“Anyway,” he sighed wistful thoughts of Kylee into the sea air, “Rae was the first time I felt grown up love.”
“What’s the difference?”
He looked up and then closed his eyes. “It rewired my insides.”
A hole the shape of my mother’s smile seared through me and choked the air away from my throat. I let out an exhale as though I’d been punched in the gut. Because I had, by his words alone. I was left struggling for the comfortable air of my cynicism.
“I know. Intense, right?” He smiled and took a silent sip of his coffee.
“Keep slurping it,” I blurted out.
I needed him to be real, still. Flawed in the volume of his drinking. Loud enough to override the palpable rawness of his allegiance to the doctrine of love.
“When I was in high school I pictured a future with a few girls. With Rae, I felt it here.” He patted his stomach, leaving his fingers to bunch around the fabric of his shirt.
“How long were you together, again?” I couldn’t remember if he’d told me, but I was losing traction on reality.
“Barely two months.”
“Wow.”
“Mmmhmm.” He ran a hand through his hair.
“Did she feel the same way?” I knew I was trudging into mucky personal territory, but come on, we were talking about his dead ex-girlfriend as it was.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I never told her.”
“What?” My shock offended two nearby seagulls, who flew away in a tizzy.
“What?” Regan cleared his throat, looking concerned at my sudden trip into intensity.
“All of that talk about being in love before you even knew what to do with yourself and you never told her?”
The pained look in his eyes signaled I’d done it. I’d pushed too far.
“Well ... I didn’t exactly get the chance to, Georgia. I felt it so deeply that I was afraid if I told her that soon then I’d push her away. Then—”
“I know.”
Regan reached his hand across my lap, grasping my knee. “Let me talk about it.”
“Okay,” I whispered.
“Then ... she died. She. Didn’t. Make it. Jesus.” He sniffed and inconspicuously wiped under his eye. “Words have never hit me like that before. I’d been shot, I was sure of it. Every time I took a breath it felt like the air was leaving my chest through a hole before it ever got to my lungs.”
It was time for me to regain some emotional control over this conversation. We’d passed my comfort level at the intersection of love and certainty.
“Was there an exit wound?”
He turned to me with a perfectly quizzical look on his face. “Huh?”
“An exit would. From feeling like you were shot. Did the bullet leave your body, or do we need to go fishing for it?”
“I...” Regan shook his head slowly, looking between me and the ocean with his bottomless eyes.
“Sew yourself up if it’s gone, Regan. That’s the only way you’ll move on. If you want to move on. Come on ... the muffins are done.” I stood, brushing crumbled gravel from my jeans, and walked back toward the bakery.
Georgia
“And that was it? That’s all you said to him? And all he said to you?” Lissa shook a martini like her life depended on it as we navigated an annoyingly busy Friday night.
I shrugged. “Yep. That was it. Then he went back to his apartment and I haven’t really seen him since.”
“Did he take the card?”
“No.”
“Do you still have it?” She slid the martini to her customer in an uncharacteristically impersonal manner, more interested in the mild excitement she judged in my life.
“Of course I have it. What the hell would I do? Throw it away?”
It had been an awkward week in La Jolla. Regan hadn’t spoken a word to me since he left the bakery on Sunday. Well, actually, after our chat on the wall before the second batch of muffins was done, he never came back into the bakery. He got up, looked me up and down with a disturbingly unreadable expression on his face, and went back into his apartment.
Saying he hadn’t talked to me was slightly dramatic, given I hadn’t actually seen him. But I heard him. He’d taken to practicing his violin in the wee hours of the morning. On nights I came straight home after work, I could hear him. It sounded like the notes were crying. Given our conversation on the swing set, it was hard to tell if he was escaping from something or putting pressure on himself.
I determined I wouldn’t push him about the card from Rae. He knew I had it, and that was that. I’ve found that if you push people, they have an uncanny tendency to push back.
Lissa slid by me, lightly smacking my butt. “You’ve got skills, sister.”
“Skills?”
She chuckled. “You spent all that time with him inside the bakery and you managed to avoid all discussion about it, its theme, or your mother whatsoever.”
I roughly set a rack of glasses at the edge of the bar. “It’s not just him. I don’t talk about my mom. To anyone.”
“Why?” She put her hands on her hips, as though we hadn’t had this conversation every few weeks for the duration of our friendship.
“You know why. No one gets close enough.”
“You don’t let them.”