Remembering Everly (Lost & Found #2) (8 page)

Looking down at my glass of wine, I realized it was already gone and I was not nearly drunk enough for this train of thought. Reaching across the table, I grabbed one of the remaining shots of Fireball and tossed it back, followed by another, and then one more for good measure.

No one really seemed to notice. Everyone was far too busy, buried in their phones.

Maybe I should have used my penis shot glass. That might have gotten their attention.

“I’m going to the restroom and then I’m going to make a call,” I said, grabbing my phone.

“Ah, that’s so sweet!” Trudy said, her head tilting to the side.

“Hurry back, because I think our songs are coming up!” Sarah followed up.

“Will do!” I answered, finally feeling the effects of the liquor starting to kick in. I was always a lightweight when it came to alcohol. One glass, two tops, and I was a goner.

As I walked away from the table, my feet wobbled beneath me and I giggled as a plan formed in my befuddled mind.

I should not have been trusted with a phone.

I
was half asleep on the living room couch, watching
Ghostbusters
when the phone rang. It was the second movie—the one with the creepy painting and all the green goo. I personally liked the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man better. You never could go wrong with an original.

Unless, of course it was me.

Clicking off the movie, I looked up at the clock on the small cable box and I noticed the time.

Midnight.

Considering I knew about five people in the city outside of clients, I immediately sat up, feeling wide awake as I wondered who could possibly be hurt or in trouble at this late hour.

I’d canceled on Magnolia. Again.

She’d graciously understood, telling me she would be here whenever I was ready.

She understood everything now that I’d told her the truth. It was a relief knowing I could stretch out our relationship longer, postponing the attachment I knew she was forming, but at the same time I knew she wasn’t going anywhere.

There was literally nothing I could do to drive her away. I was like a lost puppy to her, and all I needed was love and a good home and soon enough I would be healed and good as new.

Only, I wouldn’t.

Nothing would ever fix me. I was permanently broken.

Grabbing my phone off the coffee table, I saw the caller ID and groaned.

The reason for my brokenness, calling at midnight.

That could not be good.

Don’t answer it
, I told myself, as my finger closed down on the green Accept button.

“Hello?” I said tentatively.

“You don’t love me, and I don’t think I love him.” Her voice was slurred. Loud music boomed in the background. “One big mess. So messy.”

“Everly?” I don’t know why I asked this. Maybe I was surprised at her words—her boldness. Maybe I just wanted to make sure it was really her on the other end.

“Yep. ’S me. Why’d you leave, August…Auggie.” She laughed. “You don’t like being called Auggie. But you probably already remember that. You remember everything now.”

She sounded sad about that little fact, but I let that go, focusing on bigger issues.

“Where are you?”

“Bar downtown. We’re celebrating me getting married.”

My heart sank as her words settled in place.

“You’re married?” I whispered.

“Nooooo.” Her voice, low and raspy, nearly sung the word as I breathed out a sigh of relief. “My bachelor party,” she slurred once again.

Bachelorette party, I interpreted. She wasn’t married yet. I shouldn’t care, but I did.

When it came to Everly, I would always care too much.

 Even when she was some other man’s wife.

“Why are you calling me, Everly?” I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

“I had to pee,” she began, pausing for a moment. I could imagine her swaying back and forth in some darkened hallway. I hoped it was a safe one. “My friends were supposed to show me a good time tonight because I had to spend all day with my evil mother-in-law. Evil mother-in-law to-be,” she corrected herself. “She doesn’t like my hair. Or my pretty dress. Do you like my dress, Auggie?”

“I like everything about you,” I answered honestly, knowing she wouldn’t remember a damn thing about this conversation by morning. Remembering the few times we’d drunk way too much wine with dinner, I knew one thing about Everly.

She was a horrible drunk. She’d be out like a light in less than an hour and would wake up with a bitch of a hangover and little memory of the night before. It’s why she didn’t drink excessively. She hated the feeling of losing control.

Me? The way my life was going lately—drinking was the only thing that felt halfway like living.

“No you don’t,” she sighed. “You hate me, because of what I did—because of what I did to you. You know, I dream of that night sometimes?”

“Me too,” I replied.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” she mumbled. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just got so angry, and then we collided and you crumbled to the ground. I thought you were dead.” She was nearly frantic in her drunken haze as she recalled the events of that night.

“It’s okay, Everly,” I tried to say.

“No it’s not! I should have told someone then what happened. But I was so scared. What if they didn’t believe me? What if I went to jail? I don’t know why I did it—no, that’s not true. I do. I did it because I was scared I’d be taken away from you.”

Confusion blossomed in my mind. “But you left me anyway.”

“I didn’t want to.”

“You had to,” I said, realizing she’d done what was right. For both of us.

“We were toxic. So very toxic. I thought we could heal—when you came back, and didn’t remember anything. But we still fell apart. And now you hate me. And honestly, I wish I hated you too. I want to hate you. It would be so much easier.” He voice cracked, the pain in her words making my chest hurt.

“I know.”

“Why can’t I hate you, Auggie?”

“Probably for the same reason I can’t hate you,” I confessed.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I replied, quickly changing the subject. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to your party now?”

“Probably,” she confessed. “All my friends were texting their guys, making goofy happy grins while I just stared at them dumbfounded. So I got up and peed. And then I called you.”

It wasn’t exactly a profession of love, but I didn’t miss the fact that she hadn’t called Ryan.

She’d called me.

“Why did you leave me, August?” she asked, her voice turning serious.

“I didn’t. You left me.”

She groaned, giving a bit of levity to the serious tone. “You didn’t give me a choice. When Trent showed up, you knew I’d never stick around. You basically kicked me out by welcoming him in.”

My eyes squeezed shut, remembering that day.

I’d just landed my first placement in an art studio. It was a major step in the right direction for me careerwise and I had been nearly vibrating with energy when I’d arrived home, ready to share the news with Everly.

But I never got the chance.

Trent had beat Everly home, and my whole life had crashed around me.

I had pushed her away, but not because I didn’t love her.

I’d have to be dead to stop loving that woman, and even then, I didn’t think my soul would ever cease seeking hers.

“Why’d you do it? Why did you choose money over me—again, August? We were almost there…almost at our perfect forever. And then you pushed me away, like you always do. Why am I never enough?”

“You’d never understand,” I said softly, knowing I could never risk this kind of truth on a drunken phone conversation.

“Do you remember our baby name game?” she asked, her voice more steady and clear now.

“Tell me about it—like before I had my memory. Every detail, Everly,” I requested, grateful for her quick change of pace. I feared she’d ask why, demand to know why a man who said he remembered everything wanted such detail, but in her loose, languid state, she just did as requested and began speaking.

I could nearly feel her warm smile against my cheek as she began to slowly speak in my ear, recounting the memory as she recalled it.

“After we moved into our little house with the flower boxes, I would drag you to garage sales every weekend—without fail. You hated it. Garage sales equaled other people’s used shit in your opinion, and the faces you would make sometimes as we walked past boxes of used clothes and baby gear would make me laugh like a hyena. But I loved it. It was decorating on the cheap, and in no time, I was able to turn our little drafty house into something beautiful.”

I did have a few memories of us in that house, and from what I remembered, it was everything she described. Homey, warm, and comfortable. I hadn’t realized the effort she’d put into making it ours and breathing life into it.

Had she mourned its absence from our lives when I’d whisked her away so suddenly and given her something so new and shiny? Had I even considered how that might have made her feel?

“One day,” she continued, “we were walking through a typical sale. This one was heavy on baby stuff, but I’d managed to find a few pieces I thought I could repurpose for our living room. Just as I was about to haggle with the man for a lower price, something caught my eye. A baby name book. Picking it up, I turned to you and waved it back and forth, waggling my eyebrow, figuring you would have a stroke and die right on the spot. Instead, you just grinned, snatched it from me and handed the man a dollar, which was twice the asking price, and started flipping through it.

“‘Maxim?’ you called out, your eyebrow going all crazy again. ‘For what?’ I asked, thinking you’d gone completely insane. Which you had, by the way.”

A small chuckle escaped my throat.

“‘For our future little munchkin,’ you said. And then it was me who had the heart attack and died.”

My chuckle turned into deep rich laughter, and she joined in.

“You were never afraid of anything back then. I don’t know what happened.”

Me neither, Everly. Me neither
, I thought.

“You continued to do this little game all the way home, each name becoming more and more atrocious until I finally caved and gave my opinion. It turned out to be so much fun that whenever we were bored, we’d pull out that battered old book and start going through names, laughing at the terrible ones, highlighting the ones we actually adored, like our own plan for the future, and just enjoying each other.”

She paused, the silence becoming thick.

“I never do things like that with Ryan.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that so I just let silence speak for me.

“I feel like I’m living a life everyone expects of me, August,” she murmured. I could hear the tears she was trying to keep at bay.

“Then live the life meant for you,” I urged.

“What if that life was supposed to be with you?”

“There’s only one bird in that cage, Everly,” I reminded her. “Let her run free. Let her find her own life.”

“How?”

“Isn’t that the first step?” I chuckled. “Figuring out this shit on your own.”

“This makes my head hurt.”

“No, I’m pretty sure that’s the alcohol,” I told her.

“Gross. Don’t remind me. Speaking of which, I need to pee again. I knew I shouldn’t have gone in the first place. Now I’m just going to be peeing all night long.”

“Drinking 101—never break the seal. You should have known better,” I smiled, hating that our conversation was coming to an end.

“August?” she said one last time.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“When I wake up in the morning, and everything about this night is fuzzy…what should I remember?”

I took a deep breath, letting it fill my lungs as I put my thoughts together.

“Remember that you’re a strong woman, that your friends love you and that more than anything, you should stay away from me, Everly. Stay far, far away from me.”

She sighed, a sad sigh full of frustration.

“Okay. Good-bye, Auggie.”

I smiled at the nickname, “Good-bye, Everly.”

The phone went dead and as I sat there in the darkness, I tried to picture her in the unlit corner of the bar, her hair frazzled and tossed as she made her way back to her friends with the secret of our conversation. I tried to picture what she was wearing, how the fabric would cling to her glistening skin. No doubt she’d have the attention of every male in the room, and not notice a single glance. She never had.

I hoped she remembered everything I told her, about finding something for herself in this life. For once, my motives didn’t have anything to do with jealousy. If she found all roads pointed to him and that was where she was happiest, at least she’d know that was where she belonged.

But she needed to take a leap—and no one could push her off that cliff but herself.

“
Lucifer
?” she laughed, holding the book so close to her face it almost touched her nose. I swore one of these days I was going to get that girl to the eye doctor.

I’d love to see her in a pair of glasses.

Nerdy Everly. So hot.

“Are you crazy? Do you want a demon child?” I grinned, grabbing the book from her grasp. I flipped through it, loving the many highlights we’d done over the last few months we’d had this book. What had turned into an afternoon joke had become one of our favorite pastimes. While we’d never actually spoken specifics, we loved the idea of ‘what if’. There were no immediate or concrete plans to have a child or to even get married, but the notion that there could be—someday—sent butterflies to our stomachs and made us just…giddy.

“What about Abstinence?” I said, trying to keep my face calm and neutral.

“That is not in there.”

“I swear to God.”

She snatched the book back from me, and her eyes scanned the page full of “A” names as her eyes went wide.

“No way! Who would do that to a child?”

“An overprotective father. Just think of her teenage years,” I laughed. “No shotgun needed. Guys wouldn’t touch a girl with that name.”

“Or,” she debated, “you’d end up with the most promiscuous daughter on the planet, determined to prove her name wrong just to spite her parents.”

“Ouch. Good point. That’s dicey. Krystianna is looking better and better day by day.”

“I liked Krystianna!” she retorted, throwing the book at me playfully.

“Yeah, I know. But it’s never going to happen. Krystianna Kincaid? That’s a mouthful.”

She climbed on my lap, my eyes roaming her tight little body as our skin came together on the couch.

“What makes you think I’m taking your name, Mr. Kincaid?” she whispered as my hands wrapped around her ass, pulling her closer.

“Because I like the sound of my name with yours,” I answered roughly.

Her eyes rounded as her lips softly touched mine. “I do, too.”

Sometimes the memories came without rhyme or reason. Sometimes they came because of a certain person or trigger. Often they brought me to my knees, interrupting my day and life, but other times, they came in the form of dreams.