Page 102 of People Like Us

“Say it again,” he begged, his fingers digging into my hip as he pinned me against the couch cushions.

“Always August. I mean it. Haunt me if you have to, but I will always love you.” My nails dug deep into the muscles flexing in his back with every thrust.

He cupped my face as he kissed me fiercely. “I’ll haunt you. Every day of your life, Lola. You’ll never get over me. I won’t let you.” His kisses tasted like salt.

He drove into me only a moment longer until his hips faltered, and then slowed in a stuttering rhythm as August let out a sound that was half whimper half groan. His cock twitched inside me as he filled the condom before his body gave out, and his weight settled against me fully.

We laid like that for a long moment, panting and tangled with his head against my thumping chest before he broke the silence.

“Is it always like that?” he asked softly.

“Like what?” I asked, though I was sure I knew the answer.

“Heavenly,” he breathed out.

“No,” I said easily. “It’s never been like that for me.”

Chapter Forty

By the time we crossed into Salisbury, my palms were slick against the steering wheel.

I wasn’t used to Carolina summers anymore—the heavy wetness of them, the way the air smelled like standing water and hot dirt. The humidity here sat against your skin differently than it did in New Orleans. Down there it felt alive, lush and green. Here it felt stagnant. Like rebirth and death all at once.

My husband sat beside me with one arm resting against the open window while our son snored softly in the backseat, sticky-faced and exhausted from the flight. Endless rows of tobacco shops and old brick storefronts rolled past outside the windows.

“That theater,” I said absently, pointing toward a faded marquee downtown, “used to do midnight screenings of Rocky Horror every October. Emily snuck me in once when we were sixteen.”

My husband smiled faintly. “You? At Rocky Horror?”

“I contained multitudes,” I said defensively.

“You still do.”

I huffed a laugh through my nose, but my eyes kept moving over the streets. Salisbury looked both exactly the same and entirely wrong. New restaurants sat in buildings I remembered boarded up. The old antique mall had become a vape store. A tattoo shop stood where a florist used to be.

But the bones of the town remained. Old churches with peeling white paint. Telephone poles tangled in black wire. Porches sagging around faded rocking chairs.

The place still looked haunted by itself.

As we drove farther out, the buildings thinned until the town simply gave way to fields. Corn stretched endlessly beneath the gray afternoon sky, tall and green and swaying softly in the wind like water.

Something deep in my stomach tightened. I rolled my window down farther. The smell hit instantly—earth and fertilizer and summer rot.

Home. I hated that my body recognized it that way.

“There,” I said quietly after another mile, nodding toward a squat brick building near the roadside. “That used to be the only place you could get gas or grub for miles.”

The Grill sat abandoned now. Its windows were dark with grime, old advertisements peeling in the sun. The gas pumps had been removed completely, leaving only cracked concrete islands behind.

But I could still see it the way it used to be. Fluorescent lights buzzing against nicotine-yellow walls. Taxidermy hanging crooked above vinyl booths. Smiley laughing behind the counter while grease popped in the kitchen.

“The sign out front used to glow,” I said softly. “‘Hot dogs, cold drink: ninety-nine cents, Prayers: free of charge.’”

My husband glanced toward the building again. “Why’d it close?”

The smile faded from my mouth. I shrugged one shoulder carefully. “Their daughter died. I don’t think they ever recovered from the guilt of it.”

His brows pinched immediately. “Why would they feel guilty?”