Oak nodded. “It was sudden. A heart attack.”
My heart broke for him. For that to have happened in the midst of everything else seemed so unfair. Then my heartbeat really started to accelerate because I remembered the whole story he told me about Pat…and his daughter. Beth. I definitely always remembered her name. The one he’d slept with. Pat was her father. They were good friends before they ended up sleeping together. So, if he was in Arizona…he was with Beth.My roommates had accumulated a lot of stuff over the summer that they couldn’t bring back with them or that they couldn’t store in the City, stuff like boogie boards and surfing gear. So the following day I organized a rummage sale for those items in the house that they couldn’t take with them.
They agreed to let me keep a percentage of the profits in exchange for standing outside all day hawking the stuff. I needed money now that I’d be moving home and would soon be unemployed.
Earlier in the week, I’d hung up fliers around town advertising the sale. I added a lot of my own personal belongings to the mix. I had more shoes and clothes than I knew what to do with, and now that the baby was coming, I needed to downsize. So I rounded up a bunch of stuff I wanted to add to the pot. The less I had to take back to the City with me, the better.
Putting two outdoor tables together side by side, I laid all of the items out. Some of the bigger things, like surfboards, I propped up behind my chair.
Volume was slow. Cars that happened to drive by would stop, but the majority of the time the people wouldn’t buy anything. Every ten minutes or so, someone who’d seen one of the fliers would walk over.
A little after lunch, a flurry of people showed up all at once. I sold off all of the larger surf items to one buyer, and I was left with about half of the other things. The small crowd also left behind a mess on the table of the items they’d rifled through that I needed to clean up.
My back was turned away from the street as I reorganized the clothes and small goods on display.
“What’s all this?”
His voice vibrated through me.
I turned around so suddenly that it made me a little dizzy.
My heart nearly stopped at the sight of him. Rush had never looked so amazing. Maybe it was the absence, maybe it was the pregnancy hormones, but it took everything in me not to leap into his arms. The recognition of his scent was both beautiful and painful all at once. I longed for him but wouldn’t allow myself to move toward him.
Feeling off balance, I muttered, “Rush…”
“Hi, Gia.”
The Rush who’d left a couple of weeks ago was a total wreck. The Rush standing before me no longer had red eyes and a pained expression. I wouldn’t say he looked happy, but he looked at peace, like the time away had somehow changed something in him. What exactly that meant for me, I was still trying to figure out.
Blowing out a shaky breath, I said, “You’re back.”
“I am.”
My eyes were working overtime, scrolling up, down, and across him for any signs that he’d been with someone else, that he’d fallen for another woman, or that his heart was no longer mine—as if you could tell those things by just looking.
He was wearing a jacket I’d never seen before. I wondered if he bought it in Arizona. His hair was no longer mussed from running his fingers through it. He didn’t smell like cigarettes, either, so I was happy to know that he probably hadn’t fallen off the wagon on his travels out west.
“I’m so sorry to hear about Pat.”
He squinted like he was trying to figure out how I knew. “Yeah. It was unexpected.”
“Oak told me that’s where you’ve been.”
“He did, did he?”
“I know you didn’t want me to know where you were. He accidentally let it slip.”
God, I couldn’t stop staring at him. I wanted nothing more than for him to touch me, hold me, kiss me…anything. I couldn’t recall my physical need for him ever being as strong as it was in this moment. I would have been completely fine with forgetting about things for a night and just going inside my place and taking all of our frustrations out on each other. But of course, that was fantasy; the hard stare aimed at me right now was reality.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t want you to know. Where I was in relation to me and you is irrelevant. I needed to get away, get into a different headspace that wasn’t based on anger. And I needed to do that apart from you. Unfortunately, Pat died in the midst of it, and my being away became mostly about mourning him and only partly about clearing my head.”