Supercross Me (Motocross Me #2) (4 page)

The next week home passes almost exactly like the rest of them had. Work, home, sleep, work, home, sleep. Occasional talking to Shelby at the track. We even got one lunch on Monday where Jake was on the track riding with a trainer and she was free to hang out with me for a whole forty-five minutes. I made the mistake of telling her about Lincoln after he walked by us on the bleachers and called out, “Hey, Hana!” as if we were friends or something.

Shelby seemed to think that being friends with Lincoln was a good idea, so maybe she also thinks Ash has moved on. I shut that down quickly by changing the subject to the first thing I can think of: how annoying it is when your bra underwire starts poking out of the fabric at the end.

Now that I’m stuck back at home for the summer, I find myself longing for school more than anything else. There was a time shortly after my breakup with Ash when I thought that I’d go crazy if I had to spend one more night in my dorm room with its insane asylum white walls and the chill in the air at night that never seemed to go away. Funny how now when I’m in my own bedroom, with its calming gray walls and beautiful Paris décor and a functioning air conditioning unit that keeps the temperature nice at all hours of the day, I still feel like I might go insane.

Maybe I am insane.

I need a freaking hobby.

When I clock out of work around five in the afternoon, I rush home and shower quickly. Then I make the executive best friend decision to call Shelby instead of texting her.  This is important, dammit, and a text won’t do.

“Oh my gosh, are you dying?” Shelby answers, saying the words in one breath. “You never call.”

“I
am
dying,” I say, keeping a straight face as I apply mascara in front of my vanity. “I am dying of boredom and malnourishment for lack of best friend time.”

She laughs. “Well you’re in luck. I was just about to text you.”

“Mmhmm, sure,” I say, rolling my eyes. Then I curse silently because the stupid gesture made me mess up my eye makeup and now I have to start all over again. “Can you maybe ditch Jakey-poo for a couple of hours, please?”

“For the record, I have never once called him Jakey-poo. And secondly, yes, let’s hang out.”

“Can I stay at your place? I’m sick of being home.”

Her hesitation is almost palpable through the phone lines. “There’s a new cupcake shop that just opened off Mixon-Cemetery Road. We should check it out.”

“Why can’t we just hang out in your room?” I ask. I’m about to argue that I don’t want to go anywhere, but if that was the case, why am I doing my makeup?

Shelby sighs. “Ash comes home tomorrow so . . . you probably don’t want to stay over.”

I watch my own expression go from curious to jaded in the mirror and I try to shrug it off. Maybe Jake isn’t the only reason I haven’t seen Shelby as much lately. Maybe some of it is on my end, avoiding the one person who reminds me of him. “Fine,” I say, faking a smile for the mirror. “Let’s go get a damn cupcake.”

*

“Why is it called Mixon-Cemetery Road?” I ask as I turn my truck onto the narrow road on the outskirts of town. There’s an old liquor store on the side of the road, the kind that looks so rickety that one swift kick to the doorframe might bring the whole thing down. Ahead of us, the road is draped in a canopy of oak trees that have probably been here longer than Mixon has been a town.

“There’s a cemetery at the end of the road,” Shelby says. She’s watching her phone, tracking the app that’s showing us the way. Nana’s Cupcakes didn’t appear on the map since it’s so new, but we found the address on the online edition of the
Mixon Daily News
and typed it into the GPS.

We pass an old country house with newly painted shutters and a wraparound porch. There are a few more houses scattered about, but mostly it’s just fields and cows kept in barbed wire fences as we drive for a few miles.

“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” I ask, slowing down for a sharp turn in the road. The trees have grown thicker, almost swallowing up the single-lane road, and now even the cows are scarce. I had thought my house was in the middle of nowhere, but this is even more isolated.

“Yeah, it’s just a little further up,” she says, her eyes on her phone. “My aunt went there last week and said the cupcakes are to die for.”

“To die for on a cemetery road, eh?” I snort at my own joke as I come to a stop on the side of the road. We’ve made it to Nana’s Cupcakes, and apparently so have all of the dead bodies.

Mixon Cemetery is an ancient burial ground that truly sits at the end of the road. It literally dead ends right in front of us, and all around, the end of the little county road is bordered by a tiny black fence being strangled by years of overgrown grass and weeds.

I put the truck in park and climb out, momentarily distracted by the morbid beauty of the place. The headstones are barely visible through all of the tall grass, and it’s clear that no one has been buried here in probably a century. To our right, at the east end of the little cemetery, is a white shack of a building with a welcoming fresh coat of paint and a set of wooden stairs with a wheelchair ramp that is so new I can smell the fresh cut lumber.

There’s also a new sign hanging down from thin chains.
Nana’s Cupcakes
is painted on in shaky pink letters.

I put my hands on my hips. “Okay this is the weirdest snack run we’ve ever done.”

Shelby grabs my hand. “Come on. These are the kind of adventures summer breaks were meant for.”

We step inside the small bakery, and our senses are overloaded with the rich goodness of desserts lovingly crafted from scratch. A woman behind the counter wears a name tag that identifies her as Nana. She has short curly hair that’s mostly dark brown with only a little sprinkling of gray. She’s thin and seemingly frail looking, but then she pulls out a massive tray of cupcakes from the oven with one hand and waves to us with the other.

“Good afternoon, girls! So lovely to see fresh faces in here.”

“Good afternoon, Nana,” Shelby says, walking up to the display case and peering down at the cupcakes inside. “What would you say is the best cupcake here?”

Nana’s hands tap the top of the display case and she peers at us with this grandmotherly sort of charm. “They’re all the best, darlin’. I don’t make them if they aren’t delicious.”

“What the heck,” Shelby says cheerfully, turning to me. “You’re not on a diet or anything are you?”

I shake my head. “If anything, I’m on the anti-diet because Molly has been serving healthy crap at home lately.”

“Excellent,” she says, throwing me a sly look before turning to Nana. “Nana, we’d like two of each type of cupcake, please.”

*

“Oh my god . . . so good,” I say a while later as I balance my half-eaten cupcake in one hand and drive the truck with the other. Of the dozen cupcakes we purchased, Shelby and I have each downed two of them already. “This is so good I could die happy right now.”

“Imagine if someone overheard us right now,” she says, licking some icing off the top of her third cupcake. “Probably sounds like we’re making a porno in here or something.”

“Ew, gross!”

“See?” she says, laughing. “Even that was erotic to the right person.”

“Maybe we should record ourselves and sell it as some kind of audio porn,” I say, shoving the rest of the cupcake in my mouth. With my mouth full, I mumble, “Does this sound sexy, baby?”

We giggle and make equally stupid jokes for the rest of the drive back to Shelby’s house. When we get there, the construction crew is packing up for the day. “Those guys work really late,” I say, pulling to the far right of their driveway so I’m out of their way.

“And they start at the butt-crack of dawn each morning. It is unbelievably annoying. I am so sick of the hammering.”

“There’s another line for our audio porn,” I say.

She shoves me in the shoulder. “Okay, we have to stop talking about this! One of us needs to be a good Christian girl here, Hana.”

I smile. “And that’s why I love you.”

The first thing Ash did with his massive sponsorship check from Team Yamaha was make a down payment for a new house. He and his family had always lived here in a rickety mobile home on their land. Since his dad’s small engine repair shop is located at the front of the lot, and the family has no desire to leave the area, Ash thought building a new home here would be a great gift to give to his parents as a thank you for supporting him all of these years. I’d thought it was horribly romantic at the time, that I was dating a guy who was so selfless and caring that he spent all his money on his family.

Ash plans to live in it too, since he’s only nineteen and racing will take up most of his time for the next several years. Back when we were still together, we’d made a few light-hearted jokes about maybe building our own house next to theirs in the future. The Carter’s certainly had enough land.

It’s been a few months since Ash first chose a contractor with his parents and let them pick out the floor plan. It’ll be a two-story house with five bedrooms and a stone fireplace in the middle of the living room. I’d been there for some of those decisions, and it was always fun sitting around looking through a bunch of home building catalogues with his family.

Now the land to the left of the mobile home has been cleared, the foundation poured and the skeleton walls put up. I take the remainder of our cupcakes, which are packaged in a pretty mint green box with Nana’s logo on top of it, and we head toward Shelby’s old house.

“It looks like they put up some drywall,” I say, looking at the progress that had been made since I’d last seen it.

Shelby’s eyes brighten. “Wanna go look around? I haven’t been over there in a while.”

“But if we’re looking at the house,” I say all dramatically, “Then who will be eating our cupcakes?”

“Good call,” she says, opening the box while I hold it. “Let’s eat and look.”

“We are multi-tasking geniuses,” I say, taking a cupcake that looks like it’s cookies and cream flavored.

Despite the lightness of our conversation and our eagerness to check the progress on the house, I suddenly sense an uncomfortable shift in Shelby’s mood, and I’m not sure why. I look over at her and raise an eyebrow. “What is it?”

“Well, I’ve been kind of waiting for you to talk all day,” she says, peeling off the paper liner from her cupcake. “And you still haven’t said anything.”

“What exactly am I supposed to talk about?” I may be playing dumb, but my stomach knows the truth because it twists into a knot the moment I speak.

“Well . . . you know,” she says, busying herself by looking down at her careful steps as we walk between rows of rebar lining the future sidewalk that leads to the door. “How have you been lately? You haven’t cried on my shoulder in a while.”

“Shelby, I love you and you know that, but it’s really hard talking to you about Ash. It was painful all those other times we did talk, and I only did because I had no one else.”

“I know, I know. I’m just worried, and I hope that maybe your silence means you’re starting to feel better. Are you?”

I step into the house, my flip-flop smacking on the concrete foundation. “I’m feeling as good as I can feel, I guess.”

“I’m really sorry about the way this has turned out,” she says, trailing along behind me.

There’s still half of a cupcake in my hand and I shove it back into the box. My appetite is gone, replaced with the painful memory that Ash is no longer mine and I am lost without him. “I’m sorry, too.” We walk into the living room area and the framework for the massive fireplace is already set up. “So this is the living room,” I say, looking around and hoping like hell that she’ll just change the subject with me.

“So, are you thinking about moving on?” she asks, reaching up and touching the fireplace framework.

“No, why? Has Ash moved on?” I look up quickly, my throat dry. “I mean—don’t answer that. I don’t wanna know.”

Shelby’s pink lips twist into a sad smile. It hurts so bad to look at her in times like these. She has his eyes. That same off-center smile. His golden brown hair. How the hell am I supposed to get over someone when his twin is my best friend?

“Hana, I’m not sure he’ll ever move on.” Her shoulders lift and she lets them fall slowly as we walk throughout the frame of a house, the smell of drywall and spackle getting stronger in the kitchen. “But I guess I don’t really know anything anymore. We don’t talk much about that kind of stuff. Maybe he has moved on, who knows?”

I don’t want him to be sad, not exactly. But the thought of Ash being happy with another girl makes me want to run my forehead straight into the exposed nail on the two by four in front of me. I groan. “New subject, please.”

Shelby leads the way through a short hallway that passes a laundry room and leads into the master bedroom. “Okay then, let’s talk about Lincoln. He totally likes you.”

“Seriously, Shell? What did I
just
say?”

She steps into an unfinished space that’s probably her parent’s future bathroom. “I did change the subject! I went from one guy to another. So, spill it—Lincoln is hot, right?”