The sound of my alarm going off, startled me from my sleep. I sat up, disoriented and reached for my clock to shut the noise off. I was panting and sweaty. But I felt so relaxed. I thought about the dream I had just had. I was having sex with Neil. It had felt so real, though I wasn’t really sure what sex felt like, I had an idea. I was also, ninety-nine percent sure that I had just had an orgasm from a dream.
It had been almost two weeks since Courtney had told me about Neil’s father passing away. I hadn’t been able to get the conversation out of my head. I hadn’t been able to get Neil out of my head. It was more than a little bit unnerving after spending years trying to achieve that very thing.
Even now, trying to get ready for work, I could feel him in the back of my head, trying to make his way up to the front again. It was a place he’d occupied for quite some time, for several years after he’d made what he liked to call his “escape” from Ashville. It felt shockingly natural to let him come right back to it again. That was something I couldn’t let happen. It was awful, what had happened to his dad, but that didn’t make him any more a part of my life now than he had been before Courtney had told me what happened. I would do well to remember it.
“You’re just being silly, Fay,” I whispered to myself, feeling downright foolish, and also aware that I was going to be late to work if I didn’t get my ass in gear. “Cut it out.”
I nodded to myself, as if my pitiful attempt at a self-reprimand was actually going to do any good, and hurried out of my front door. I managed to get out and get the door locked before it caught my eye; the thing that completely stopped me in my tracks.
“Oh my God.”
My voice sounded flat in my own ears and some vague, far away feeling part of my brain wondered if I was in some kind of shock or something. The voice wasn’t present enough to really gain any traction. It was even less authoritative than the voice I’d used to reprimand myself, which seemed like a dismally impressive thing to be able to say.
The light I saw in the Driscoll house was enough to make me feel like I had been hit by a bus, or something even more destructive. The house I was living in was the house I had grown up in, left to me when my mother had suddenly passed away when I was eighteen years old. It was also the house that had a prime view of the Driscoll residence, which sat high up on a hill I could clearly see from my front porch.
I had seen light pouring out of its windows plenty of times over the years, which only made sense, seeing as it was where Neil’s dad continued to live after Neil moved on and never looked back. There hadn’t been any lights on since Mr. Driscoll had passed away, but that didn’t mean anything. Or at least, it didn’t have to mean anything, although it could have.
“No,” I hissed at myself, actually starting to get a little pissed at myself by that point. “It doesn’t, okay? It means nothing. Now get to work.”
I nodded to myself as if somebody else had given me the instruction instead of it having been delivered by me, to me. I headed to my car. I was acting like a complete basket case. I knew it, and I didn’t like it one bit. There was absolutely no reason to think a stupid light in the Driscoll residence meant that Neil had come home.
/> They’d had a housekeeper for as long as I had known them, and it only made sense that she would be there to help clean the house up now that he was gone. Then there was the business manager, a man whose name I couldn’t remember at the moment, but who would very likely be there to help put the elder Driscoll’s home in order. There were all kinds of likely explanations and not a one of them involved Neil.
That was only wishful thinking, and what made it sting was that the thinking was based on a person I didn’t know anymore. Neil and I had been in a relationship that had meant more to me than I liked to admit, but that had been in a whole different life. We didn’t know each other now and never would again. A death in his family wasn’t going to change that. No matter how many romance novels I read.
***
“Hey, girl! For a minute, I thought you really weren’t going to show up!”
“Hey, Court, I’m sorry. I guess I got off to a slow start.”
“Please!” Courtney laughed, pulling on the old sweatshirt that indicated to me she was about to head into the walk-in so that she could take some inventory. “I was about to throw you a parade. I’m pretty sure you haven’t ever done even one slightly irresponsible thing since we’ve known each other. If you’d skipped work, it would have shown me that there’s still help for you yet. Besides, it’s not exactly like this place is hopping, you know?”
Courtney looked around the diner with a sour, bored expression on her face, and I followed suit. Busy definitely wasn’t a word you would use to describe the place, that was for sure. As was more often the case than not, there wasn’t a single soul inside of those four walls aside from us.
I laughed, not because I was trying to be mean, but because it was just another example of how completely different the two of us really were. She looked at the empty diner and saw it as proof of how boring Ashville was. Although, I had a sneaking suspicion that if the opportunity to leave ever actually presented itself, it was one she would decline. I looked at the empty diner and saw an opportunity. I saw an opportunity to regain some of my mental footing, an opportunity to get my bearings again, once and for all, after the stupid funk the news about Neil’s father had put me into. It was just an example of life going on as it normally did, and who didn’t need a thing like that from time to time?
“I’m going to the back.” Courtney broke into my thoughts with a tone so dramatically morose it started me laughing all over again. “You’ll be okay up here on your own?”
“Of course, I will.” I smiled, pulling my much-hated romance novel out of my purse. “Just like always, right?”
“Oh, brother!” she groaned, shaking her head as she made her way to the walk-in, shaking her head until I couldn’t see her anymore, and probably continuing to do so even once she was out of sight.
I smiled to myself again and opened to the place where I’d left off in my book, ready to lose myself in the love affair of people who felt just as real to me as Courtney did. I loved that feeling of getting lost in the lives of others, loved it so much that I almost didn’t hear the sound of an engine idling outside.
Once the sound penetrated my thoughts, I hardly looked up. Our business wasn’t the only one in the immediate vicinity, and I was almost positive that whatever car was outside was not intended for us. It was only once I saw the truck that the panic began to set in. Because I knew that truck.
It had been years since I’d seen it pulling up to the front of the diner, but I would know it anywhere. I knew its occupant without ever having to catch a glimpse of him. For a moment that seemed to stretch out into forever, I froze, completely unsure of what the hell I was supposed to do now. Then my body just sort of took over. Without giving it any kind of conscious thought, I hit the ground, book and all.
I did so before I ever saw anyone step out of the truck’s cab, giving me a marginal amount of hope that I hadn’t been seen, and well before the little bell above the entrance gave its merry clang. I could have murdered that bell for sounding so happy when I felt pretty close to certain that I was going to either throw up, have a panic attack, or possibly do both at the same time.
“Hello?”
The sound of the voice shot through the diner like a bullet might have done, sounding so loud in my ears that I had to fight the urge to clamp my hands over them. I wasn’t actually a child, all evidence to the contrary, and if I’d allowed myself the luxury of covering my ears, I wouldn’t have been able to hear what came next. I needed to do that in order to know when I was safe. It was either that, or never leave the safety of the floor behind the front counter again.
“Hello?” the voice called again, a bit of uncertainty and maybe some annoyance as well detectable now. “Is there anyone here? The front door is open. You know, normally a sign that a place is open for business? Any chance that’s true here?”
I cringed and waited for it to be over. It was amazing how quickly things could go from one way to another. Only minutes ago, I had just been dipping into my book, ready for what would most likely be a day of reading without a whole lot else. Now, I was on the floor hiding for my life. Or at least, it felt like I was hiding for my life, which to me was pretty much the same thing.