The unexpected squeeze and kiss from Darby had me glowing from the inside out as I gobbled up my steak and a mound of buttery mashed potatoes. Fortunately, the rest of the night went a little smoother. Rob acted less cocky and condescending. Still, I couldn’t wait for the night to end and I could leave here with Darby.
We walked to the car hand in hand without talking. The stars had come out while we were inside. Out here by the lodge, they were more visible than in town. At the car, I stood looking up at them for a moment, breathing in the scents of the fall night—dry grass and decaying leaves mixed with pine and fir needles and a hint of a wood-burning fire pit on the other side of the lodge. Voices and laughter from guests enjoying the fire and s’mores punctuated the night.
“Maybe I should have a fire pit,” I said as I got into the car. “At the inn.”
“I’ll build you one, if you’d like.” Darby turned on the car but didn’t back out yet. “Maybe with river rock or something?”
“That would be lovely.”
We chatted about where it would be safe to have one out at the inn as he pulled out of the lot and onto the road that would lead us back into town.
“You were awesome,” he said as we drove into town.
“I was?” I asked, pleased.
“I’ve been waiting all my life for someone to put him in his place. You knocked him down a few pegs, which he didn’t see coming. I’ve never seen anyone fluster him before.”
“Well, good. He deserves to be flustered. He is not a good person.”
“He’s the worst,” he said. “I can’t believe I spent so much of my life feeling bad about myself around him. When I saw him tonight I realized that’s just part of his thing. He likes to keep people down and off-kilter, and he’s a genius at knowing just the right buttons to push.”
“I can’t believe she’s marrying him. Because actually, she’s not that bad,” I said. “Compared to him, anyway.”
“The bar is not too high.”
“What was it you saw in her?” I asked. All night, I’d been thinking about that and wondering what it was that had drawn him to her in the first place.
“She’s smart and charming. You can see that, right?”
“Yes, I can. But also vapid and not very interesting.”
He laughed. “I didn’t see her that way at all. The whole time we were together, there was a part of me that wondered when she would leave. Not totally consciously maybe, but I never thought I had what it took to keep her happy for long.”
“You were right.”
“Yeah, I was.”
“I wonder what would have happened if you hadn’t felt that way? If you’d been cocky as hell like Rob. Maybe you caused her to leave because you expected it.”
He appeared to think about this for a few seconds before answering. “I’ve never expected much from my life, and I guess we get what we believe we deserve. I don’t know.”
“Is that why you haven’t asked me out until recently?” Lights from a car going the other way illuminated his profile.
“I didn’t think you would say yes.”
“Well, now you know,” I said. “And we can both agree I’m a catch.”
“Um, yeah?”
“Meaning, if I’m interested in you, then you must not be all that bad after all.” I smiled, flirty and loose from the drinks and my full stomach.
“I guess you’re right.” He looked over at me for a quick moment. Just then, the car sputtered and lurched. He cursed under his breath and slowed, veering onto the side of the road. The motor coughed and then died. We sat for a moment before he looked over at me. “Well, it looks like this old girl’s finally dead. I thought the shop had resurrected her for a few more miles but maybe there’s no saving her.”
“Do you think so? Maybe it’s just the battery? Isn’t it almost always the battery?”
“Maybe.” He rested his forehead on the steering wheel for a moment. “How am I going to get to work? I can’t borrow Breck’s truck again. It’s too humiliating.”
“You can borrow my car,” I said. “If you need it.”
He turned to face me. “That’s really sweet, but last time I checked, you needed your car to get to your own job. I was hoping she’d make it until we got paid for the gazebo job. And now I’m going to have to pay for a tow truck.” He rubbed his eyes and scrunched over the steering wheel. “Being broke makes me feel like a total loser.”
“You’re not a loser.” I touched his shoulder. “Don’t say that about my friend.”
He lifted his head to look over at me. “Can you really look at me and think I have any potential to be a good partner? My father’s a criminal. I’m broke. I have no car and student loans galore. I’d never be able to buy you a nice house or one of those big fat rings like Arianna’s.”
“Your father’s a criminal, not you. It’s not a crime to be struggling financially.”
“No debtors’ prisons like there were in the past,” he said, with a hint of humor in his tone. “But you know what I mean. Next to a guy like Rob, I don’t stand a chance.”
“Maybe for Arianna. Not for every woman.” I twisted in my seat to get a better look at him. “Not every woman cares about all that.”
“Most women do.” His face was barely visible in the dark, but I could hear in his husky tone how discouraged he was about life. “Arianna didn’t waste any time after she met Rob to make her choice.”
“I’d rather be with an interesting man doing something meaningful with his life than married to Rob Wright. He’s all wrong, if you ask me. Actually, the guy’s a total jerk.” I shivered and wrapped my hands around the tops of my bare arms. Without the heater, the cool night air was chilly, and I hadn’t brought a jacket. We would have to walk back to town or call a friend to get us. It was already after nine. Our happily coupled friends would probably be in bed watching television and snuggling. Suddenly, a longing filled me. I wanted that with someone. Was it Darby? Could it be him, after all this time? Had he been right in front of me all along? “If it were up to me, I would choose you over him every time. I don’t care how fat a diamond he offered. He’s pretentious and full of himself and was hell-bent on making you look and feel bad tonight.”
“He succeeded,” Darby said.
“He may have made you feel bad, but he didn’t succeed in making you look bad. Not to me. The opposite, in fact.” I placed a hand on his thigh. “You seemed smart and funny and really interesting. The kind of man the right woman would be grateful to have in their life. Not Arianna.” The very thought of Darby with her made me want to claw at a hard object with my fingernails. “But you have to see it for yourself.”
“See what?”
“How great you are. No one can tell you that. You have to believe it in your own heart.” I leaned closer. “Now, kiss me before we figure out how we’re getting home.”
He did as I asked, taking my breath away with the intensity of his mouth on mine. When we pulled away, we were both breathing harder than the moment before. “Thanks for tonight,” he said. “You were spectacular. Remind me not to get on your bad side.”
“Impossible. You’re already in here.” I tapped my chest. “Now, who should we text to come get us? I’m cold.”
“I’ll text the guys and see if anyone would mind coming to get us. I don’t think we can get a tow truck this time of night anyway, so we’ll have to leave her on the side of the road here.”
He pulled out his phone and typed for a moment. “We have a group text. Mostly we give each other grief.”
A second later, his phone dinged. “It’s Huck. He and Stormi are coming back from dinner with his parents and are going to swing by and get us.”
“Great.”
“What should we do while we wait?” Darby asked, drawing nearer and stroking my bare arm with his fingers, giving me goosebumps. “Make out like teenagers?”
“I never did that when I was a teenager,” I said.
“Really? Why not?”
“I don’t know, really. Just wasn’t ready. Things were tumultuous at home with my dad. His temper made it so we never knew what kind of night we were about to have. It took everything to keep it together well enough to get my schoolwork done.”
“What was he like?”
I closed my eyes, summoning an image of him from when I was a teenager. He ruled the house with an iron fist with rules like ways to fold towels and hang clothes. If anyone deviated from his instructions, he would grow enraged but never say it out loud. Instead, he would ignore us or say cruel things unrelated to what he was mad about. One night, I came home from an evening studying at my friend Mary’s house to find my mom crying at the kitchen island. Stacks of dishes were in the sink. I caught a faint scent of charred meat. An open bottle of wine and a glass were on the countertop in front of her.
I’d rushed to her side. “Mom, what is it?”
She’d looked up at me, her mascara and eyeliner smeared from tears. “I burned the steaks. I left them on Broil and started talking with Max and forgot. You know how charming he can be. Max, you know. Your dad was furious with me. He got so mad he took Max and Stan to a steak house and left me here.” She lifted the wine glass to her mouth and drank.
“Did he ridicule you in front of them?” I asked, my stomach churning.
“No, that’s not how he is,” she said, as if I didn’t know. “He pretended like it was fine, all lovey and passive-aggressive.” She tossed back a little more wine. Had she had the whole bottle? Not like her. My mother was always perfectly groomed and dressed, never one to draw attention to herself. I hadn’t seen her like this before, all smeared and messy and drunk. “And he told the guys I wouldn’t be able to join them for dinner because I needed to be here when you got home. They left hours ago. He whispered in my ear on the way out that I should be medicated. Something made for stupid people so they could get their act together.”
They do make medicines like that, I thought. My best friend Lottie was on one for her ADD. “Mom, you don’t need meds. It’s easy to leave a piece of meat under the broiler and have it burn.”
She raised bleary eyes to me. “You’re a much better cook than me. You know, I was sitting here thinking about how little I do well. Actually, I couldn’t think of one thing.”
I sat next to her and drew her into a hug. “Mom, that’s not true. He wants you to think that. He wants all of us to think that way. Trey said he barely got out of here alive.” I smiled to take the edge off my words, but we both knew the truth. My father had terrorized Trey, just as he did Mom and me. He was subtle but thorough. At the end of the day, we all felt sure we were nothing. Undeserving of the life he’d provided for us.
Now, Darby played with a lock of my hair, drawing me back to the present. “I could hear a whole story without you having to open your mouth just by your expressions.” He kissed me, tenderly this time. An emotion stirred inside me, like a tapping on the inside of my chest that made me ache with a combination of longing and gratitude for the sweet man sitting across from me. “I’m right here if you ever want to tell me the dark stories. You can’t scare me. Not after growing up with my dad.”
“When I was seventeen, I came home to find my mom crying.” I told him the story of finding my mother that night. “I heard him come home later and tromp up the stairs. He started in on her—yelled how she’d embarrassed him in front of the other partners. Called her useless for anything but…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Saying it out loud seemed like a betrayal to my mother. Anything but sloppy sex.
Darby nodded, murmuring that he understood and that I didn’t need to say it. He knew. “Sounds like our dads would be great pals if they’d ever met. Abusive in different ways, but that’s what it is nonetheless.”
“It took me a while to figure out that not all fathers were this way. Max, for example, was a really good guy.” I’d always thought he’d been a little in love with my mom. Had that been part of it, I wondered now? Had my dad picked up on something between them? Had that been the trigger? Or was it really the steaks? Probably the steaks. “Sometimes I worry I’m just like him.” I’d never said that to anyone before. “I’m particular about things too. Everything has to be perfect or I get anxious.”
“Are you cruel to your staff? Or to boyfriends who aren’t quite as tidy as you?”
I chuckled against the dull ache in my throat. “No, I’m not. I have high standards at the inn, but I would never come down on someone for simply making a mistake. It’s on me to train them correctly in the first place. Maybe that’s how my dad felt? Like he’d done his part and trained us exactly how he wanted things, but then we fell short, which enraged him.”
“I know just how that is,” Darby said softly. “I wish you didn’t, though.”
“Do you ever worry you’re too broken to be with someone?”
“All the time,” he said. “But it’s the lie they told us about ourselves that makes us think that. Being with Rob tonight, it all came back to me. The way both he and my dad chipped away at my confidence until there was nothing left of who I really was.”
“But they didn’t win.”
“Seems like they did,” Darby said. “Tonight, anyway.”
“You’re great just the way you are. Better than great.”
“Do you always do this? Make people feel better?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe it depends on who I’m with. You make me feel good. Like I’m more than the sum of my parts.”
“Or bank accounts?” Darby asked.
“Yes, right.” In the distance, a pair of headlights appeared. “I bet that’s them.”
I was glad to be rescued, but at the same time knew that what had happened between us had made us closer. “Darby?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you want to stay over tonight?”
He stiffened and turned toward the front window. The headlights, nearly upon us, illuminated his face. A muscle in his jaw twitched. “Is that what you really want?”
“Yes, it’s what I want. Do you?”
Slowly, he twisted to look at me. “I don’t know that I’ve ever wanted anything more. At the same time, I don’t want to wreck anything.”
“We won’t.” I hoped I was right. Having Darby in my life was starting to feel just right.
* * *
We were soon sitting in the back seat of Huck’s car that smelled of new leather and mint gum.
“I think she’s a goner,” Huck said, referring to Darby’s poor car. “I’m afraid to say.”
“She’s been on borrowed time,” Darby said. “I need a truck anyway if I’m going to do construction. I’ve been borrowing Breck’s to haul stuff, but that can’t go on forever.”
“Let me know and I’ll go with you into Louisville to buy something new,” Huck said. “I love shopping for vehicles.”
“With nothing to trade in, I’m not going to be able to get much,” Darby said. “But thanks.”
“Do you want to borrow my car until you figure it out?” Stormi asked, turning back to look at us. “I don’t really need it since Huck and I drive into work together.”
Darby rested his head on the headpiece and shook his head. His hand reached out to find mine. “I have good friends,” he said under his breath. “I forget how good sometimes.”
“Yeah, we both do.”
“You guys want to stop at the grill and get a drink?” Huck asked.
We exchanged a look. “No, we’d like to get home,” Darby said. “Big day tomorrow.”
Big night, too, I thought.
* * *
“Good Lord, what was that?” Darby flopped back onto the pillows in my bed. “It was better than I remembered even, and that’s saying something.”
I was too tired and satiated to move and closed my eyes. “Even better. What is this between us?”
“Extreme chemistry?”
“I guess that’s what you’d call it.” I rolled over to my side facing away from him, hoping he would curl up next to me.
“Is this okay?” Darby slid into place behind me and draped his arm over my hips.
“Sure. As long as you don’t mind?”
“What would I mind?”
“My last boyfriend didn’t like to snuggle after sex,” I said. “He always rolled to the other side of the bed as if I were too hot or something.”
“You are hot.” Darby nuzzled my neck.
I giggled. “Not yet. You have to give me a little recovery time.”
“How long will that take?” He kissed my shoulder and made circles on my hip with his fingers.
“It’s a miracle. I’ve recovered already.”
“A modern medical miracle,” he said, pulling me on top of him.
The morning would come soon, I thought, as I wrapped all four of my limbs around him. And I didn’t care if I woke tired. Losing some sleep would be worth every moment.