“I thought I knew too,” he muttered, pressing harder on the gas.
The first year had been the hardest, of course. Even though his heart had hardened against Laire when she didn’t show up at Thanksgiving, by Christmas his resolve to forget her had weakened, and he was desperate to see her face again. His devotion to her, as much as he had fought against it, hadn’t died.
The day after Christmas, he’d driven out to the Banks and chartered a boat to take him through the icy Sound from Hatteras to Corey Island. Although he hated her mightily, he needed to see her, and he needed to know why she had pushed him away.
Walking up the dock to King Triton Seafood, his hands sweat, despite the whipping wind of the thirty-three-degree day. When he stepped into the little shop, a redheaded man in his early twenties looked up from the counter.
“Help you?”
He didn’t mince words. “Is Laire here?”
The young man, surely a relation of hers, judging by his hair color, had leaned toward Erik, his eyes narrowing. “Who’s askin’?”
“I am.”
“And you be . . .?”
“Erik Rexford.”
Fire leaped into the man’s eyes, and his fingers, resting on the counter, curled into tight fists. “You’re goin’ to want to leave here, sir. Right fuckin’ now.”
“Come again?” Erik asked, scanning the man’s face.
“Laire’s gone. And she ain’t comin’ back.”
“What? Why?”
“How do you people sleep at night?” growled the man. “How d’you fuckin’ sleep w’the way you treat people?”
“I’m sorry but I don’t—”
“Get the fuck out. And never show your face on Corey again, or I swear to Judas, I’ll kill you myself.”
Erik took several steps back, shocked by the fury in the man’s voice, wondering what the hell he was missing.
He quickly reviewed the facts as he knew them:
He and Laire had had an amazing summer.
They’d had an amazing night together.
Her father got sick.
She broke up with him.
She broke up with him. Not the other way around. She broke up with him without explanation, then stood him up at Thanksgiving. She was not the innocent fucking party in this equation. He was. So why the fuck was this punk threatening him?
He turned to the door, reaching for the handle, when his confusion and brokenheartedness overcame him. He pivoted back around to face the redheaded man again and cried, “I don’t fuckin’ understand!”
Vaulting over the countertop with surprising grace for so squat a person, the man lurched at Erik, one fist catching his cheek while the other uppercut him in the chin. Slam bam, and Erik stumbled back against the door, pushing it open with the force of his sucker-punched, reeling body. The wind caught the door, and it swung wide open, leaving nothing to break Erik’s fall. He tripped backward over the welcome mat and landed on his ass, with the redheaded man looming over him.
“Now do you understand, you fuckin’ cocksucker?”
Erik looked up at the man—her cousin?—and shook his head. “No.”
“Well, that ain’t my fuckin’ problem. Now git.”
Her cousin turned and walked back into the shop, locking the door, and turning the sign from “Open” to “Closed.”
And Erik, who had no more answers than he’d had when he arrived five minutes earlier, had no other option but to walk back to the charter with his bleeding cheek and swollen chin and start making his long way back to Raleigh.
Laire’s gone. And she ain’t comin’ back.
Truer words had never been spoken. Laire was gone—his Laire, the girl he’d loved so completely, so passionately, so goddamned much—was gone. And wherever she was, she was lost to Erik, never coming back.
He had mulled over her cousin’s words from time to time over the years—the pointed question about how he could sleep at night, as though he’d done her an injustice. Try as he might, he couldn’t figure out what that injury was, though it had tormented him for a few years whenever he turned his mind to it. He’d loved her. He would have done anything for her. Perhaps, he’d finally decided, her cousin had been talking about the politics of the Rexford family and his father’s administration, which wasn’t known for making life easier for the working man. It’s the only thing he could come up with because, as far as Erik was concerned, he’d never done anything to hurt or disappoint her.
When he really wanted to torture himself, he sorted through her words at the hospital, trying to wrest from them some meaning, some explanation for the way she’d pushed him out of her life. The last words she’d ever spoken to him were, I’m not your darlin’. I’m not your anything. We were just a . . . a fling. A fantasy. I’m an islander; you’re a dingbatter. It’s over. . . . It wasn’t real, Erik. It wasn’t real.