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1.

 

       It was one of those nights, the kind on which Nick Thacker needed three things: to work himself to exhaustion, to drown any surviving discontent with tequila, and to then undo all that hard work by rereading a letter he’d done his damnedest to forget.

       He’d already checked the first two items off the list. Nick sat on his bedroom floor, his skin slick with the sweat he’d wrung from himself at the gym. The metal bedframe dug into his back. A fifth of tequila dangled from his grip.

       He sipped. He hated the way the liquor’s fire writhed in his gut—already, he dreaded the price he’d pay tomorrow. But at least bravery came in liquid form, because he sure as hell didn’t have the courage to unearth the letter on his own. Never mind that the thing had called to him all day.

       Hell, it called to him always.

       Usually, he ignored its siren song. At work, he’d brave the blast furnace’s heat as if wading through oil. He’d watch the glowing iron pour from the hearth until sweat misted his reflective suit and his lungs throbbed in the blistering air. Until the furnace’s roar subsumed the hungry ache inside him.

       But today, that hadn’t been enough. Today, he was going to do something incredibly fucking stupid.

       With shaky hands, Nick set aside the tequila and slid a shoebox from beneath his nightstand. He let a few desperate heartbeats pass by, in case his faulty sense of self-preservation decided to intervene. But he’d known since this morning the day would end this way. On the way to work, he’d caught the tail end of a talk-radio segment while flipping through stations—some guy had called in, confessing that he’d hired a ghostwriter to pen love letters for his girlfriend—and Nick’s fingers had frozen on the dial. The letter Aubrey had once written, never far from his thoughts, had leapt to the forefront.

       It hadn’t left since.

       He swallowed and opened the box. He didn’t know which hit harder—the hand-written sheets inside, or the tequila rocketing through his bloodstream—but the impact made his chest clench, regardless.

       He lifted out the letter. The sheer number of times he’d folded and unfolded these pages had reduced the paper to fragile silk, but seventeen years hadn’t dulled the ostentatiousness of the purple title at the top. An Inexhaustive List of Things I Love About You.

       Nick traced Aubrey’s handwriting. It’d been forty-six days since her words had last stung his eyes. Forty-six days since he’d vowed to stop doing this to himself. Yet here he sat.

       Again.

 

1. I love your way with words.

 

No one writes a love letter like you do, Nick, least of all me.

But here’s my attempt to try, because yours have changed my life.

I’ll never forget the first one I found in my locker. It was nothing

like those awful books we read for English, which are really just

some dead guy’s long-winded attempts to sound smart. No, your

words were alive. They shifted the world beneath my feet. And they

were all for me.

 

Please, don’t ever stop writing to me.

 

       Nick dragged a hand down his face. God, had Aubrey ever really loved him like that? With such wholehearted purity?

       He tried to feel his way back to that long-dead breath of sunlight, but he couldn’t manage. Probably because, even in high school, he’d never truly settled into her adoration. He’d known he could never do anything for a girl like that except hold her back.

       People who shone as brightly as Aubrey MacLean didn’t belong in places like Henderson, Indiana.

       Good thing, then, that Nick had broken her heart. Good thing Aubrey had left town and never returned. Good thing he hadn’t seen her in seventeen years and never would again.

       Good. Fucking. Thing.

He gulped more liquid flame and thunked the bottle down.

 

2. I love that you never back down from a fight.

 

Not that I approve of guys beating each other up. But you

don’t fight for fun. You just stand your ground when your

honor is on the line, and always let the other guy throw the

first punch. Then, when you hit back, it’s…god, what can

 say, other than ‘beautiful?’ I know I’m not supposed to think

of it that way. I’m not supposed to lie in bed at night and replay

the way you defended yourself against Gallant on your first day. But

I’d never seen anyone fight like that before. So calm. So focused, like

you were completely sure of yourself.

 

       A dark chuckle scorched Nick’s throat. Some things hadn’t changed. He still fought. Daily. He had to, in order to keep the well of words inside him quiet.

       He wondered whether Aubrey would still find it beautiful. If she’d seen him and Jackson pummel each other at the gym earlier, would she have caught the way Nick funneled his regret into his fists, one punch at a time?

       Footsteps sounded. He shoved the letter under the bed, nearly knocking over the tequila in his haste to stand. Thankfully, the mattress shielded everything from view, because Tansy filled the doorway, dripping rainwater. She fluffed her blonde waves, scattering droplets across the carpet.

       “Hey. What’re you doing?” She sounded flat. Bored. Like she didn’t have the faintest interest, but had gotten so used to asking she couldn’t be bothered to do otherwise.

       Accurate, really.

       “Just taking a breather,” Nick said. “I had a hard day at the mill.”

       Her watery blue gaze swept up and down.

       He toed Aubrey’s letter under the bed. After six years of separation, Tansy counted as his wife in nothing but name, and he had no reason to hide. But he would’ve rather stripped naked than let her see, so he schooled his expression to nothingness. “You’re home late. Where were you?”

       She shrugged.

       He knew what that meant—she’d been out indulging in one of the flings she would manage to forget before the day ended. Meanwhile, he’d been holed up in his bedroom like a lovesick teenager, reading a decades-old letter from a girl he’d never deserved.

       “Did Paige tell you about her internship?” Tansy said. “There’s a fee.”

       Nick tensed. “A fee?”

       “Yep. She needs money.”

       A headache materialized behind his eyes. “All right. But I’m already pulling overtime at work. Six shifts a week is all they’ll let me take.”

       Tired judgment weighted her gaze. “I’m not asking for me. It’s for our daughter. You know, the one you impregnated me with and agreed to help raise.”

       Nick pinched the bridge of his nose, but Tansy was right. She usually was. “Yeah. Okay. How much does she need?”

       “Four hundred dollars.”

       He nearly choked. “Four hundred? For an internship? I thought Paige was supposed to be working for them, not the other way around.”

       She crossed her arms. “This is her ticket to a good college, Nick. It’s the most presumptuous internship in Henderson. So yeah, it costs money. Like most things.”

       “Prestigious,” he corrected, without thinking. “The most prestigious internship in Henderson.”

       Tansy huffed. “Whatever.”

       Silence hung between them. Nick held her gaze, but his awareness pulsed somewhere low, alongside the letter and liquor he’d shoved beneath the bed. He imagined he might shove his failings under there, too, and maybe the dull, anxious thud that invaded his chest whenever he confronted the familiar disdain in Tansy’s eyes.

       Two more years. Then the bond they’d forged on the night they’d accidentally made a child together would cease to exist. They would no longer be bound to each other, or to this house. Yet the weight of the coming years bore down, an ever-present ache on his shoulders.

       He cleared his throat. “What happened to the extra three hundred I gave you last week?”

       “Gone. It’s not like our refrigerator just fills itself.”

       He sighed. But he already knew he’d find the money somewhere. Of course he would. He would lay down in front of a screaming train if it meant getting his daughter into a good college and helping her build the life she wanted. That was why he stayed, after all. Why he did anything.

       For Paige. His precious baby girl. His only real family.

       “Okay,” he said. “I’ll figure it out. Just...give me a few days, okay?”

       Tansy’s expression didn’t flicker. “Great.”

       Without another word, she walked off, leaving him to find a towel and blot the rainwater from the carpet himself.

​

***

​

       Later, in the dark, while Tansy snored down the hall, Nick laced his fingers beneath his head and stared at the ceiling. Incessant rain beat on the shadowed windowpanes.

       Four hundred dollars. Where would he find that much on short notice? Maybe he could ask Jackson for a loan—with no family to support, the guy had managed to accumulate a decent-sized savings—but he hated relying on his best friend.

       No, he’d rather handle it himself.

       Nick pushed the covers down, then pulled them back up. Why the fuck couldn’t he get comfortable? He contemplated sneaking to the kitchen for the tequila he’d restashed, then decided against it. Tansy’s interruption of his pity-fest had been well-timed, and as long as he didn’t drink any more, he could avoid a headache tomorrow.

       Aubrey’s letter, though... That still lay under the bed, its purple words shining from the pages like lasers, burning holes through the mattress and gathering into a hot ache in the pit of his stomach.

       No one writes a love letter like you do, Nick.

       Was that true? Maybe, but only because writing to Aubrey had once come to him as naturally as his own heartbeat. Even now, words smoldered in his belly. Sentences swam in his blood. Paragraphs piled in his rib cage.

       Directing them at Tansy had never felt right, so he’d spent seventeen years swallowing them down. Back when he’d first gotten married, he’d tried bringing his new wife flowers, instead. Fake it ‘til you make it, or some shit like that.

       The first time, Tansy had tolerated the gesture well enough. She hadn’t thanked him, but she’d arranged the flowers in the nursery, a welcome gift for the impending baby. When he’d tried again a few months later, though—after her eyes had gone bleary from lack of sleep and the constant soothing of a colicky newborn—she’d curled her lip, scornful.

       “Is this really what we should be spending money on? You could’ve bought another baby bottle, instead. I can’t seem to wash them out fast enough.”

       “I was trying to be romantic,” he’d said, stung. “It’s my way of saying thank you. For everything you’re doing.”

       Tansy had made a face, then scooped up a wailing Paige from the baby swing and bounced on the balls of her feet in an effort to stop the crying. “If you want to be romantic, why don’t you try feeding our kid in the middle of the night? That’d be a lot more useful than bringing me something that’s going to be dead in a week.”

       Her bluntness had shocked him, even though he should have been used to it by then.

       But she’d had a point, so Nick had started handling Paige’s midnight feeding himself, at least on the days he hadn’t worked second or third shift. Even though it had meant concentrating twice as hard at work the next day in order not to topple into the blast furnace’s volcanic river and incinerate himself. 

       He’d never brought Tansy flowers again. Now, all these years later, he understood he should never have tried. The zenith of her interest had already passed, on the night she’d chosen him to distract herself with, for whatever reason. When he’d been so broken he’d unwittingly chained his future to hers.

       Still, for all that, Tansy was a good mother—fiercely loving toward Paige, for which she’d earned Nick’s undying respect. But her emotional range didn’t extend beyond maternal adoration. Sappy love movies bored her. During their marriage, she’d forgotten their wedding anniversary every year. And she’d never once told Nick she loved him.

       As far as he knew, it had never occurred to her to try.

       Meanwhile, he bled inside. He pretended otherwise, mostly for Paige’s sake, and masqueraded through adulthood with his poker face firmly intact. But in reality?

       He felt like a boy, sometimes. Like the scrappy kid from the wrong side of the tracks who’d given his heart away at seventeen and never gotten it back. Who still boiled with white-hot self-loathing when he thought about hurting a girl he’d once loved down to the roots of his soul.

       Who now spent hours at the gym, silencing the words he still wanted to say to her.

       Because if he’d married Aubrey, he would’ve penned her something every day. Spilled ink like so much lifeblood across the page. He would’ve written about her garnet hair and green eyes, about that look of hers, the one that made him feel like they were sharing a secret.

       His breathing quickened. If only there was some way to alchemize this regret into a way to pay the bills, because lately, the stacked-up words had begun to fester, as if he’d stuffed his jagged crevices full and had no place else to stash the leftovers. He’d tried to feed the words to the blast furnace. Sweat them out, punch them out, anything.

       But maybe they had another use.

       He sat up in the darkness, this morning’s radio segment still heavy in his thoughts. Somewhere, someone was getting paid to ghostwrite love letters. Meanwhile, here he was, overflowing with words he couldn’t say.

       He threw the covers back, then crept past Tansy’s door on quiet feet, down the hall to the cramped office, where he flicked open the sleeping laptop.

       He typed a few words into the search engine. Ghostwriting love letters for pay. After scrolling through the results, he sat back. No job postings that he could find, but that didn’t prevent him from trying on his own, did it?

       He navigated to one of those websites where freelancers could offer gigs to the public. After registering for an account, he typed Nick Thacker’s Love-Letter-Writing Service and pieced together an ad. For four hundred dollars, he would personally craft love letters for someone up to six months.

       He erased the ad, doubtful, then wrote it out again and posted the damn thing. What was the worst that could happen? He shut the computer and sat amid the muted roar of the rain.

       Yet the corrosive heat in his gut gnawed deeper, so instead of going back to bed, he ventured to the front door, then outside.

       In the driveway, the chilly autumn downpour assaulted him, more like a hail of bullets than actual rain. He tilted his head back and gulped the icy droplets. Maybe, on the off chance that someone responded to his ad, he could finally free himself. Crack open his chest and let the words gush out until the flames died back.

       Not that he’d actually be writing to Aubrey. But he could always pretend he was.

       Maybe that way, he could finally tell her goodbye.

 

 

 

 

2.

 

       Aubrey MacLean hadn’t believed she would truly return to Indiana until her feet touched Henderson’s broken sidewalk. The Greyhound bus trundled off, leaving her on an unmarked street corner halfway between farmland and civilization.

       She breathed deep. To a stranger, the late September evening might have seemed serene—cricket-song wafted on the air while clouds as fuzzy and soft as ripe peaches drifted overhead. But to Aubrey, menace lurked within the quiet.

       This place had nearly broken her. She’d never wanted to return.

       But here she was anyway, with a single purpose, and it didn’t involve standing around feeling sorry for herself.

       She set off with her suitcase, her stiletto heels finding wobbly purchase on the buckled cement. In the distance, the steel mill exhaled gray steam, and she wondered who worked there, these days.                    Probably most of the people she’d gone to high school with.

       At the thought, her heart rattled out a few gunfire beats. While boarding the bus in New York, she’d vowed not to dwell on Nick, but now questions crept in. Was he still living here in Henderson? Raising the child he’d had with Tansy? What did he even look like, after all these years?

       She told herself it didn’t matter. But the darkened windows of the passing row homes roused memories of familiar black eyes, and the tangled shadows edging the sidewalk looked for all the world like tousled, night-dark curls.

       She gritted her teeth and focused on the staccato tap of her heels. Click, clack, click, clack. One, two, three, four.

       After a minute or two or twenty, the ironclad perfection of numbers repelled the onslaught of memories. Nick Thacker might have had power over her once, but no longer. He probably didn’t live here anymore, anyway. Like her, he’d never wanted to stay.

       The thought loosened a knot within her.

       In town, her passing met with curious stares. The men all wore the dark, utilitarian coveralls of steelworkers, while the women enjoyed sweatshirts and messy buns. Meanwhile, Aubrey sported a shoulder-length red bob, dangly earrings, and a tailored boyfriend blazer.

       She tugged at her clothes. She probably shouldn’t have donned her corporate armor, but old habits died hard. Without meaning to, she’d dressed for proving herself. For holding her own in a male-dominated industry. Which she just about had, right before she’d gotten booted out the door.  

       One sky-high heel caught a ridge in the sidewalk, and she stumbled, pain knifing through her ankle. She caught herself, barely, and lowered herself to the curb with a whimper.

       A massage of her ankle revealed a joint already ballooning beneath her fingers. “Shit,” she muttered.

       Cars rumbled past. When she tried to stand, a hot spear of agony rewarded her, so she sank back down, wondering how she would possibly get her luggage across town to her old house now.

       She was still pondering when a car pulled off on the street’s far side—something meteor-gray and fancy, every bit as out-of-place here as she was. A tinted window rolled down, revealing an undeniably handsome face.

       “Hi, Miss. Do you need help?” The man’s teeth gleamed in the gathering dusk, somehow familiar. A heartbeat later, recognition hit Aubrey like a tidal wave.

       “Gallant?” she breathed. “Gallant Nobel? Is that you?” God, she hadn’t thought about him in ages. She’d nearly forgotten he existed.

       His brow furrowed. “Uh, hi. Have we met?”

       “We grew up together. It’s me, Aubrey MacLean.”

       Gallant’s expression slackened. He blinked once, then again. “Aubrey? The cheerleader?”

       She offered a half-smile. “Yep.”

       Within moments, he was out of the car, crossing the road with long strides. “My god. What’re you doing back? Are you okay? Where’s your car?”

       She gave a weary laugh. “I live in New York. I don’t have a car.”

       He grasped her outstretched hands and helped her to her feet. “Do you need a ride?”

       “Actually, that’d be great.” She gestured at the offending frost heave. “I’ve been back for all of twenty minutes and already managed to sprain my ankle.”

       He nodded. “These sidewalks’ll get you, if you let them.”

       “Right. I’d forgotten.” Apparently, her prolonged absence had taken an eraser to some memories. Just not the ones she wanted.

       Gallant squeezed her fingers and perused her up and down. “Wow,” he said. “You look...different.”

       Aubrey inspected him right back. For the most part, he looked the same, still blessed with the sort of face that graced clothing ads and served as an example of perfect human symmetry. Seventeen years hadn’t dulled the rich bronze hue of his hair or the crystalline blue of his eyes. But there was something subtly different. An aura of confidence, maybe. An easiness.

       Not like the overly cocky boy she remembered.

       “It’s been a while,” she said.

       He let go of her hands. “It really has. I can’t tell you how great it is to see you.”

       “You, too.” To her surprise, she actually meant it.

       Gallant’s eyes crinkled as he scooped up her suitcase. “Here, why don’t I get this? Can you walk? Or should I bring my car around?”

       She tested her hurt ankle, pleased when it took her weight. “I can get there on my own, I think. It just won’t be pretty.”

       He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

       Aubrey couldn’t stop an eyebrow from arcing. The old Gallant would’ve seized the opportunity to tell her she looked pretty doing anything. But maybe he’d changed. Either that, or he wasn’t in a position to flirt. Yet when she glanced down, both of his ring fingers were bare.

       He wheeled her suitcase across the road. Aubrey hobbled after him and situated herself in what proved to be a Tesla. The vehicle’s interior reminded her of a spaceship, sleek and dark and polished. As she latched her seatbelt, Gallant rolled up his window, shutting out the evening chorus of crickets and frogs. “Where to? Your old place, I’m assuming?”

       She nodded. “That, but maybe the grocery store first, if you have time. I could use an ace wrap and a few things for the house. Nobody’s been inside for a while.”

       Gallant made an affirmative sound and eased the car into motion.

       The quiet startled her. She’d been in electric vehicles before, mostly Ubers in New York, but the city’s din had prevented her from appreciating the lack of engine noise. Here, the silence was almost eerie.

       Gallant’s gaze flitted between her and the road. “So, what brings you back to Henderson? Now, I mean?”

       She didn’t miss the subtle emphasis on now. “You mean, why didn’t I come back when my dad died?”

       “Yeah.” His look turned sympathetic. “I’m sorry about that, by the way. He was a good guy. But I was pretty surprised we didn’t see you, afterward.”

       Aubrey turned to the window. Outside, single-level homes rolled by, backdropped by a twilit sky. The warm colors belied the chill in the air, which struck her as the perfect metaphor for her feelings toward her dad—warm and cold at once. “You probably weren’t the only one. But my dad never wanted a funeral. He just wanted us to spread his ashes somewhere beautiful. So my mom and I went to Switzerland.”

       Gallant nodded. “That sounds like a nice way to honor him.”

       “It was.”

       He didn’t seem flustered by the macabre subject and smoothly moved on. “And how’s your mom doing out in...California, was it? She got remarried, right?”

       “Yep. LA suits her. And my stepdad treats her like gold, which makes me feel a lot less guilty about living thousands of miles away.”

       Gallant turned onto Main Street. A heavy silver watch glinted on his wrist—something expensive, though Aubrey didn’t recognize the brand.

       “I’m glad she’s happy,” he said. “When she left Henderson, though... I kept thinking you’d show up. Put her house on the market, maybe.”

       Aubrey wondered if she was imagining the wistfulness in his tone. As if he really had thought about her, more than once. “I didn’t need to. Rich is...well, he’s rich, so my mom hasn’t needed the money.” She paused, then decided Gallant deserved the truth after offering her a ride. “My mom’s been wanting to deed me the house, but to be honest, I’ve been avoiding coming back.”

       He glanced over with curious eyes. “How come?”

       She hesitated. “You know.”

       “Nick Thacker,” he said. Not a question.

       “Yeah.” She swallowed the thousand other words scrabbling for purchase on her tongue. She wouldn’t ask if Nick still lived here. It didn’t matter. Her stint in Indiana would only last for as long as it took to convince her ex-boss to rehire her. She would hole up in her childhood home rent-free, put her nose to the grindstone, and glue the shattered pieces of her professional reputation back together. The moment she got her job back, she’d disappear.

       Gallant filled the heavy quiet. “So now you’re here to...what? Visit? Stay?”

       “Visit.” She ejected the word with force. “I should be back in New York by next year.”

       “Oh yeah?” He chuckled. “Funny. That’s where I’m headed. Probably in February.”

       She missed a beat. Henderson was the kind of town that sank its claws into people and didn’t let go. “You’re moving?”

       “Yep.”

       “To New York City?”

       “Yep.”

       A pang clamped around her chest. He said it so easily, like it was something just anyone could do, any time they liked. “What prompted that?”

       He shrugged. “I’m just ready for a bigger pond. You can only go so far in this town, you know?”

       She nodded. She did know.

       “Hey,” he said. “Last I heard, you were doing something brainy out there. Something mathy, like you always said. Accounting, maybe?”

       Aubrey mustered a limp smile. People who didn’t work with numbers rarely grasped the distinctions, so she doubted Gallant had demoted her on purpose. “I’m a mathematician, actually.” Or had been. Right now, she wasn’t anything, except disgraced.

       “Wow.” His eyes flared. “That sounds important. Good for you.”

       “Thanks.” She smoothed over the wobble in her voice with a cleared throat. “Seems like you did pretty well, yourself. Fancy car, fancy clothes...” She gestured to his charcoal blazer and pressed black slacks. “I’m guessing you didn’t end up at the steel mill.”

       He laughed. “Nope. Real estate.”

       “That’s fantastic.”

       He slid the Tesla into a parking spot outside the Kroger. Glowing neon letters arced above the store’s front doors, backlit by the fading sky. In the distance, the mill crouched like a watchful spider.

       “Just tell me what you need, and I’ll grab it,” he said. “No reason to make that ankle any worse.”

       Aubrey bit her lip, hesitant to indebt herself further. Gallant didn’t seem to expect anything in exchange for the ride, but she didn’t think she’d imagined the appreciative glow in his eyes.

       The corners of his mouth flicked up. “I can’t get over how incredible you look. Really.”

       Nope, not imagining it at all. “Thanks,” she said crisply. “But I’d better go in myself. I have extra shoes in my suitcase, so I’ll just change real quick. I won’t be long.”

       His forehead knitted. “You sure?”

       “Yep.”

       He shrugged and pulled out his cell phone, settling in to wait. Aubrey limped to the trunk to swap her stilettos for ballet flats. By the time the store’s sliding doors hissed open, the throb in her ankle had her questioning her decision, but she straightened her spine and pushed onward.

       Inside, more men in coveralls and women in jeans browsed beneath fluorescent lights. A poster soliciting donations for Henderson’s homeless pets met her front and center.

       She paused and dug through her purse for a twenty, then pondered the wisdom of parting with it. Breaking her lease in New York had also broken her bank account, but she would earn more money, eventually. Worthy causes couldn’t usually wait.

       That decided, she stuffed the bill into the bucket and found a cart, letting the pushbar take most of her weight. She rolled over to a display of firewood. If there was one thing she had missed about Henderson, it was the rambling old Victorian she’d grown up in. The majestic two-story boasted a wood-burning fireplace, which would come in handy, given that the furnace had been switched off for years and Aubrey had no idea how to rectify that. Tomorrow, she’d hire a handyman, but tonight, her plans involved a steaming mug of tea and a good, old-fashioned roaring blaze.

       After loading up on firewood and basic groceries, she found the first-aid aisle. Now that she was moving around, the sprain didn’t feel as debilitating as it had initially, but a brace wouldn’t go amiss.

       Aubrey was gazing down, trying to decide between the ace wrap in one hand and the lace-up brace in the other, when the hair on her neck lifted.  A tingle flooded her skin.

       And she knew. She just knew Nick Thacker hadn’t moved away. Somehow, the cadence of his footsteps still lived within her memory.

       He came up behind her and stopped.

       Her lungs quavered, but she stayed still, determined not to give him the satisfaction of turning around. He’d have to ask, and even then, she might walk away without even showing her face.

       Except when he rasped a single word, it dropped straight into her.

       “Aubrey?”

       She squeezed her eyes shut. Holy god, it was just her name, but the way he said it unzipped her skin, reached into her chest, and rearranged the beat of her heart. The mutinous thing pattered inside her ribs, its rhythm suddenly alien.

       “Jesus,” he said. “Is that really you?”

       Shit, shit, shit. He sounded exactly the way she remembered, like they’d stood here just yesterday instead of decades ago. His voice was still so husky, still filled with quiet fire, like a match struck against rough stone.

       She couldn’t help it. She turned around.

       The sight of him hit her like a one-two punch. Nick might have sounded the same, but he didn’t look it, not at all. He was all grown up. Tall enough that he could look down on her now, which made her wish uselessly for her stilettos. Another five inches would have put her on par with his eyes, at least.

       Not that anything could have prepared her to meet them. The color there reminded her of something depthless, so black she had trouble distinguishing where his irises ended and his pupils began. And while his eyes still tipped up at the corners, that once-noble upsweep now lent him an air of lethal intensity. He looked so...male. So big. So mature.

       Gone was the boy who’d snuck into her heart and ripped it apart with his bare hands. In his place stood a man, his face an opus of sharp lines and hard angles.

       She dropped her gaze, trying to escape the sudden flurry of her breathing, but the rest of him only compounded her problems. As a teenager, Nick had been skinny—frighteningly so—but now he’d filled out. And then some. A gray tank-top showcased the breadth of his shoulders while the sleeves of his unzipped navy coveralls knotted around a trim, muscular waist. He looked ridiculously fit, like he could punch through a concrete wall, if he wanted.

       Knowing him, he probably could.

       “It is you,” he said softly.

       A shiver skimmed down her spine. She searched for something to say. Absolutely anything. “You cut your hair,” she blurted, then winced.

       God, of all the things she could’ve come up with after seventeen years—chief among them being how can you stand there looking so casual after you destroyed me?—that was what emerged. You cut your hair. Fan-freaking-tastic.

       “Um. Yeah.” Nick scrubbed a hand across his scalp. His hair was as black as ever, but he’d shorn the unruly curls in favor of a buzz-cut no more than a quarter inch long.

       She wished it made him ugly. It didn’t. If anything, it only heightened the impact of those angular features, the way they conspired to rob her of breath. Somehow, Nick Thacker was more beautiful—more wildly dangerous—than he’d ever been.

       “I get too hot at work, otherwise,” he said.

       A long silence unspooled. Aubrey focused on the smudge of ash adorning his sculpted cheekbone. She wanted to break the brittle quiet by screaming—at herself for internally falling to pieces, or maybe at that blackened smear. It looked strategic, as if someone had painted it there, deliberate, for the express purpose of driving home how devastating he’d become.

       Why couldn’t he have just gained weight? Or lost his hair, like a normal person?

       Whatever. It didn’t matter. She needed to escape the suffocating buzz of the overhead lights. Now. “Well, it was nice seeing you. Or something. But Gallant’s waiting for me outside.”

       “Gallant? As in, Gallant Nobel?” His shoulders tensed, the reaction seemingly unconscious, because his eyes never changed.

       The impassivity there made her want to throw something. Once, she’d understood every flash within those depths, but now his eyes were a cool dark secret, a word inked in an alphabet she’d once cherished but since forgotten. He could’ve been pondering his grocery list or cursing her existence, and she wouldn’t have known the difference.

       “Yeah.” She did her utmost to mirror his composure. “I sprained my ankle, and he’s helping me out.”

       “Is he.”

       God, she needed out. Away. Mustering all the dignity her injury would allow, she tossed both ace bandage and brace into her cart and limped off.

       Just before she rounded the corner, Nick called out. “Aubrey, wait.”

       She looked back. She shouldn’t have, but she seemed just as incapable of ignoring him now as she had as a teenager.

       His raven-dark brows crooked. “Seventeen years, and that’s all you’re going to say to me?”

       Her breath caught at the way seventeen years rolled off his tongue as if he’d held the number in his mind already. As if it meant something to him. As if he’d kept track.

       But the calculation was straightforward enough: their age now, less their age the last time they’d seen each other. Thirty-five minus eighteen. Her calculator brain could do that in a nanosecond. She knew his could, too.

       It meant nothing.

       “Yes, Nick. That’s all there is to say.” Lifting her chin, she muscled her cart away and prayed this would be the last time they ever spoke.

But in a town like this, she probably wouldn’t get so lucky.

​

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