Sweet Forty-Two (33 page)

Her joke, not mine.

“Be right back, Mom.” I kissed her on the forehead and she dismissed me with a wave of her hand.

“You worry too much. Pretty sure
The Young and the Restless
and I will do just fine while you’re downstairs.”

I shut the door behind me and raced down the stairs and into the bakery, where I found the health inspector talking with Regan, handing him papers from his clipboard.

“Here she is now.” Regan gestured to me and the inspector turned with a smile.

“You caught me just in time, ma’am. This place is in such great condition, I was finished sooner than expected.” The averaged-height, overweight man with more hair on his arms than on his head looked pleased as he swiftly took the papers from Regan and handed them to me. “Two weeks is your intended opening date?”

“It is. Two weeks from Saturday.”

“Best of luck to you. Make sure you phone my office when you decide on a name for the place so we can fill out the certificates accordingly.”

Behind his shoulder, I watched Regan lift his fists to the air in supportive victory.

“It’s all set? I passed?” My eyes widened and I looked between the papers in my hand and the inspector’s face.

“All set. Good luck again, Miss.” He gave me a firm nod and left through the main door.

I turned around, my mouth hanging open in my excitement. “Holy shit!” I screamed, raising my arms in the air as Regan had seconds before.

“You did it!” Regan lifted me into a tight hug. Fully lifted me off the floor and spun me around. “Come upstairs with me. I have champagne.”

He set me down and grabbed my hand, racing up the stairs.

“Slow down, legs,” I teased, “some of us aren’t twenty feet tall.”

“Some of us aren’t two feet tall, either,” he shot back, reaching his apartment and opening the door.

“Gee,” I mused, “love what you’ve done with the place.” Bare walls and a single couch seemed to be accents to a music stand and his violin.

Regan pinched my cheek and stuck out his tongue. “I’m not here much, jerk.”

He dashed into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of champagne from the fridge.

“Hey,” I started, putting my hands in my back pockets, “there’s something I want to talk to you about.” My heart beat in triplet rhythm as I prepared for total emotional exposure.

“Hang on.” He reached into a cabinet and pulled out two plastic cups. “This is all I have ... sorry.”

“It’s okay.” I cleared my throat, afraid I’d lose my nerve.

Regan popped the champagne and it made me jump, feeling like I was shoved through a keyhole, riding on an umbrella with a dodo bird, circling in a pool of insecurity. Before I opened my mouth again, he looked over my shoulder.

“Oh, hi, Mrs. Hall,” he said nonchalantly. “I didn’t know you were here, sorry. Want some champagne? The bakery passed the health inspection!”

Dread nearly crippled me as I turned and found my mother standing in the doorway. In our excitement, Regan and I had left the door open. She must have heard us. She was pale and looked like a foreigner, the way her eyes darted around the apartment, settling on Regan’s face for a few seconds at a time before moving on.

“Is everything okay?” Regan asked when my mother didn’t respond to his first salutation.

“I’m sorry,” she shook her head, “have we met?”

Regan slowly set down the bottle of champagne, taking noticeably quicker breaths as he stared at me.

“Mom,” I prompted without looking at Regan, “this is Regan, remember? You met him a month, or so, ago in my apartment. CJ’s cousin.”

I said as many prayers as one can say while waiting for their facade to shatter.

“CJ, the drummer boy your dad used to let play at
Dunes
?”

I swallowed hard, nodding at the repeat conversation we were having about how I knew Regan. About five minutes too late, recognition snapped my mother’s eyes into focus.

“Oh, shit. Regan, yes, of course. I’m sorry, honey, it’s the goddamned shock therapy messing with that pesky short term memory.” My mom giggled. A light and airy sound that was instantly soaked in the darkness of Regan’s face.

“The what?” Regan came around the counter and stood next to me in the living room. I knew he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. I wouldn’t have believed it myself.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t say
shock therapy
. That’s kind of tacky, isn’t it? The ECT.”

The
Please be quiet and go away for five minutes
vibes I was sending my mother with my bugged-out eyes were not being received by her, but they were loud and clear to Regan.

“I didn’t realize, Mrs. Ha—”

“Please, call me Amanda.” She smiled, though it was starting to fade as it became clear Regan’s lack of understanding was more like a lack of knowledge at all. “Oh ... I’m going to ... excuse me.”

My mom left as gracefully as possible, closing the door behind her.

I looked at Regan who was, as I’d expected, watching me. “Let me explain.”

His eyebrows lifted as he held out his hands. “Shock therapy, did she say? Like to her brain?”

I nodded. “Yes, for the past four weeks she’s been—”

“Four
weeks
?” His nostrils flared and he dropped his hands to his hips.

“I can explain, Regan.”

He snorted. “Sure. Just like you could explain her existence at all, right? How you were
going
to tell me she was alive.”

“I
was
going to tell you. I just needed—”

“Needed what?” he snapped. “Time? Did you need more time to watch me come apart and expose every inch of my soul to you before you deemed me worthy of knowing what makes up yours?” He brushed past me, grabbing the bottle of champagne and pouring it down the drain.

I caught up to him and put my hand on his wrist. “Regan, you don’t understand. Don’t cut me off—just listen. I’m not made like you. I don’t trust like you do. I’ve never had a reason to.”

He pulled his hand away. “I thought I was reason enough for you, Georgia. For weeks you were the only one who knew about the most heartbreaking letter I’d ever received. Jesus, I cried with you. Hard tears, Georgia, not the sniffles of some dumbstruck asshole trying to play on your emotions to get in your pants.” His face turned red as he continued. “Then ... then I asked you to hold my hand as I said goodbye to her. As I threw that
fucking
letter into the
fucking
ocean! Explain to me, please, how that gave you reasons to keep something like this from me? Damn it, I could have helped you. Been there for you somehow.”

“I was scared, Regan!”

“Scared? You were scared? Georgia, we’re all fucking scared. This is
life!
It’s scary. People divorce, disappoint us, die, walk away. I thought we had something here.” He pointed between us.

I held out my hands. “We do. Don’t you see? You’re the only person who has made me become more of myself. You pushed me to open the bakery—”

“Don’t even get me started on the bakery, Georgia. That’s when I thought we were getting somewhere. I thought that was you letting me in. The last bit of the real you that no one else had seen yet. I felt special to be in there with you, to be part of the process. Was the last month with me in the bakery so awful for you that you knew you just couldn’t open up to me all the way? Even after that kiss? The one
you
initiated, I might add?” He clenched his jaw.

I refused to look away from him. “Forty-two days.”

“What? Enough with the goddamn riddles, already.” His face screwed up incredulously as he tried to sew my words together, walking past me again and heading for the door.

I sucked in breath and demanded confidence from myself. “You’ve been in my bakery with me for forty-two days. And, each day for those forty-two days you’ve broken down more barriers than I even knew I had. Please,
please
listen to me. I’m sorry.”

He shook his head, stopping my train of thought. “I’m tired, Georgia. I’m tired of the games, of the riddles, and the half-truths not quite bold enough to be called lies. Rae taught me a lot of things during her short time in my life, and the most important was, you know what? Sometimes there really is such a thing as
too late
.” Regan opened his door, staring at me with eyes so empty there wasn’t even a hole for me to jump into in a final appeal.

“Regan,” I pleaded, my eyes filling with tears.

He stared at the space around the door, not able, it seemed, to look at me.

I wanted to grab him and tell him that I loved him. That I really, truly did. He’d view it as the Hail Mary I didn’t intend for it to be, though, so I had to leave. I pursed my lips to keep my mouth closed as the tears started to fall. When I walked past him at the door, I took a deep breath, taking in the molasses smell of rosin that always seemed to linger on his skin.

As the door clicked behind me, without so much as a goodbye, I forced myself to dry my tears. If this love stuff was real, and I believed it was, and if we both felt it, which I believed we did, then I had to trust that he’d come around.

I believed in him. Now, I needed him to believe in me.

“So...” Bo cracked his knuckles and leaned back in his chair, sipping his beer.

“So.” I took a swig from the anger bottle.

Ember rolled her eyes. “God, you two could take a century having a conversation. Regan, it’s been a few days. Are you ever going to return Georgia’s texts ... or go home?”

I sat forward, placing my forearms on my knees. “She hasn’t been texting me for the last few days. And, I’ve been home, smartass. I’ve only stayed here one night.”

She threw her head back, growling and sighing to the ceiling. “You know ... I’m the last person in this little group here that should be qualifying Georgia’s character, since I was such a raging bitch to her when we first met, but you know she wasn’t being malicious, right? At least not from the story. It’s only your version I’ve heard, anyway, and that’s the impression that I get.”

“Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Nice reference, Em. What was that ... 1997?” Bo cracked a smile, setting his fourth bottle of beer in the sand. I laughed, picking up my fifth.

“Dear God, drink some water, lightweights.” She couldn’t help but chuckle along with us.

I cleared my throat. “You’re right. She wasn’t malicious, I get that.”

“So why are you here? You’re not the theatrical ty-... oh, wait ... there was that
hiding in Ireland bit.
” Ember shrugged and polished off her wine.

The air was cold coming off of the bay, and I pulled the hood on my sweatshirt over my head, scoffing at my flair for the dramatic.

“I’m just licking my wounds. Animals do that, you know—run off to a cave somewhere and come out when they’re all better.”

Bo sighed, like he already regretted what he was about to say. “You know you’re not going to feel better until you talk to her.”

Ember’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Says the guy who spent two months stalking his ex-girlfriend at the club where she sang.”

“Worked out for you two, didn’t it?” I air-toasted them and finished the rest of my beer.

“Barely.” Bo shook his head. His voice was low and serious. “Sure we both did some healing and growing in the three months we were apart, but I promise you I would have rather done that healing and growing with her by my side, no matter how uncomfortable it would have been at first.”

Ember rose from her seat and placed herself in Bo’s lap, nuzzling into his neck as he wrapped his arms around her. “And, let’s address the elephant on the beach here. Haven’t you said that you learned from Rae to live every second? Not like it’s your last, or anything, but just
live
. Don’t you say there’s no point in wasting seconds not living when living is what we’ve been charged to do?”

I winced as Ember spewed my well-rehearsed mantra back at me, and my stomach turned as I realized I’d used similar words to hurt Georgia a few days ago in my apartment. I turned them around and threw them back at her from my own anger.

“When does the bakery open?” Bo asked.

“I’ll make you cupcakes, calm down,” Ember teased. He stuck his tongue out at her.

“No, I mean, Regan, you were a huge part of giving her the courage to push forward there, right?”

I nodded and shrugged. My noncommittal stance as the knife in my stomach twisted left and right.

Bo continued, “Don’t you think you should be there to support her on that day?”

“The girl can hold a grudge, Bo. I mean, she has to, she doesn’t have many friends.”

Ember scrunched her nose. “She’s friends with CJ, for Christ’s sake, how big of a grudge can she hold? Just because she doesn’t have a ton of friends doesn’t mean she holds a grudge. Look at you, you’re private but not a grudge holder.”

“I really do like her, guys.”

Ember sighed. “No, you love her. At least that’s what’s brewing in there. You’re not a
like
kind of guy. You don’t put your emotions on the line for
like.
”

“Argh,” I pinched the bridge of my nose, “what if I really,
really
fucked up? She has trust issues and,
shit
, I kicked her out of my apartment.”