Still Go Crazy

3. Grace

Chapter Three

Grace

I didn’t know how long I stood frozen in place with two fingers pressed lightly over my mouth. My lips tingled, and my entire body hummed with a confused sense of emotion … desire, anger, regret, and so many more feelings I couldn’t even label.

Having Boone touch me again felt like two planets colliding in space. My entire cellular composition was attempting to reconfigure and absorb the impact.

Wayne meowed, finally breaking through my frozen state. Dropping my fingers from my lips, I spun around, narrowing my eyes at him. “This is all your fault.”

Wayne simply lifted his gray leg and started cleaning himself. I rolled my eyes and turned away, searching out where I had left my phone. Spying it on the kitchen counter, I strode across the room to pick it up. Tapping on my mother’s contact, I called her.

She answered on the second ring. “Hey Grace, how’re you doing this morning?” she asked in her forever cheerful voice.

I didn’t even bother with a greeting. “The property place rented the other side of the duplex to Boone.”

My mother was quiet for a moment before asking, “Boone Reeves?”

“Yes, Mom. What other Boone would I be talking about?”

“Just confirming, Grace. Well, I guess you’ll finally have to deal with him.”

“Deal with what?” I countered, wondering if my brain might explode with frustration at how calm she sounded.

“Boone, and the fact that you’ve never gotten over him,” my mother said, her tone still calm. For a sweet person, and someone I loved, she could sometimes be infuriating.

“Mom, I’m over Boone.”

Oh really?

Shut up.

Oh, for God’s sake, now I was arguing with myself.

“Okay, if you’re over Boone, why are you so upset that the property manager rented the other side of the duplex to him?”

I decided to ignore this line of questioning. “Is it possible for me to call her and ask her to cancel the lease?”

My mother’s sigh filtered through the phone line into my ear. “Hon, anything is possible. But there are laws around that kind of thing. It’s not so much the money, but do you really want to turn it into that big of a mess? You hardly ever saw the last tenants there. Between your work schedule and your class schedule, you’re extremely busy. I’m sure Boone is just as busy as you.”

I bit back a groan. “Mom, that’s not the point. I don’t want him here.”

“Maybe this was meant to happen.”

“Oh my God, Mom. Don’t give me some kind of spiritual juju bullshit right now,” I muttered.

“It’s not spiritual juju bullshit. Why don’t you come over tonight after you get off work, and I’ll do a tarot reading?”

I resisted the urge to throw the phone. “I’ll talk to you later, Mom.” I hung up abruptly.

Tossing the phone on the counter, I ran my hands through my hair. “This is a f*****g disaster.”

Restless in my skin, I spun around and ran to jump in the shower. I needed something to erase the feel of Boone’s body and his lips touching mine.

Why, oh why, did he have to go and kiss me, but just barely? Why was he saying he missed me?

A scalding hot shower later, I was resigned to the fact that Boone had taken up residence in my brain. There was also nothing more than a single wall separating us.

* * *

“Grace, I can’t come back,” Boone said.

I gripped the phone tightly in my hand, feeling a bead of sweat rolling down my spine. I was standing outside in the late summer heat, two weeks into my sophomore year of college.

I could feel the sickening thud of my heart inside my chest, and my stomach twisted tightly. “How come?” I asked, my voice reedy even to my ears.

“Look, I f****d up. But it’s not just that. My dad’s sick, Grace.”

“What do you mean?”

“He just got diagnosed with colon cancer. I need to stay and help take care of him.”

I couldn’t say why, but I knew Boone wasn’t telling me everything.

“Does this mean you’re never coming back?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry, Grace. I really am. I have to go.” The phone line clicked dead in my ear.

“Boone!”

When I called him back, it just rang and rang, over and over and over again. All I got was his voicemail.

Boone and I had started dating our senior year in high school and had fallen into that crazy, wild kind of love you could have back then – foolish and headlong with enough chemistry to set the world on fire.

Boone’s mother lived in Stolen Hearts Valley with his father across the country in Colorado. After our freshman year of college, we decided to take a break. Nothing awful happened, but he planned to stay with his father for the summer and fall. He was taking a semester off to sort things out with his financial aid. We still fancied ourselves in love, but we were going to be apart for five months. We were young, but we thought it would be mature—or something stupid like that—to give ourselves a chance to see if we wanted to date other people.

We had told each other we could date if we wanted, and we could figure out if we really loved each other. It had been my idea. During the ensuing months, I’d gone on one date. All it had shown me was that I missed Boone. About six weeks ago, he’d called and told me he thought it was stupid for us to try to date others.

We had weeks of phone calls and daily texts, and I’d been so looking forward to him coming back. Then, this?

In the ensuing weeks, Boone’s silence was complete, and my heart was broken. He didn’t return my calls. Total and complete silence.

No one seemed to know anything, at least not my friends. It was only about eight months later that I discovered he had a girlfriend who was pregnant. I’d been so embarrassed to learn he’d lied to me that I told no one. Not even my closest friend, Evie.

I was so torn up over it that I hardly told anyone how much it hurt. I couldn’t believe what an i***t I’d been.

* * *

After my morning encounter with Boone, my day was insanely busy. I staved off one of my brutal migraines with my prescription medicine and picked up an extra shift at Stolen Hearts Lodge, where I worked in the restaurant. I thanked God and the stars above almost every day that, while Boone had moved back to Stolen Hearts Valley, and was on the first responder team with many of my friends, he didn’t work at the lodge. I was pleasantly spared the anxiety of running into him almost daily.

I felt a tug on my ponytail as I tossed a load of napkins in the washing machine in the back hallway behind the kitchen at the lodge. Glancing over my shoulder, I found Evie smiling brightly, her blue eyes sparkling. “We’re all exhausted, so nachos and wine in the back when you finish up with that last table.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I replied, trying to inject some cheer into my smile.

After pouring the soap in the washer and hitting start, I hurried back up front to check on the last table in the restaurant. I gave a wave to the line cooks as I passed by. They were well into cleaning up their cooking stations, and the low murmur of their conversation carried on along with the hum of the industrial dishwasher.

* * *

“Oh my God!” Skylar exclaimed.

I bit back a laugh. “It is a good story.”

“You are seriously telling me that Lucas got your vibrator by accident. That’s how you two got going?” Skylar asked in clarification.

Valentina brushed her red curls off her shoulders and shrugged with a sheepish smile. “Um, yup. That’s what got the ball rolling.”

Skylar giggled as she paused to scoop a few more nachos onto her plate.

“The only question now is whether you plan to share that story with your children when you have them?” Evie teased.

Valentina laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“I wish I would meet someone,” Skylar offered in between bites.

“Someone will come along when the time is right,” Shay said with a smile.

“Okay, so I’m kinda new to hanging out with y’all,” Skylar began as she glanced around the table, “but if I have it right, I’m not the only single one left here. You’re still single, right?” She turned to look at me, her strawberry blond ponytail bouncing. Her hair was barely long enough for the ponytail, so her wavy locks looked a bit like a sprout on the back of her head. She pushed her glasses up on her nose, her light brown eyes curious behind the lenses.

Skylar was a fairly recent addition at Stolen Hearts Lodge. She actually worked at the vet clinic over by the rescue program. The Lodge was much more than just a restaurant. Jackson Stone had turned his family’s old farm into a high-end outdoor resort. He was also a veterinarian, so he ran a vet clinic and a rescue program for a wide variety of animals.

The vet clinic was busy enough that Jackson had hired Skylar as a vet tech to help him stay on top of things. It had taken a few months before Skylar began joining us for girls’ nights.

I took a gulp of my wine and nodded. “Yep. Still single and planning to keep it that way.”

“Really?” Dani chimed in as she leaned toward the center of the table to snag a few tortilla chips.

Boone flashed through my mind, and I shoved him right back out. “I happen to think single is better. Just because y’all fell madly in love,” I said, gesturing amongst Valentina, Shay, Dani, and Evie, “doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. In fact, research shows that the happiest people are actually single women.”

Skylar’s smile stretched across her face. “Well, that’s handy. I guess I’m on the right track. I’m epically good at finding assholes to date, so it’s probably best if I don’t even bother.”

One of the line cooks happened to come into the staff kitchen to check with Dani about something. Dani, the chef and manager for the lodge restaurant, was rarely off duty. I was relieved for the interruption. The last thing I wanted was to dwell on my single state.

A bit later, after the nachos were gone and there were two empty bottles of wine on the table, our group had broken apart for the night. I was stacking plates to carry them over to the dishwasher. Only Evie and I were left.

When I returned to the large stainless steel table where we’d been seated on stools while we ate, I snagged a clean rag and wet it under the faucet to help her wipe it down. “Surprised you’re not hurrying back to Dawson,” I commented with a glance in her direction.

Evie finished wiping down her side of the table and paused, resting one hand on the table with a towel held in the other. “He’s on call tonight.”

I nodded, continuing to circle the towel on the surface of the table. My eyes lifted when I heard her footsteps. Of late, Evie had asked me a few more times about Boone, and I was relieved she seemed to be leaving the subject alone for tonight.

She tossed her towel in the laundry bin in the corner. Turning back, her voice carried over to me. “I found out something.”

“What?” I wiped over the last corner of the table before approaching her.

“Boone’s ex-girlfriend never had that baby.”

I had just lifted my arm to toss the towel. Her words startled me so much I dropped it on the floor, my eyes whipping up to her face. “What?”

Evie leaned down to scoop up the towel and toss it in the laundry bin before resting her hips against the wall behind her. “I looked it up. Don’t be mad at me. I don’t know exactly what happened, but there was no baby.”

I gave my head a little shake. “But, there were pictures all over social media of her pregnant. I think she was due within a month or two when I found out.”

Evie nodded. “Yeah. I did a little social media sleuthing for you. I wanted to know what the hell happened. Boone’s been back for almost a year, and he hasn’t said a thing about a kid. It didn’t add up. I also don’t think they were actually together. Even though she posted about Boone, there was nothing that made it seem like they were together. She had a miscarriage. She didn’t post about the miscarriage, but her mother did and said the family was devastated.”

Emotion slammed into me. I’d been so angry with Boone. So hurt. So embarrassed that all I’d told Evie at the time was that Boone wasn’t coming back, and he had a new girlfriend. Evie and I weren’t living near each other then, so it had been easier to gloss over it. My pride had been stung so deeply I hadn’t been able to bear sharing that he was expecting a baby with his girlfriend.

I barely noticed that I was reaching for something until I felt the cold steel of the metal shelving stand as I curled my hand around it. “Really?” My throat was dry, and I swallowed.

“Really,” Evie said, nodding firmly. “Look, I was curious. When we had our little argument a while back when I was teasing you about Boone because I didn’t really know how bad things had been, I just left it alone. I wrote him off as a guy who was obviously too stupid to realize how awesome you are. But since he moved back here, I got curious. It didn’t make sense that he would come home, and none of us would hear a thing about his kid.”

Looking into my friend’s warm blue gaze, I nodded slowly. I’d had the same curiosity. It was just that denial and avoidance were my coping skills for Boone, so I clung to them like a life raft. The life raft might’ve been leaking and sinking, but I was still clinging to it. It was possible I was stubborn. Maybe.

After a few quiet beats, Evie continued, “Look, I don’t know what was supposed to happen for you and Boone. But I know you two are overdue for a reckoning. Maybe you do want to be single for the rest of your life, and that’s perfectly fine. But it’s obvious you have some unresolved issues with Boone. Maybe you should try to talk to him.”

Staring at her, I swallowed through the tight knot in my throat. “It’s not a big deal,” I said hurriedly. “Maybe I didn’t tell you about his girlfriend being pregnant back then—and I’m really sorry to hear that she had a miscarriage because I’m guessing it was hard—but when all is said and done, it was just a break up. It took me by surprise and hurt my feelings, but it’s nothing more than that.”

When a lock of hair fell over her eyes, Evie blew a puff of air, effectively sweeping it to the side of her forehead. “If it was nothing more than that, then you wouldn’t avoid him so much.”

I narrowed my eyes, resting my hand on my hip as I gripped the edge of the metal shelf with my other. “What the hell? Are you on his side now?”

“Oh my God! I’m not on anybody’s side but yours. I’ve hardly talked to Boone. I mean I say “hi” and I’m polite, but that’s about it. Dawson says he’s a perfectly nice guy. I’m only saying something because it obviously still gets to you. I’m concerned because I care about you.”

Guilt struck me as worry filled her eyes, and her brow scrunched up. “I’m sorry. I totally overreacted,” I said quickly.

Evie pushed away from the wall, stepping in front of me and sliding a hand over my shoulder with a gentle squeeze. “I know. I’m here for you however you need me. But I think Boone is a giant trigger for you. It’d be nice for you if you could neutralize that.”