Chapter Twenty-Three

Jules waited all of a heartbeat before she followed Adam out onto the street. He wasn’t exactly a sharer, but she’d have to be blind not to see the pain written over every line of his body. “Adam, wait!”

He stopped, but he didn’t turn to face her. “Now’s not a good time, sugar.”

Her realization last night settled in her chest, feeling like it’d cemented her heart into place. There was no reason to be surprised he was shutting her out. Hadn’t he done it every single time she’d asked him what was wrong? But she took a deep breath, shored up her courage, and said, “You can talk to me.”

He still didn’t turn around. “Talking never did anybody a damn bit of good.”

“You won’t know until you try.” She touched his arm, trying to quell the panic rising with each breath. Please don’t shut me out. Please just talk to me. Please show me that we weren’t doomed before we started.

Adam jerked his arm out of her grasp. “Talking is all anyone in this shitty little town likes to do—except when it counts. Then everyone shuts the fuck up. So, no, sugar, I’m not going to pour my heart out to you to make you feel better about yourself.”

She stumbled back a step, her heart dropping to her stomach. “That’s not why I offered to talk.”

“Isn’t it? You want to fix me, and you want reassurance that I fit into the plans you have for your future. Well, I can’t give you either.” He started to turn away. “And I’m never going to be the man who will settle down with you.”

The woman she was a month ago would have let him walk away. She would have mourned the end of things, but she wouldn’t have had the fire burning in the pit of her stomach driving her to chase him down the sidewalk. “No one can fix you, Adam Meyer. Not until you’re ready to hold still long enough to realize that your inability to stay in one place has nothing to do with your dad and everything to do with you. You’re a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you could change if you wanted to.”

He glared, his hands clenched at his sides. “Really, Jules? Changing my entire life around to suit your needs isn’t as easy as coming up with some quirky plan to scandalize a small town before you move on with your life.”

“That’s not fair.”

But he wasn’t listening. “Here’s a piece of advice—being the town scandal comes with more strings attached than you want to deal with. It’s better to leave the whole damn thing behind.”

“There you go again, running the second it looks like you’re in danger of putting down roots. Brave, Adam. Really brave.”

He shook his head. “This was a mistake. I should have seen it earlier.”

This is it. He’s not even waiting to leave town to walk away from me. She stared at his back as he moved away from her. “Fine. Walk away from me. It’s what you’re good at.” His step hitched, and for one endless moment, she thought he might turn around, might come back and actually talk to her.

But then the moment passed and Adam kept walking.

Jules’s breath whooshed out, and it took everything she had not to crumple into a ball on the street and start crying. When the heck had she started to care about that man so much? She was an idiot, and quite possibly insane. She turned, feeling like she was walking through molasses, and looked straight into Grant’s gray eyes. And I thought today couldn’t get any worse.

He smiled. “Trouble in paradise?”

Did he think she cared about what he thought when her heart was walking away from her, the pain cutting deeper with each step he took? She’d thought herself in love with Grant back in the day, but it hadn’t been a drop in the ocean compared to what she felt for Adam. So Jules lifted her chin and stared down her nose at her ex. “Here’s a tip, Grant—fuck off.” She marched into her café and shut the door behind her.

It was clear from the expressions on the handful of customers around that they’d seen and/or heard everything. She tried for a smile. “Does anyone need a coffee refill?”

Mrs. Peterson walked over and took her hands. “I’m so sorry, honey. But after Grant, you really should have known better.”

The walls around her seemed to be moving closer. She carefully extracted her hand. “Adam is nothing like that…that…douchecanoe. How dare you even compare them? He’s stubborn to the point of idiocy and proud and in pain, but that’s no reason to put him in the same box.” In a distant part of her mind, she knew she was ranting, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “And for God’s sake, I’m twenty-six. Just because I’ve been dumped unceremoniously twice in my life doesn’t mean I’m doomed to be alone, and I’ll thank you—and everyone else in this town—kindly to remember that. At the very least I should have three shots to get it right before you regulate me to the shelf!”

She strode across the room and through the door into the back, not looking at anyone for fear of seeing more pitying looks. Jamie jumped about ten feet when she barged in, but Jules ignored her cousin and just kept walking, up the stairs and into her apartment. Aubry jumped nearly a foot in the air when she walked through the door, but her surly expression disappeared the instant she saw Jules. “What happened?”

It took two tries to get the words out. “Adam and I are over.”

Aubry straightened, her amber eyes narrowing. “You were fine three hours ago. What did he do? Do I have to get out my body-burying kit?”

She was only half sure Aubry was joking. It didn’t make her feel any better that her friend was willing to go to such lengths for her. “If you go to jail, I won’t have anyone.”

“That’s not true. Your parents love you very much, even if they live a million miles away, and your extended family is as meddling as they are numerous.” She huffed. “Though I guess they’re pretty cool, too.”

“Aubry…” She stumbled over and sank onto the couch. “Something happened—something bad. I knew he was leaving—I couldn’t escape that fact—but I thought we had more time. Maybe I’m asking too much. I just want him to let me in, but it feels like he shuts me out of anything that isn’t the good parts of him. What kind of relationship is that?”

“I’m not going to pretend I know a damn thing about relationships, but even I know that wanting the whole of someone isn’t a bad thing.” She glared out the window as if he was standing right there. “He’s an idiot. A big-headed, knuckle-dragging, troublemaking idiot. He doesn’t deserve you.”

That was the problem. She wasn’t sure it was the truth. She took a deep breath. “I should have known better. It shouldn’t matter so much what the town thinks of me. Instead of coming up with some crazy plan with my fake boyfriend, I should have done what every normal single woman in her twenties does and joined an internet dating site. There’s a world outside Devil’s Falls, and I’m sure I could find someone who isn’t a troll or a serial killer to love me.”

“Jules—”

She stood. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Too goddamn bad.” Aubry grabbed her elbow and yanked her back down onto the couch. “Life is about risk—don’t you look at me like that, I know I don’t follow that rule—and you took one. And for the last fucking time, you’re not boring. A boring woman would have married Grant and been his little wife with no identity of her own. You don’t have to be a wild child or fuel for the gossip mill to be unique and amazing, and I’m stopping now before we both start to cry.”

She shook her head. “But everybody—”

“I know for a fact that the only person who thinks less of you for the choices you’ve made is Grant. That’s why you get your back up when anyone else says anything remotely close to you being a cat lady or on the shelf or whatever other hot-button terms you don’t like.”

Aubry had a point. She knew Aubry had a point, but it was so hard to agree with her with Adam’s words ringing in her ears. Stability. That’s what she’d always sought for herself. She’d known Adam wasn’t the most stable guy around, but… “He just walked away. He wouldn’t even talk to me.”

If there was one thing she learned from her parents’ twenty-five-year marriage, it was that people had to be able to fight in a relationship and still have the security to know it wasn’t the end of things. She didn’t have that with Adam. She wasn’t sure she ever would, even if their fight hadn’t happened today.

“Adam’s a broken individual. Trust me, it takes one to know one.” Aubry hugged her. “And, just like me, you can’t fix him through sheer force of will. The world would be a better place if your sunshine could drown out other people’s rainstorms—it just doesn’t work like that.”

But she didn’t want to change him. Not really. She liked all of Adam’s hidden depths and a thousand other little things about him. The only thing she wanted was for him to let her in, to let her help him shoulder the burden. If his mom really was terminal, then he’d need someone to lean on. He couldn’t do it alone, not without breaking, not when he obviously loved Amelia so much.

But he wouldn’t take help from her. She suspected he wouldn’t take help from anyone.

Or maybe he would…

Jules straightened. “I have to make a call.” She disentangled herself from Aubry and pulled her phone out of her pocket. It took all of a second to find Daniel’s number and call it.

He answered almost immediately. “Yep?”

“Adam needs you.” Her voice broke, but she charged on. “He won’t talk to me, but something happened, and he needs to talk to someone.”

“Does he know you’re calling?”

“No.”

Daniel was quiet for a long ten seconds. “We don’t talk about some things, Jules. It’s just the way it is.”

What was it with the men in her life who couldn’t deal with emotion? She took a deep breath and tried to keep the strain from her voice. “I know you have unresolved issues—all of you do—but if you let him shoulder this alone, it’s going to kill something inside him. Please, Daniel. Please at least try to talk to him.”

Her cousin sighed. “I’ll try. That’s all I can do.”

It would have to be good enough. “Thank you.” She hung up and turned to find Aubry staring at her. “What?”

“You really fell hard for this guy, didn’t you?”

Too hard, too fast, too much all around. She slumped back into the couch. “I really did.”

“I think this calls for a tea party.” Aubry stood. “And by tea party, I mean we’re going to drink vodka out of teacups and eat our weight in ice cream while we bitch about the men who’ve done us wrong.”

“I don’t deserve you.”

“Aw, Jules, that’s where you’re wrong. You’re better than all of us—you’re just too good of a person to see it.” She disappeared into her room and came back with two fine china teacups on saucers. “Now, do you want to shoot some noobs, or is this the kind of hurting that requires a sappy romance movie?”

Jules’s eyes burned. “You’re the best friend anyone could ever ask for.”

“Just don’t go around telling people that.”

“Your secret is safe with me.”