifteen-year-olds can be assholes, so we were going through a rough patch.

“Well, we had a lot in common,” I say.

“I mean it,” my dad says.

“Thanks,” I say, then take another sip of cold coffee. Grimace. “I just feel like such a fuck up.”

“Freckles, everyone sitting on this balcony right now has gotten into a shouting match with a parter in the dead of night,” he says, sounding very stoic. “It’s just the way of things. Besides, you can’t fuck up badly enough that I won’t still love you.”

I shift positions so I can lean my head against his shoulder and close my eyes.

“I love you too,” I say.

We stay there like that for a few minutes. The sun keeps rising. I wonder if Seth’s back in Sprucevale yet, or still on the road, or even going back to Sprucevale, or maybe he’s already in a cheap motel —

“Can we go back inside?” I ask, cutting off my own train of thought. “It’s kind of cold out here.”

“Thank God, I thought you’d never ask,” my dad says, already standing, offering me his hand. “How about I take you to breakfast? There’s a great hole in the wall that Vera never wants to go to.”

I wrap the blanket around myself and shuffle toward the door.

“Sounds perfect,” I say.Chapter Forty-FourSethBy seven-thirty that morning, I’m on the outskirts of Sprucevale. The drive should have been longer by an hour, but I did ninety the whole way back and only stopped once.

I want Snowpeak, West Virginia and skiing and Delilah and her family in the rearview mirror. I want to stop hearing her say I just want you gone. I want to stop seeing the look on her face when she mentioned Mindy’s tattoo.

Even her car smells like her. It feels like her. There’s a hula girl on the dashboard and her sunglasses in the glove box along with three half-empty bottles of sunscreen and it all reminds me that it happened again.

After everything, it happened again. We fucked and we fought and now I’m driving away from her, furious and heartbroken, like I’m stuck in some nightmare time loop. I can’t believe I’m not used to it by now. I can’t believe that I don’t have a system for dealing with my post-Delilah weeks; a Gantt chart or something that says sleep for eighteen hours and then bake three cakes, play video games, take up Crossfit. Find someone new for a night.

Only this time is worse, because this time wasn’t two nights in some motel. This time was nearly two months. This time was square dancing and ice skating and hiking and cooking, movie nights on the couch and driving to the mountains just to see the sunset.

This time hurts in a new, astonishing way.

I’m a few miles from my house when I realize my problem: I’m still in Delilah’s car, not my own. I could park it at my place, but I don’t want to text her about it. I don’t want to look out the window and see her getting into it. I don’t want to think about this car ever again, so instead of going home I pick up my phone, think for a moment, and then call Levi.

“Yes?” he answers.

“I need a favor.”

“All right.”

“I need a ride from Delilah’s house to mine,” I tell him.

Levi waits, as if for an explanation. I don’t offer one. His silences might work on other people, but I’ve known him for thirty years.

“I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes,” I go on.

“Send me the address,” he says.

When I pull into her driveway, he’s already there: standing next to his truck, wearing jeans and boots and his winter coat, watching something in her yard.

I park, get out, walk over. He notices my face, my pajama pants, the car I showed up in, but he has mercy and just nods at Delilah’s yard.

“She feed them?” he asks.

I follow his gaze to a raccoon, sitting on its back legs, watching us expectantly.

“Yeah,” I say, and my voice sounds like dirt. I clear my throat. “That’s either Terry, Larry, or Jerry.”

“You really shouldn’t feed wildlife,” he says, with the air of someone who’s said it a thousand times before.

“You’ve got birdfeeders,” I point out.

He shrugs.

“They’re birds.”

“They’re life and they’re wild,” I say, my voice sharpening. “Is that not wildlife?”

Something flickers on his face that might be the tiniest smile.

“True,” he admits. “Got a suitcase or anything?”