Where My Heart Breaks (21 page)

“By being subservient and meek to a woman who will rule the rest of your life if you let her?” Millie asked. “I get it, Kate. You messed up, and your parents were there to help you straighten your life out. I was there too. But I’m not imposing my rules and beliefs on you now.”

It was eerie that I had heard a similar argument not twelve hours before, but I dismissed Reed’s because he didn’t know me. Millie knew me better than I knew myself.
 

“Can you back off, please?” I finally said. “I have enough people in my life telling me what I am supposed to do. I’ll go out with Sam because he’s a nice guy and I’m not a complete bitch.”

“No, you’ll save that for when you break his heart and dump him after that date,” Millie said.

“I know that given time, he’ll see that we were meant to be friends,” I said quietly.
 

“Well, you can go ahead and send him in my direction then. I’m very good at helping to pick up the pieces of a broken heart.”

By this time, we were in the car and on our way into town. Millie always insisted on driving, so I let myself sink into the plush leather of her BMW convertible and closed my eyes.
 

I felt emotionally drained and exhausted. Suddenly, I was not looking forward to working that evening with Sam. I decided Millie’s sudden therapy session was intended to distract me from Sam. I had no idea what Millie saw in Sam in those few minutes that had so quickly piqued her interest in him, but I wasn’t going to pry any further. Once Millie set her mind on something, or someone, it was game over. I almost felt sorry for Sam. He’d have no idea what hit him.

I heard the beeping notification of my phone. Since the only person who regularly texted me was in the seat next to me, I had a sinking suspicion that I knew who it was. I slowly pulled the phone out of my pocket.
 

Are you avoiding me?

Hell, yes, I was avoiding him. It was immature, but the only line of defense I had at the moment.
 

“Is that the mysterious Mr. Black inquiring about scheduling your next orgasm?” Millie asked without taking her eyes off the road.

“You are so crude,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it. I deleted the message and returned my phone to my pocket.

“Playing hard to get, I see.”

“Shut up,” I growled.

“Well, you should probably say something to the guy at some point. I mean, what if he decided to show up at the Willoughby to try talking to you? Wouldn’t your aunt have a heart attack?”

That thought made me sit straighter in the seat. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I figured that if I didn’t respond, Reed would take the hint that there wasn’t anything to discuss, and he would move on.
 

I groaned. “I’m going to have to talk to him.”

“Of course you are, silly,” Millie said. “Order the orgasm to go.”

“I doubt he’s going to have any further interest in my orgasms,” I said. “He’s being nice. Patrice looked like she was going to murder both of us when he dropped me of last night. He’s not a complete jerk.”

“So you still think he’s going to do the wham-bam-thank you ma’am with you?”
 

I hated hearing what happened the night before belittled down into a typical cliché. I had one-night stands before. Not a lot of them, but enough to understand the emptiness of an act that had nothing more than the mutual goal of scratching an itch that refused to be satisfied any other way. One of them had been decent, but the other two were awful. There was an awkwardness going in that only grew progressively worse through the act itself. Then you had to deal with the lies that you tell each other to make the quickest escape possible. After that, all eye contact is avoided, and if you do happen to bump into each other again, excuses are made to keep the exchange short.
 

None of that felt like what happened with Reed. I felt like he opened up to me and pulled me into his world. It killed me to wonder if he did that with all of the women that he seduced. Or who seduced him. His vulnerable side made him all the more attractive.

By this time, we had entered Bleckerville proper, but I didn’t have the energy to point all out of the sights to Millie. Of course, in a town the size of Bleckerville, all the sights were pretty much on display on Main Street anyway.

“We didn’t have a chance to discuss it,” I said stiffly. “Reed made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t date. Sexual attraction does not a relationship make. But it doesn’t matter because I can’t have a relationship with him anyway.” I was still waiting for that knowledge to sink in to my brain and become real.
 

“We need a little diversion, so you two to can have a little reunion and work out all your issues,” Millie said. It was exactly what I had thought earlier that day.

“If Patrice finds out, I’m dead,” I said.

I pointed at Baker Street. It turned out that the Good Day Café was just around the corner. Millie slid her car into one of the empty spots and threw the car into park. She turned to me with serious eyes.
 

“Get your phone out. Here’s what we’re going to do. Try and keep up, sweetie.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I put myself in Millie’s hands and waited on the sidelines as Millie did what Millie did best: plot, plan, and organize.

Somehow she talked me into giving her Reed’s phone number. Then she shoved me inside the café and pointed at a booth next to the window before flouncing back outside. I nervously watched her talk on her phone for the next five minutes. She smiled and laughed several times, which bothered me a hundred times worse than when I watched her flirt with Sam. Millie was exactly Reed’s type. With her looks and extroverted personality, I didn’t stand a chance if he decided she was the one he wanted.

As I waited for Millie’s return, a young woman with shoulder length dishwater blond hair approached with a pleasant smile. Her face was familiar, and I remembered then that Sam mentioned his sister worked at the café. Her name tag confirmed it.
 

“Can I get you something to drink?” She looked at me with obvious curiosity, and I wondered if she knew who I was.

“Two diet cokes, please,” I said. I tried not to glance back out the window at Millie. “And menus.”

“No problem,” she said. She pulled two small skinny menus out of her apron and set them on the table in front of me. “Are you Kate by chance?”

“Guilty,” I said. “You must be Trina. Sam mentioned you.”

Trina chuckled. “Probably with a promise of pie.”

I couldn’t resist chuckling back. I liked her. She seemed to have her brother’s easygoing, casual personality, which helped me relax. “He might have said something about that,” I confessed.

“If you’re still hungry for dessert, I’ll hook you up,” she said with a wink. She started back toward the counter when Millie came through the door.
 

I looked at her expectantly as she sat down across from me. She opened her menu and started to look through it. I let the silence stretch on for another ten seconds before I couldn’t stand it anymore. “What did you do? What did he say? Tell me everything!”

Millie looked at me with a warning look as Trina appeared next to the booth setting down two glasses of Diet Coke. I realized that saying anything about Reed in front of Sam’s little sister would probably be poor form.

“Do you have any questions about the menu?” Trina asked.

“What’s good here?” Millie asked.
 

“The cook makes a mean tuna melt,” Trina said.
 

“Done. We’ll have two of those,” Millie said, handing the menus back to Trina with a brilliant smile. “Your brother seems like quite a gentleman.”

I had that vomiting sensation in the back of my throat again.

Trina cocked her head at Millie and looked a bit shocked. I knew what was running through her head. Somebody like Millie wouldn’t normally give a guy like Sam the time of day. Something wasn’t adding up.

“Thanks,” Trina said. She shuffled away quickly, probably because she didn’t know what else to say.
 

I was thinking that I didn’t even like tuna melts, but my stomach was doing flip flops at the moment and I didn’t think I’d be able to eat anything anyway. As soon as I saw Trina disappear through the saloon style doors to the back, I reached across the table and grabbed Millie’s hand.

“Tell me,” I demanded.

Millie winced and pulled her hand out of my manic grasp. I had forgotten how strong she was. “Chill. It’s all arranged. There’s a place down the road that’s secluded and he said he likes to go fishing there a lot. It’s beneath some bridge that he said you’d know, Knock Bridge or something like that?”

“Knollwood Bridge. It’s from the book.” It was a poetic choice. Jackson and Camilla met under that bridge to discuss the consequences of their illicit affair and what they were going to do about it. It was so like Reed to make me meet him there.

Millie had continued on, not noticing my reflective pause. “He said it wouldn’t be weird for people to see his truck parked on the side of the road there. I’ll drop you off there at one-thirty and then pick you back up at three, so there’s plenty of time for us to get some shopping in before you have to get back.”

“You are prioritizing shopping over my love life?” I sputtered.

Millie sighed. “Oh, stop being so dramatic. I’ve given you ninety minutes to do…whatever. I’ll lay low and take a drive and check out the scenery. It would look strange for me to be around town without you, especially if you think your aunt’s spies are watching you as closely as you think.”

She had a point.
 

“Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” I asked.
 

“Whatever life decisions you are making in your head, you need to have all the facts, and you’ll need to have closure. Right now you are spinning your wheels, and it’s driving both of us crazy.”

Leave it to Millie to be sure I knew how my chaotic life affected her. For the next forty-five minutes, Millie talked my ear off about her grand ideas for bringing the wedding business to the Willoughby. I only half listened as my thoughts had turned to the man that I was meeting after lunch.

As expected, I nibbled at the tuna melt. It actually wasn’t half bad, but I wasn’t hungry. My stomach felt tight, and as the time that we had to leave approached, I felt the onset of panic.
 

“Kate, I realize that I knowingly enjoy the sound of my own voice more than the average person, but seriously, even I am getting sick of hearing myself talk at this point,” Millie finally said. She had polished off her tuna melt and fries and liberated mine as well when I wasn’t paying attention.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not being very good company, am I?”

“What’s Patrice’s story? I mean, you told me that she’s a widow and stuff, but what made her decide to buy that old place? It seems like a lot of work.”

It was a safe and legitimate turn to the conversation, and I was ashamed to realize how little I had been thinking about Patrice in my own drama. “She and my Uncle John bought it together about eight years ago. I remember thinking it was beautiful when my mother showed me the pictures. We never made it out here to visit.”

“Why? It’s a doable drive from Baltimore.” Millie’s mouth was full. It disgusted me how much Millie could eat. I have no idea where she put it in her willowy frame. She worked out at the gym like a fiend though, so at least she wasn’t one of those “I can eat whatever I want and not get fat” girls. Millie earned her figure the old-fashioned way, blood, sweat, and tears. I respected her for that. I wasn’t as committed.

“I don’t think that Patrice and my mother are that close,” I said. “But in the end I think they’re a lot alike. That’s why my mother was okay sending me out here. Being with Patrice is the next best thing to actually being with my mother.”

“Good ole Mrs. Spivey,” Millie said, shaking her head.
 

Millie and I had been friends for three years, and my mother had never invited her to call her by her first name. It was slightly embarrassing, but luckily Millie got it after spending a little bit of time with my family. There wasn’t a lot of warm and fuzzies in the Spivey household. It had been even worse when I was a kid. I watched my friends’ moms fuss over them, give them lots of hugs and praise, and I wondered what was wrong with me that my mother didn’t do that with me. It wasn’t until I crossed the line into adulthood that I came to the realization that it wasn’t me at all. It was her. I had no excuses for her anymore.
 

“I thought that Patrice was at least reasonable,” I said. “I thought that she was pleased with how I was doing. I was pretty proud of myself anyway. Guess I was wrong.”

“Patrice is okay,” Mille said. “I think she’s stressed out. Like I said, I think it’s a lot of work running that place alone.”

I thought about what Millie said. I naturally assumed that Patrice’s distance had to do with her disapproval of me, but, as usual, that was my own self-involved perception. The whole reason that my mother sent me to Patrice was because things hadn’t been going well since Uncle John passed away last year.

“Well, I’m here to help her. At least for the summer,” I said.

“Speaking of help, here comes our pie,” Millie said, her face lighting up. At my questioning look, she clarified. “Helping me take care of my sweet tooth.”

Millie’s logic was astonishing sometimes.

Trina set two pieces of apple pie down in front of us. Even though I still had no appetite, I had to admit that the aromas wafting to my nostrils made my mouth water. I did need to eat.

She placed the bill face down at the edge of the table. “The pie went on Sam’s tab.”

“I’ll remember to thank him later,” Millie assured her.

“It was nice to meet you, Trina,” I said. The girl waved to me before she left the table.

“What is up with you and Sam?” I asked as I picked up my fork. The pie was too tempting to resist. I moaned as I put the first bite in my mouth. It was the slightest bit tart, but the sweet cinnamon crispness offset it perfectly, and it was as if it melted in my mouth.