“It won’t be near as interesting,” Travis said.
“Sure it will.” He twisted the towel around his hands as he readied himself to say it. “I . . . uh . . . I committed to speaking at a writer thing next month. One of the writers at my agency had to cancel—some family emergency, and Reuben decided to take a chance at asking me. I said yes.”
For a moment, there was just silence.
Then Travis said, “Repeat that.”
“You heard me,” Trey said wearily. “It’s in Jersey. Not far, but . . .” Now was the hard part. “I tried to see if Al and Mona could watch him, but that’s their anniversary and they are taking a cruise. So I called Mom and Dad. They . . .”
Shit. Hand shaking, he dragged it down his face, realized there was some stubble he’d missed. Maybe he should—
Quit stalling. Just spit it out. “They want to take him to Disney. Just the two of them.”
“And you’re letting them.”
He gripped the counter. “Yeah. I’m letting them.”
“Have you puked yet?”
That startled a laugh out of him. “Nah. But if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“If you did, I wouldn’t tell the others.”
Now he smiled. “Yeah. I know.” He checked the time. “Look . . . I gotta go. It’s almost time to go to the library. I’m surprised Clay hasn’t come up here and banged on the door already.”
“Okay. Man, one second—listen. Make yourself a list or something. You do better with lists. And on that damn list, put down for you to just ask her out on a date.”
“Shit.” Trey rolled his eyes. “I can’t be around her without my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth, or worse . . . drooling.” He grimaced. If he asked her out, then he’d have to worry about other things—what if he kissed her? What if she kissed him? What would happen when he started thinking about the void of his memory from that night? Drooling would be the least of his concerns. “Trust me, a date is no good.”
“Fine. Put no drooling on the list. But stop sitting on your ass.”
* * *
One hand closed into a fist as Trey stood there.
He hadn’t just done that. He really hadn’t made a stupid list.
He was going to kick Travis’s ass over this . . . because, dumb-ass that he was, he had made a list. More than likely, nothing would come of it.
So, yeah. He’d made a list. Big deal.
Ressa Bliss was gorgeous.
She was outgoing.
She probably had a boyfriend. For all he knew, she might even be married. Not that rings really meant anything, but . . . blowing out a breath, he looked down at the one he had yet to take off.
Slowly, he reached up and traced the tip of his right index finger across the engraved surface of his wedding ring. It wasn’t so much that he couldn’t let go that kept the ring on his finger. He had accepted and acknowledged all of this a long time ago.
He grieved for Aliesha long and hard—probably longer and harder than he maybe should have, losing himself in a dark, ugly pit of despair. It had been easier to do that than focus on some of the other things that had gone wrong in his life. It hadn’t been until the past year that he realized just how messed up he’d let himself get.
Oh, he’d hidden it.
He’d hidden it well from everybody except his twin . . . and probably Mom. Travis and Denise Barnes saw past the walls nobody else had even realized were there.
But only Travis had any idea of just how messed up Trey probably was. There were missing hours that Trey still couldn’t get back—followed by a morning where he had been forced to remember, all over again, that he’d lost his wife.
That void, those missing hours, they haunted him and all he wanted was to forget—the whole damn night, not just pieces of it.
Sometimes, he thought he almost remembered. A woman’s laugh, the burn of whiskey.
Then a vicious pain.
He’d left the hospital with bruised ribs, bruised knuckles, and various other aches and pains. At some point, he’d gotten into a fight. The bartender said there had been a man in the parking lot, and he thought the woman Trey had been drinking with had left with him.
But beyond that?
He only had emptiness, questions—and a good, thirty-minute gap of nothingness that the bartender couldn’t account for between the time he’d noticed the commotion on his security cameras and the time Trey had stumbled out of the bar.
The few dates he’d tried to go on since then, he could almost hear the echo of a woman’s laugh in the back of his mind and it was like the fumes of whiskey clouded his head. Any interest he might have felt died under a rush of near memories.
So he’d just . . . stopped. Stopped trying to live again, lost himself deeper inside himself.
Until he’d seen Ressa. Staring at his ring, he closed his hand into a fist and slowly relaxed it. Then, without giving himself a chance to think about it, he tugged the ring off.
It wasn’t a connection with his wife, really, that he was removing.
In more ways than one, it was his shield.
How he’d kept himself cut away from everybody and anybody save for his family and a few very select friends. If he took that off, then he had to admit to himself that maybe he was ready to move on.
He wanted his life back—or some semblance of it.
He wanted to feel a woman’s skin against his own without memories of something he didn’t even understand haunting him. Wanted to know he could touch a woman and actually feel that need—feel something other than the grief of Aliesha’s death choking him.
How could one night change something so basic? How did something he didn’t even remember change everything?
“Dad!” Clayton’s voice rang through the house.
Wincing, Trey did exactly what he’d done for almost six years—compartmentalized everything. He’d think about all of this later. “Be down in a minute, buddy!” he shouted back, slowly putting the ring down on the counter. Whether or not he’d put it back on, he didn’t know.
But he had taken it off. Even if it was just for a little while, that counted, right?
Picking up the little moleskin notebook he carried everywhere, he flipped to the middle and eyed the list he’d just made.
To-Do List
1. Clothes shopping
2. Get groceries—you’re out of deodorant, moron
3. Ask her out
4. Try not to drool
The list was out of order.
And it was just as stupid as he’d thought it would be.
Abruptly, he went to tear it out of the notebook, but then he stopped.
If he didn’t do this now, then when would he?
Abruptly, he grabbed his pen and scrawled something else down at the bottom.
5. Start living again
“Dad?” There was a pause, and then a more persistent yell with an edge of panic. “Dad! I can’t find my books!”
Saved by the boy, he mused, stroking a finger down the list, lingering on the final item. If nothing else, that one right there was something he had to do.
He’d take it as a sign. So he’d think about it. Think about it and just see. See what happened.
Really, what could any of this hurt . . . nothing really, right? Not more than it hurt to dream about her at night, fantasize about that mouth. Or other attractive parts of her anatomy.
It was a seductive, taunting road, one paved with fantasies and frustration, but it was better than the desolate one he’d walked for far too long.
“In the basket on the bookshelf by the door,” he called out as he shoved the notebook into his pocket. “Exactly where I told you to put them last night.”
Single fatherhood was nothing if not a lesson in patience . . . and repetition.
* * *