“That’s all right. It’s sweet of you, though, to think about it. Thanks, Fay. I appreciate it. Unfortunately, I should also be going.”
“Going? Didn’t you come in here for a meal? Or, why did you come in here?”
“Just a coffee to go will be fine, actually. I’ve got a lot of shit on my plate, and I’m not trying to stay in Ashville for the rest of my life.”
“Of course. Hold on.”
I poured him his cup of coffee with hands that were undeniably trembling. How many times had I done this exact same thing over the course of my life? Enough that when I’d first begun giving him drinks to go, they had been cups of coke or hot cocoa instead of coffee, back before he was grown up enough for a drink as mature as that.
Back in the day I had all but lived for the times when Neil would come in to see me. I had loved the way he had always made me feel like the most important, special person on the face of the earth. And now? Now he was like a stranger, only worse. A stranger wouldn’t have had this uncanny ability to hurt me the way that Neil was, to hurt me without even trying. And he wasn’t even doing anything! He was only acting like we were strangers or distant acquaintances, which was exactly what we were now. All I knew was that I wanted him to go. Out of all of the times I had imagined the two of us seeing each other again, it had never once played out like this.
“How much do I owe you?” he asked.
“Nothing, please. Let’s just consider it a gift from an old friend.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure,” I answered in an overly bright voice, knowing that I would never be able to work the register in my present state of agitation. “Least I can do, right?”
“Shit. Well, thanks. I don’t have anything to do for you in return. But we should get together before I leave, you know? We should do some catching up. Maybe I can buy you dinner or something, or what passes for dinner in this place.”
“Yea, if you have time. That might be nice.”
“All right, good. I’ll see you around, Fay.”
I nodded at him, feeling both relieved and sad when he was finally out of the diner and getting back into his truck. It was a nice enough offer, his idea of us going to dinner, but I wasn’t an idiot, or at least not a total idiot. Not as far as I could tell.
The dinner suggestion had been his way of getting the hell out of dodge as fast as he could. Nothing less and nothing more. For all the things that appeared to have changed about the guy, there was something other than his eyes that seemed to be the exact same as it had been when he’d gone and never looked back.
His desire to be as far away from little old Ashville as he could get was exactly the same as it had been when we were still teenagers. Although I wouldn’t have thought it was possible back when I was still an eighteen-year-old girl, Neil’s dislike of Ashville seemed to have grown instead of decreasing.
I’d heard the saying “absence makes the heart grow fonder” plenty of times. Everyone had. For Neil, the opposite seemed to be true. Absence seemed to have made his heart grow colder, towards Ashville as a whole, and undoubtedly towards me. I was nothing more than some silly little townie, and there was no way seeing me again was on his agenda.
My hand flew back up to my locket, and for just a minute, I could see the Neil that had been mine. The Neil that I had loved so completely. Then my hand dropped back to my side, and that image was gone, leaving in its wake the version of Neil I had just seen. This man was all work and no play for sure. If I saw him again before he left, I would be so stunned, someone could knock me over with a feather.
My guess was that seeing me again would only drive him to get his work done faster so that he could leave his past behind for good and get on with whatever fancy life he’d created for himself out there in the wide world.
“Well that was a trip and a half, am I right?” Courtney asked.
I turned to look at Courtney, who was beginning to look a little blue from all of her time in the massive refrigerator. I shrugged my shoulders in a gesture I hoped looked at least a little bit nonchalant. Not only was I not sure what to say, but I also wasn’t sure that I could trust my voice. Whether I wanted to be or not, I was kind of bowled over by what had just happened, and I needed some time to regroup.
“Come on, Fay. Don’t be mad, all right? I know you just wanted to hide from him, but really, why the hell should you? This is our diner. Not his.”
“I know. I’m not really sure why I was hiding, to tell you the truth.”
“Because you were surprised? Or who knows? Maybe he’s just like one of those guys in your books. What do they always get called? ‘The one,’ or some shit like that? Maybe he’s that, and your body just reacted.”
“Um, doubtful, Courtney.”
“No shit, it’s doubtful. Now come on, pour a girl a cup of coffee before she freezes to death. I swear, I can’t even feel my nipples anymore!”
And just like that, the strange and unexpected appearance of Neil was behind me. My real life came rushing back with full force. If there was one thing Courtney was good for, it was reminding a girl where she was. I poured her coffee, handed it to her, and the reached out and gave her an impulsive hug. It was something she would normally have shrugged off with a string of curse words, but this time, she let the hug slide. It wasn’t until we got an actual customer that I let her go. By that time, I was starting to feel a lot better.
It had been a fluke, seeing Neil, and one I was sure I wouldn’t have to repeat.
Chapter 6: Neil
For a few terrifying seconds, I didn’t have a fucking clue where I was. All I knew was that the sun was way brighter than I felt like it should have been, and my head was pounding with the kind of hangover only whiskey was capable of giving me. When the culprit responsible for your hangover was the only thing you recognized for sure upon waking, you knew you were in trouble. This was something I had never known before, but I sure as shit did now. It wasn’t a lesson I was pleased to learn.