Nash Brothers Box Set - Carrie Aarons Page 0,88

a human standpoint, I just … I could never shake the feeling that under the suit and tie, the guy was as smarmy and corrupt as the politicians you watch in movies.

When we’d almost died in the car crash, he’d used it as the perfect leverage to get me out of the picture. I’d tiptoed around him for years, trying to be on my best behavior so that he wouldn’t split Lily and I up, and then I’d played right into his hand.

“Yes. Kissing babies, shaking hands.” She blows out a sigh.

“So nothing has changed then?” I mean it both as a dig and an inside joke.

The fact that she’s still puppeting around as the perfect daughter at twenty-seven is pathetic. But we also used to joke about this all those years ago, how fake her father could be in public.

“I don’t really have much of a choice. Or much else to do with my nights. Sitting at home gets lonely,” Lily admits.

We’re standing on opposite sides of the gazebo, a place that holds so many immortalized nights for us.

“I know what that’s like.”

I shouldn’t have said that. Because in this moment, she is looking at me with something akin to tenderness in her eyes, and I can’t have her looking at me like that.

“Do you come here often?” Her voice is quiet.

I shouldn’t have even stepped into the space at all. I’ve transported us back to yesteryear, and now we feel as if we have some right to visit it. I should have bolted the moment I saw her standing in here, but I was just too damn curious. What’s that saying? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

No matter how many times we flirted around the subject of us, the end result was that we were doomed.

But I answer her anyway. “Yes.”

That one word has her rearing back, her shock palpable.

What is it about this last year that keeps pulling us together in a magnetic, forceful way? For the nine years before it, I’ve managed to pretty much steer clear of Lily. Yes, we live in the same town so it’s inevitable that I’d bump into her at the grocery store or see a flash of her hair as she walked down the street, but the last year has put my willpower to the test.

Just like right this instant. When we’re unconsciously moving toward each other, our feet moving of their own accord. Lily’s eyes stay trained on mine as if I might spook. My heart rattles in my chest, the cold, dead organ shaking the dust off because it’s in its matches’ vicinity once more. With shaking hands, she reaches for me, in our gazebo, on a night that we spent together so many years ago.

Time has stopped, existing only between her and I. In our bubble, there is no animosity. No secrets or history or bullshit.

There is only Lily, and the love that still burns so brightly between us it could reduce this town to ashes.

That face, the one I used to kiss for hours, looms right in front of me. So I take it in my hands, and her eyes flutter shut as I touch her for the first time in a decade. My stomach twists, goose bumps cover my skin, because my God, I’d almost forgotten …

How it feels to be with her.

“What happened to us?”

The words fall out of her mouth and detonate between us.

They rip through the walls of my heart, sending a blast to my gut, and finally, a metaphorical grenade shell to my head. I jerk back, my hand pulling away from her cheek.

Because I can’t answer that question. She’s asked it so many times, so many ways, and I’ve avoided it for so long.

If I kiss her now, I’ll want to talk. Her lips on mine will unlock every secret, every emotion, I’ve packed away since the day my truck flipped.

And I can’t do that. Not for my sake, or hers.

So, as I’ve done for ten whole years, I turn, walk away from her, and leave both of the organs in our chest just a little more empty.

Just a little more hollow.

7

Lily

“I mean really, there are about eight hundred styles of wedding dresses. How is any woman supposed to choose?”

Presley riffles through magazines as we sit on the living room floor of my townhouse. We have the modern bridal one, the country-themed wedding magazine, the one that has some weird,