Her cell beeped, and she took her time getting it out of the back pocket of her low-slung jeans. Her fingers hovered over the message and she glanced at him.
The silence grew heavy and weighted, but then she gave a single nod and started walking toward the woods. He knew she wouldn’t need to look up the coordinates he’d texted her. The numbers were burned into his mind as well as hers. She’d whisper them to him when they were kids, from the time they were fifteen and eighteen and wanted to go for a swim or hang out or meet up to chat. It had been innocent then. After they’d started dating, it had stopped being innocent.
He shut the car door and caught up to her, keeping his strides short. Funny how some things came back to him so easily, like how to match his walk to hers.
She looked up at the sky. “It’ll be dark soon.”
He gauged the remaining time they had. “Will your mother need you?”
“No. Aunt Maile’s always home, and Mom’s actually pretty self-sufficient.” She shrugged, but the action looked heavy, like her shoulders weren’t well equipped to carry the weight they did. “I’m not needed.”
He curled his fingers into his palms, the sadness in those words making him ache. Did her family know? Livvy thrived on feeling needed. He usedto murmur the words in her ear, simply to watch her blossom.I need you. I want you.
She grew stiffer as they drew closer to their special place, but she didn’t demand they turn around. When they walked into the clearing, he caught the nostalgia and pain on her face. It was gone quickly, replaced by a blank stare.
She’d worn the same look when he’d told her they were finished.
Told her.It had been a speech, in the truest sense of the word, hadn’t it?
She strolled around the small pond in the center of the clearing and knelt to run her fingers through the water. They’d played here, loved here. And in the end, they’d broken up here.
He hadn’t sent her the coordinates that last time. He’d merely told her to meet him in the woods.
“Have you ever brought anyone else here?” she asked, staring at the water trickling through her fingers like they held the secrets to the universe.
He wasn’t fooled by her nonchalance. “Of course not.”
Another handful of water, seeping through her closed fingers. “Why not?”
“I would have felt like I was cheating on you.”
Her throat worked as she swallowed. “That’s dumb.”
“It’s probably why I haven’t been able to maintain any long-term relationships,” he said conversationally, pacing to the tree opposite the pond. “You either, right? You bristled when you saw me kissing Shel today.”
“We have no claim on each other.”
He chuckled, but he didn’t feel any humor. The words he spoke were naked and revealing, and he couldn’t stop them. “Livvy, for God’s sakes. How can I be with anyone else when I spend three hundred and sixty-four days waiting for you to draw me a map?”
She went statue-still. “Is that what you do?”
“Yes. It’s exactly what I do.”
Her light brown skin paled. “I—”
“It’s what you do too, isn’t it?”
“It might be what I did.” She shifted. “I stopped. Like I said, ten years is long enough to get it out of our systems.”
“Yeah.” He traced the letters carved into the tree. “You’d think so.”
The soft pad of her footsteps behind him made him ache. Her smaller hand came to rest just above the inscription. “I can’t believe it’s still here.”
“Where would it go?”
“Thought you might have chopped the damn thing down.” There was a quiver to her tone, belying her cockiness.
The words were carved in deep, made in the first flush of their love affair, not long after the first time they’d had sex.
