I huffed out an annoyed laugh. I should have known this was where the conversation was heading. “Do tell, Everett. Who might you be thinking of?”
“Me? I’m not thinking ofanyone,” Ev said innocently. “Who did you think I was thinking of?”
I rolled my eyes. There wasn’t a soul in O’Leary who wouldn’t know who he was talking about: The boy with the gray-green eyes and the light hair who’d been my first best friend and first boyfriend, the first person I’d come out to, and the one who’d held me when I cried for my sister. The only man I’d ever said ‘I love you’to. The guy who’d left O’Leary—andme—in his rear-view mirror eleven years and almost five months ago, and then moved back last year on a whim and expected me to throw a goddamn parade because he’d decided to reappear.
It reminded me of vacation Bible school, back when I was a kid, and that stupid prodigal son story they’d tried to indoctrinate us with. The parable remained as incomprehensible to me today as it had been back then. Why the hell would you slaughter a fatted calf for the son who went off and had his adventures? Save the fucking calves for the ones whostayedandworked.
“Hear me now, Everett,” I warned. “Parker Hoffstraeder and I aredone. We haven’t beenanythingto each other for over eleven years. So if you’re thinking…whateveryou’re thinking… just stop thinking it.”
“Pfft. I’m not thinking anything,” Ev retorted. “Except that you don’t talk about Parker.Ever. It’s telling.”
“Yeah? What it should tell you is that I don’t have a damn thing to say. I barely remember him,” I lied.
“It’s like negative space,” he persisted. “In a painting. Sometimes, the negative space highlights the subject. Sometimes itisthe subject.”
“Hmm. Can we go back to parsley?” I knew I was being obnoxious. I was beyond caring. “Iunderstoodthe parsley thing. More or less.”
“You’re a cretin,” Ev said. “But sure. Have it your way. Parker’s not parsley.”
“Brilliant. Concise. Incomprehensible. You’re three for three.”
“So stubborn.”
“I am not! Do you remember every guy you dated for a hot minute a decade ago, Everett? Should we talk about all of your past loves?” I demanded.
“I only had the one before Silas,” Everett said quietly. “And I used to make a point of not talking about him. But it wasn’t because I didn’t care or didn’t remember him. It was because it hurt too fucking much.”
Ugh. I took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh.Awesome job, Jameson. Bring up his dead husband. Let’s see who else you can piss off tonight.
And the thing was, Ev was right. About this part, anyway. Because buried beneath the bunker in my mind where I kept the memories of my parents and Molly, there was a secret vault—a serious, hardcore, bomb-proof chamber, like the ones on TV where they kept the most dangerous prisoners and the biological weapons—and that was where I kept my thoughts and memories of Parker from back when we had been Parker-and-Jamie. Parker’s light hair glinting in the sun. Parker’s green eyes hot on mine. Parker’s smile, lighting up all the dark and lonely places inside me. Those were not memories I took out and looked at, even when I was drunk. Some things were just too painful to fuck around with.
“Look,” Ev said after a moment of silence, “if you’re not hung up on Parker, that’s a good thing. A great thing, under the circumstances, right? But it doesn’t mean you have to be withBrian. Get it? It’s not Brian or Parker or nothing. There are other options, you know? A whole world of options.”
I opened my mouth to disagree with him, when my mind caught on the first part of what he’d said.
“Wait, what circumstances?” I demanded. I put on my blinker and took the left turn onto Lobelia.
“Uh. Parker’s circumstances? Obvs.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ohhh,” Ev drawled. “I figured you knew. Parker left town.”
I hit the brake so hard the truck jolted to a stop in the middle of my street just a few doors down from my house. For one brief second it wasn’t winter but late summer; it wasn’t pitch dark but bright and sunny; I wasn’t an adult but an angry idiot teenager, and I was hearing those words in Beatrice Hoffstraeder’s voice, a little smug and a little defiant, as she informed me that her son had gone to Boston for college and wouldn’t be back because Parker had seen the error of his ways.
My pulse pounded in my ears. “He what?”
“He’s gone to Arizona. He went by the bakery this afternoon to say his goodbyes, and it didn’t sound like he’d be back. I mean, what for? Poor guy’s lost everything. The fire at Hoff’s was… devastating.”
“I know,” I said thickly. “I was there, remember?”
I’d been finishing up my shift at the diner, thinking about Christmas, when Ruthann Kelley had run in, all breathless and wide-eyed, yelling, “Parker’s place is on fire! Everyone’s still inside!” The whole diner had cleared out in an instant as everyone—including me—ran down the street to stand behind the police barrier and gawk at the bar patrons who emerged from the building, coughing and stumbling, just before the whole place went up in flames.
I hadn’t gone to gawk, though. I’d gone because my heart had stopped beating and the breath had frozen in my lungs the second I thought that Parker might be in danger, and they hadn’t resumed normal function until I’d seen him standing shell-shocked in the cold and wrapped my arms around him. Because friend or not, history or not, there was some part of me that couldn’t help it.
“I remember,” Ev said. “And I remember that he said some stuff the night of the fire too. Stupid shit about—”
“Me causing the fire to get him to leave town. Yeah.” I resumed my drive down the street. “That was super fun. Fortunately for me, I had an alibi.”
