“Go on, pick a page and read it to me.” Dane slid lower in his chair and closed his eyes.
I flipped the notebook open to a random page.
“What’s it say?”
“This one’s cheesy,” I warned him.
“Don’t care. Whatever page you open it to is the one you have to read.” He sat up and smiled. “That’s a new rule I made up. The people who write those notes want to be heard, so let’s hear them.”
Heart. Melting. “Okay, just remember you asked for it. Based on the handwriting and what it says, I’m pretty sure this was a teenage girl, probably out there with her parents, but maybe not.”
“You’re stalling,” he pointed out, smirking again. If I was bolder, I’d have lunged over this table and kissed that cocky grin off his face.
I met the most amazing guy yesterday, but I probably won’t get to see him again. He was funny and really cute. And he said I had a nice smile. No one’s said that to me before, probably because I had those stupid braces for so long. But he liked my smile…
I kept reading until the end of the letter, signed with a heart with two sets of initials.
“That wasn’t so bad,” he said when I finished. “I wonder if she did get to see him again before they left. Or if they at least kept talking. I hope so.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a closet romantic, Dane Montgomery,” I teased.
“For other people, sure,” he conceded.
My heart ached that he thought love and romance was something for everyone but him. Wanted to know what’d happened in his life that gave him such a callous view. It’d make sense if he’d grown up around his grandparents, but he’d been spared of that.
Without hesitating I shifted to the chair between us, lifting Dane’s feet and dropping them into my lap. His eyes shot open, he tensed, but then he gave me that killer, perfectly straight smile. Maybe it was the part about the girl having braces and getting picked on that resonated with him. It was possible he truly didn’t understand how gorgeous he was, and I wanted to be the one to show him.
“This okay?” I asked, digging the tips of my fingers into his rock-hard calves. It was possible they were so firm because of muscle tone, but he radiated tension. The beach was relaxing to most people, but if anything, Dane had grown more tense every day since he’d arrived. As I worked, I felt the tissue relaxing, warmed when he sighed praises. He toed out of the sandals he’d bought, wiggling his toes in a not-so-subtle invitation to keep going. I handed over the notebook so he could continue reading while I focused on making him feel good.
I kept rubbing while Dane leafed through the notebook, occasionally stopping to read some of the shorter notes or turn the book around so I could see a drawing.
“What happens to the notebooks when the mailbox is full?” he asked.
I sighed. “Volunteers take them up to UNC Wilmington whenever there’s a full box, and they’re in the library there.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to store them someplace local?”
“It would,” I confirmed, wanting to hear where his mind was going.
“Do you keep any notebooks here?”
I shook my head.
“Why in the hell not? Is it some sort of territory thing? Is there a group dedicated to all things Kindred?”
“No, it’s nothing like that.” I chuckled, placing one foot on the ground and taking the other in my hand. “The mailbox belongs to all of us and none of us. But this is the way it’s been, so this is the way it is.”
“Sometimes things need to change. The way things always were doesn’t necessarily work moving into the future.” The wistful tone in his voice told me he wasn’t only talking about the mailbox or Sunset Beach. “Do you ever stop and wonder what your life would have been like had one thing not happened?”
“Sure, I think everyone does. But everything that’s happened in our lives leads us to where we are, guides us to where we’re going.” I’d read in a self-help book once that you couldn’t dwell on the crappy parts of life because without them, you’d never have had the joys either. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it made sense, and from then on, it was how I tried to live my life. “What about you? What do you wish had been different?”
“Plenty,” he admitted. “I used to spend a lot of time wondering why it was just me and my dad, why my mother didn’t stick around. I mean, I get that maybe she and Dad weren’t meant to be, but how could she just leave like that? If she’d hung around, I’d have at least had someone there when everything went down with my dad. I wouldn’t have lived with the asshole who pretended to be his best friend.”
This was more than he’d ever offered about his own past. I slowed my hands as I listened to him rant about his childhood, about the time after his dad went to prison. The longer he talked, the clearer the picture became; Dane wasn’t the manwhore he pretended to be. He was a hurt little boy, scared to let anyone get close to him.
I stood and motioned for him to follow me into the lobby of the hotel, suddenly wanting to be someplace a bit more private. The only problem was his room seemed a little too intimate. Had my foot been healed, I would have suggested a long walk. But there was one place I could show him as a bit of tit for tat.
I ducked behind the desk and grabbed the master keys before leading him upstairs. I stayed ahead of him so he couldn’t see the pain in my expression. I’d overdone it today and was going to be hurting tomorrow.
