Page 83 of Tulips and Lost Time

“You’re incredibly rude!” she snarls. “I get an hour alone. One hour! Before the girls are back and this apartment is overflowing with estrogen again. I have no desire to spend that hour with anyone except my boyfriend.”

Alright. Fine. Now you’ve done it.

I bring my hands out of my pockets and jangle the keys connected to a keyring I’ve had since my first bike. I spy the shiny, newest addition and look past it to Kari. “I can let myself in, Bear. Or you can open the door. Don’t make me be that guy.” I peek over my shoulder at the street and pray no one overhears this shit. “Don’t make me let myself in.”

“How the hell did you get keys?” She pushes away from the window, tossing the blinds back in place so they hit the glass with a hollow clatter. Then she stomps her ass across the apartment and yanks the front door open. Thank the good lord because the air conditioner motor is practically melting the skin from my bones. Shooting her hand forward, palm side up, she sneers. “Give me every single key you have to my apartment.”

“No thanks.” But I stalk forward, forcing her to get handsy if she wants to stop me. I slip through the gap between her supple body and the doorframe, then I step into air-conditioned bliss, stopping in the middle of the living room and coming eye to eye with a dude way taller than me.

It’s not that I’m small. I stand at a few inches over six feet, and my broad shoulders mean I weigh in at a healthy hundred and ninety ish pounds. But Blake is large. The dude is closing in on seven feet, with long, spindly arms and legs. He, too, would weigh in under two hundred pounds. He’s just leaner than your average monster.

“Luc Lenaghan.” His voice is deep, gritty, almost like he smokes a pack a day and chews glass for dessert. Of all the men, on the entire planet, he’s not the type I would expect Kari to aim for when she’s dating. But he offers his hand, and for that, I suppose, I can respect him. “Blake.”

“You’ve heard of me.” I ignore Kari and step closer until our hands clap together in a slow, firm shake. “She tell you she’s gonna marry me someday?”

Kari gasps by the door, slamming it shut in anger. “Luc!”

“She told me you broke her heart.” He squeezes me, risking my career and my limb, when he tightens his grip and refuses to let go. “She said you did some pretty gnarly shit, and so, if I happen to be holding a shotgun when I see you…”

“She’d be sad if I died.” I pull my hand free of his grip, wiping my palm on the leg of my jeans. Then I grin. Because he’s protective of her. Like a brother is of his baby sister. He’s not banging her. “I’ve made it a mission, actually, Blake, to win her back now that she’s in town again. It’d be a lie if I said you being here wasn’t a wrench in my plans.”

“Perhaps that’s why I’m here, then.” He sets his hands on his hips and studies me. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be won back.”

“She’s still really mad at me.” I peek over my shoulder and find a seething Kari, practically billowing steam from her ears. Then I bring my focus back to Blake. “Really mad. Because she’s a proud woman, and I’m an asshole who messed up. But,” I interject when Kari scoffs. It’s not a friendly scoff. But rather, one that precedes a steak knife in my back. “I was just a boy back then. Older than her, certainly, but with minimal life experience. I was doing the best I could with the tools I’d been given. I?—”

“You sent me away!” Kari sneers. “Cruelly.”

“You were a child!” Fuck it. I turn my back on Blake and duke it out with the one who needs to hear it most. “You need to stop with the victim mentality and take a little responsibility for yourself, Bear! Yes, I sent you away. But had I not, then I would have been consenting to a grown ass man dating a girl who was, just a month or two prior, a child.”

“I was eighteen!”

“And before that, you were seventeen. And before that, sixteen, fifteen, and stretching all the way back to six. Whine all you want, but the fact that I knew you when you were seven, and kissing you when you were three minutes past eighteen, screams grooming to me.”

“Grooming?” Her nose wrinkles with anger. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Maybe I know the truth. And maybe you knew the situation differently. But if you’d stayed and we were together, all anyone in this town would have seen was a grown man and a girl who was once young and vulnerable.”

“You’re insane!”

“I was being sensible. I was saving you from the choices you were making. I was saving me from having a shotgun shoved up my asshole. And I was saving us both from the teenage bullshit relationships go through.” I stalk toward her, staring down into her moist eyes. “I was not gonna spend a year with you, Bear, then have us fizzle out because the spark had worn off and suddenly, you’re wondering if maybe you chose wrong.”

“You continue to think you get to make the choices for us both!” She presses her palms to my chest and shoves me back. Except, I’m heavier than her, so it’s she who moves. “Dammit, Luc! You don’t get to plan my life out and expect me to be your little puppet, moving where and when you tell me to move.”

“Seems I do. Because you were so fucking focused on the now of everything, you never once stopped to think about the later.”

“There is no later! There’s nothing. Because you sent me away and life moved on.”

“Kari—”

“This wasn’t something that happened last month. Or even last year. It’s not like we had a huge fight a week ago, and now you’re here in my home, begging for another chance. This is all ancient history!”

My heart splinters in my chest, aching and bleeding.

“It’s been six years,” she groans. “An entire quarter of my life. I’ve changed since then.”

“Kari—”

“You’ve changed,” she whimpers. “Our lives have changed. It’s like you thought everything could be paused and I would go away for a few years. Age up a little. And when I reached a certain number of birthdays that would please you, then you could un-pause and we’d continue on. But that’s not how life goes. You don’t get to mess with people like that.”

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