His eyes widened as if my asking shocked him.
“Right,” I said, giving my head a shake and then scowling at the surrounding houses. “Stupid Pelican Bay.” He heard because the whole town probably knew. No one kept a secret from anyone in this place.
Riley shrugged as if my business being plastered over the town even though I hadn’t returned in years was par for the course because that’s how it happened here.
“Small town life, you know. Do you like Tennessee?” he asked again, meaning he planned to pester me until he got an answer.
I hadn’t asked myself that question in years. Did I enjoy it in Tennessee? We turned the corner to my brother’s street as I considered his question.
I enjoyed living in the big city. It was nice to have nobody hear my business, and I only learned my neighbors’ first names. But it was also lonely. The only friends I’d made in almost a decade of living there were people I worked with every day. I never had a close-knit family like Riley and the Jeffersons, so I didn’t think I was missing much, but sometimes it was more noticeable than others.
Dating Riley showed me some families got along most of the time. They didn’t just exist on television. The Jeffersons were the best people I’d ever been around, but it didn’t stop me from needing to get out of the town. From Maine. From the East Coast. From everyone, including the girl I’d been then.
I wanted to be more in life than Cassandra Cable, the poor daughter of the family who bickered so often the police used their first names and could recite most of their family drama. It didn’t help that my parents’ arguments often took place in the middle of our front yard. They weren’t great about privacy. And then afterward, my mother made her way through town, garnering support from the other women as she told each and every one her side of the argument from the night before.
It made me appreciate my privacy more than anyone who hadn’t lived it ever understood.
Meaning Riley.
Moving to Tennessee gave me privacy and distance—a chance to strike out on my own and create an identity not wrapped up in my last name. Being a truck dispatcher for a large whiskey shipping center wasn’t my dream at eighteen, but it helped me reach other goals.
“Yeah, I do,” I answered him honestly, but I left a big opening at the end of my sentence. Riley and I had years of unspoken crap hovering between us, and I had no idea how to breach it.
We stopped at the edge of my brother’s lawn and both of us stared up at his house, knowing it was time for us to part ways. I enjoyed the hour with Riley eating ice cream, but I didn’t know if we’d get the chance to talk again before I left town. Or even if I wanted to. We’d avoided the hard topics this time, but could we a second? I didn’t have a place in Pelican Bay any longer. Once my brief vacation ended, we’d both return to our previous lives… alone.
“Riley,” I said and met his gaze. I had things I needed to say—things I should have said years ago. Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking of better ways I could have handled leaving, but I was only an eighteen-year-old girl searching for a way out.
How did I explain to him now when I couldn’t make up for the lost time?
“I’m sorry for just leaving. I should’ve said goodbye.” More than just leaving had caused me problems over the years. I also hated how I did it. Riley deserved more than I gave him, but I didn’t figure that out until I was two years into my self-determined exile.
His eyebrows rose as if he didn’t understand what I said. “No, you should have let me go with you like we planned. I worried about you alone out there by yourself.”
Ugh. Riley was always the hero.
“Taking care of me wasn’t your job.” I never wanted to be a burden to Riley. He had the entire world in front of him. I’d only hold him back from soaring. “It wasn’t your responsibility to worry about my problems.”
He tilted his head to the side, giving me a weird expression. His eyes held their usual sparkle. The July sun beat against my skin heavily. I’m sure the hot goosebumps that covered my arms were from that and not the way Riley stared at me.
“Maybe not, but I wanted the privilege. Why did you do it, Cass?”
I tossed my hands lightly into the air in an I-don’t-know gesture. How did I explain to Riley the emotions from that period of my life? At times I still waded through them even now as an adult. A screwed-up childhood really messed with a person.
“It wasn’t you, Riley.”
He snorted and rolled his eyes. “Is this the part where you tell me it was you, not me?”
I reached out for him but let my hand drop before we made contact. “No, what I mean is that it was my family. There was so much fighting and if I stayed in Pelican Bay, that was the life I’d be facing. I couldn’t bear you and me ending up that way. The whole town closed in on me. I was suffocating.”
“This doesn’t sound any better. So I suffocated you.” Hurt showed in his eyes.
Ugh. How did I make him see? This was Riley’s problem. He always considered himself responsible for everyone else. Even being the carefree youngest Jefferson, he still carried the weight of responsibility heavily on his shoulders. I didn’t want to add to his burden. I did him a favor when I left.
“It wasn’t you. Your family was the first taste of normality I had. You remember how bad my parents fought. I needed to get away from the expectations.”
Everyone saw Riley following in his family’s footsteps to become a strong, proud man. But what he didn’t realize was that everyone saw me as a mini version of my mother. They expected me to get married, fight with my husband constantly, and become another town sob story. Riley and I were looking at completely different futures if we stayed in Pelican Bay.
“No one can tell you your future, Cass. We could’ve been good together.”
