Page 2
ME: Hold on, let me try again.
ME: GETTING TO SEE YOU IS THE BEST PART OF COMING BACK, I CAN’T WAIT!!!!
ME: Is that better?
MARNIE: Yes. Thank you.
It’s easy enough to put on a show of excitement for Marnie, but I can’t deny there’s a little pit of dread in my gut at the thought of going back to my home town. I haven’t been back much in the last eight years, and never for very long. I always feel like an outsider when I come back, like the town has stayed the same, and I’ve changed too much to really fit there anymore.
I’ve made something of myself since I left, becoming a successful singer with a good career, but something about being back there has me feeling like an awkward teenager under the judgmental eyes of my family. Not to mention Genevieve, my old high school bully, who always finds a reason to be around when I am.
Usually, I can put off Marnie’s texts asking when she’s going to see me again, or my family’s nagging for me to come back more with vague promises or excuses about work and my schedule. This trip is mandatory though, so there was no getting out of it.
Hope Falls is having its 100th Anniversary Winter Festival, and due to pressure from my family and people in the town who have known me since I was a kid, I gave in and agreed to perform on the final day.
Backing out now would look bad for me, and my family would never let me hear the end of it.
Things with my family are already tense enough most of the time. It’s hard because I know they love me, but there’s so much distance now, and not even just physically with me being somewhere else. They’re all rooted in Hope Falls and they live for the family businesses. The fact that I left and chose something different is a sticking point, and it always makes me feel like I don’t quite fit in anymore when I go there.
Another boarding call comes from the gate across the way, another group of disgruntled passengers getting up to file in line to board. I pull up my boarding pass on my phone again, checking my seat number, even though I already have it memorized by now. I check the tracking on my checked bag, noting that it hasn’t moved since it was scanned in when I dropped it off. My left hand taps an even rhythm on my knee, and I count silently in my head, ticking off seconds until I get to a high enough number. Then I check my bags again, touching the zippers to make sure they’re closed. They are, just the way I left them the last time I checked.
I grab for my coffee, ready to take another sip, but the noise of something clattering against metal makes me jump, and I spill half the cup onto the already stained carpet. When I look up, Ares Thornton is standing nearby, grabbing for the handle of his rolling carry-on, which must have crashed into the trash can nearby.
Seeing him is like a punch to the gut, and I have to remind myself to breathe. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in so long, and now here he is, just a few feet away from me.
He looks different than he did the last time I saw him in person. Still tall and strong, but older now and more put together. He’s dressed well in dark jeans and a tailored black coat that hugs the thick lines of his body, and his hair falls into his eyes, tousled from the chill wind outside or the trek through the airport. Either way, it works for him. He looks successful and confident, every bit like the popular actor he’s become.
I must stare for too long because he looks up from his bag, and his gaze meets mine for just a second. That’s another shock to my system right there. Emotions flit through his dark blue eyes, amping up their intensity. There’s recognition and shock, but those clear in a heartbeat, leaving something harder in his expression.
Immediately, I duck my head, not wanting to see it. My face burns at the ridiculousness of this—of course I would spill coffee everywhere and then stare like an idiot the first time I see him in eight years.
He lingers for a moment, hovering nearby, but I don’t look back up until he moves away completely. Then I manage to let out the breath that I was holding, exhaling messily. My hands are shaking slightly now, and I feel thrown off kilter, even more than I already was just being here.
I take a few deep breaths, and just try to get myself back together for a little while.
Later, when I risk a glance up again, Ares is still at the gate. He’s off to one side with his carry-on, talking to a massive guy who looks absolutely covered in tattoos. Even though it’s winter outside, his coat is tossed carelessly over the handle of his own bag, and his arms are folded, showing off bulging muscles and lines of ink that I can’t make resolve into their proper shapes at this distance.
Ares snorts at something the man says, and the way his body is angled toward him, posture loose and relaxed, I can tell they must be close. This isn’t someone he’s just randomly met at the airport. Are they traveling together? Clearly Ares is heading back home for the holidays, or the festival, and bringing someone with him.
“I don’t know, Callan,” Ares says, shrugging. “Won’t know until we get there and can figure it all out.”
Callan nods and says something back, too low for me to hear, but whatever it is, it brings a smile to Ares’ face.
It’s a smile I haven’t seen in so long, but it settles on his face the same way it used to, making his eyes go warm and smoothing out his face. Something aches in me to see it, and I can’t tell if it’s a kind of longing or just pain from being reminded of how things used to be with us.
Either way, I don’t want to deal with it right now.
Callan glances over all of a sudden, and our eyes catch for the briefest of seconds before I look away. I must have been staring so hard he could feel it. That’s fucking embarrassing.
But at the same time, I feel like it’s kind of understandable when I’m confronted with someone I haven’t seen in almost a decade at the airport. Someone who used to be so close to me and now feels so far away.
Ares is the son of one of the oldest families in Hope Falls. In fact, he’s the son of the family that my own considers to be their greatest rival. It’s a rivalry that goes back generations, and it’s so deep and rooted in the history of our family that my mother used to cross the street rather than walk past a Thornton business. Every family dinner included gossip and ridicule about the Thorntons, along with the hope that maybe one day we’d see them ruined.
But Ares was more than that to me, once. He used to be a lot more than that.
I shake those thoughts away before they can spiral. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters right now. So what if the guy who broke my heart in high school is on my flight, obviously going to the same place I am? I knew I’d have to face him sometime.
All I have to do is get through this festival and then escape back to Atlanta where there are so many people and so much going on that we never have to run into each other.
