Page 65 of The Cost of Forgetting You

I drag my teeth along my bottom lip. It’s humiliating to say aloud, but I’m sick of the way it makes me feel for him to tease like this. We both know it’s a stupid joke that I happen to be the butt of, but asking him about it is like acknowledging the elephant in the room. Once you do, someone has to pick up the elephant’s shit.

His shoulders slacken, and he looks exhausted all of a sudden. Like waiting for me to find my words is the last thing he has time for today. “Just say whatever you’ve got to say, Delilah.”

“Fine.” I uncross my arms, letting them fall to my sides. “I don’t understand why you insist on making comments like that.”

A wry grin stretches his lips. He’s the cat that caught the canary. “What comments, exactly?” He wipes a speck of dirt from his jaw, but the smile remains in place. “You’re going to have to be more clear.”

I blow out a breath, but my chest is still so tight. My skin prickles with awareness of his gaze. I want to crawl into a hole for even having brought this up, but I stand tall. I’m not going to let him see how much it bothers me. “Pretending to flirt with me, Truett.”

His eyebrow lifts. “Who said anything about pretending?”

My mouth opens and then closes. Several times. He studies me, noting every attempt at rebuttal, until at last I give up and clamp my lips together.

“I’ve never understood why you can’t see just how remarkable you are, you know that? You were way out of everyone’s league here. No wonder you moved away.”

I scoff, but my heart triples its pace. “Now I know you’re lying. I was never anything special, let alone remarkable. There at the end I was practically a social pariah. I wasn’t out of anyone’s league.”

“You were out of mine.”

We stare at each other, neither of us blinking, as that statement settles like dust.

He sits up, braces his hands on his hips, and jerks his chin toward the house. “You wanna continue this conversation inside? I am sweating to death while you take your sweet time chewing on that revelation.”

I glance over my shoulder, grateful for an excuse to break our intense stare, and then back at Jason’s abandoned four-wheeler. “Want me to take that?” I manage to squeak out.

He smiles. It takes over his face easily, like the expression is his natural state. While mine is a nervous scowl, apparently.

“Long as you promise not to go as slow as you did the other night.” He waits for me to mount it and turn the key before revving his engine. “Last one to the house is a rotten egg.”

“No way, Tru?—”

“Giddy up, Delilah!” He takes off, startling a few grazing steer on the other side of the fence.

Forcing myself not to overthink this, I let it rip, hightailing it after him up the hill. The dust his wheels kick up clouds my lungs. I rise up on my feet as we crest the ridge, then flop on my ass hard once the ground levels out. He’s fast, but he’s cocky, making wide serpentine sweeps over the field in front of me. I find the path of least resistance, a straight shot that cuts right through a swath of mud, and gun it, spraying him with clumps of it as I zip past. The last thing I see is his mouth going wide to yell something intentionally flirty, I’m sure—though I hardly believe him—before a sizable splotch of mud hits him square in the chest and he slows, a look of shock rippling over his features.

“Giddy up, Truett,” I grumble, a feeling of triumph washing over me.

“I cannot believe you did that.”

Tru tips one of his mother’s amber glasses beneath the faucet and fills it with water. He knocks it back. I try not to stare at his throat working as he swallows, but I fail. It should not be as sexy as it is. I know that. Still, there’s a responding pulse between my legs, and I cross them to cut it off at the pass.

He can’t just do things like call me remarkable and expect me to act like everything’s normal. Can he?

I shrug, feeling anything but nonchalant. “Don’t start fights you can’t finish.”

He turns to me, lips stretched wide in a grin that makes his dimple pop. His shirt is splattered with mud, his forearms the same. He tosses his hat onto the counter and runs a hand through his sweat-darkened hair. It’s left sticking up in a few directions, but my chuckle dies in my throat when he crosses the distance from the sink to the island where I’m sitting and leans forward on arms braced against the granite’s edge. “I never said we were finished.”

“You were mad at me, if I recall?”

“Not mad.” He shakes his head, gaze narrowed on me like he’s taking my measure. “Irked. You irk me.”

I choke on a nervous laugh. “What an honor.”

“It’s hard to hear you talk down on this town when I know you love it.” He licks his lips, his gaze dropping to the glass in his hand. “It’s hard to hear you talk about leaving when what I really want is for you to stay.”

It’s impossible to swallow when my throat is this tight. Immediately all I want is to read into those words. To believe them with all I’ve got. But for the sake of my fragile heart, I can’t. I let my gaze drop, scanning the room instead of meeting his intense stare when it finds me. He’s updated some things since I was last here, but the stained-glass window above the sink where Lucy would wash dishes while I sat and talked her ear off is still there. I half expect her to walk out of the hallway and ask if I’d like some tea.

Tru must track my thoughts, because he leans back and his voice is softer when he says, “Is it weird being back here?”

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