Page 118 of Bad Luck Club

“Here?” he asked, surprised, glancing through the front windows. Augusta had set the pineapple aside and was unabashedly staring at them, and Harry sat in the other window with Buford propped up, his back legs supported. Nicole came around with a big bowl, offering them popcorn before taking her own seat within sight of the window. The only ones not pointedly watching them were Bear and Cal, who could be seen in the background talking with Dee.

“Here,” she repeated.

It might be uncomfortable for both of them, but wasn’t that something they needed to move beyond? The fear of being a spectacle had prevented her from putting Jeremy in his place long ago, and she wasn’t going to allow it to stand in her way any longer.

For a moment, she thought Lee might pull away from her, but he didn’t. He nodded resolutely, and used his free hand to grab a few cushions from the chairs and put them on the wooden floor of the deck.

“Back-to-back?” she asked, surprised he’d suggested it. Heartened that he had.

Maybe it meant something.

Maybe it would be enough.

God, she wanted it to be enough.

“Back-to-back,” he repeated, his voice a little rough.

They lowered down onto the cushions, still hand in hand, because Blue couldn’t bring herself to let go.

“Should I start?” he said, nervous now. And she felt a stirring of those vines between them, a tightening. Part of his cloak fluttered over her hand, and she felt him shudder against her.

“You just have a sweater on under that. Do you want to go inside and get a coat?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not shivering. It’s…it felt good when you sat back against me. It felt like I could finally be at rest again.”

She let out a little sigh, his words easing it out of her.

“I’m scared, Lee,” she admitted. Because somehow it was much easier talking like this, back-to-back, touching. “I don’t want to become the woman I was. The pushover.”

“I don’t want to be the man I was either,” he said, his voice sounding a little choked again. “The interview…even before you and Dottie showed up it felt wrong, like slipping on a suit that used to fit but didn’t anymore. I hate that I hurt you. I hate it. And I don’t want you to be a pushover either. I want you to keep challenging me, for us to keep challenging each other.” He squeezed her hand. “Maybe we can be our own Bad Luck Club. We can do challenges every other week like they do.”

Her heart in her throat, she imagined what that might look like. She saw the fun they’d have, going on adventures, encouraging each other to stretch their boundaries, to do what they might have once thought impossible. Lee, brewing beer with River. Going to one of her yoga classes. Taking Iris to see a chick flick. The two of them going skydiving together, line dancing, and playing poker.

Her, sticking to a budget. Climbing a mountain. Shearing a sheep.

“I like that idea,” she said through a throat now thick with emotion. “Although we might want to call it something different. We don’t want Bear and Cal to sue us.”

“How about the Good Luck Club?”

She took his other hand, needing that connection to him. “It has a certain ring to it. But you said you were going to finish your story…”

He squeezed both of her hands, as if reassuring himself she was there, that they were in this together now. “I was so lost when I met you, Blue, even before I knew that my life was a paper house. I’d been steeped in fake things for so long I no longer knew what something real felt or looked like. I think…I think maybe I preferred it that way because it hurt so much to lose my mother. I didn’t ever want to feel that way again, about anything, so it was easier for everything to be numb. To have a life without any color in it, so that I would never notice if something was taken away. I don’t think I ever let myself feel the pain of losing my mother. Not until last night in the cab, driving away from that bar. I broke down on Dottie. I cried for the first time since right before Mom died.”

The pain was thick in his voice, as if he’d just now lost her, not years ago. As if he were once again a teenage boy bargaining with fate, terrified he’d lose. Oh, her heart. It was breaking for him, and yet at the same time, it was piecing itself back together, healing itself as miraculously as a sweater knitted into being. Tears rose in her eyes.

“Lee,” she said, letting all of her emotion, all of her love, leak into that word. “I’m so sorry. She was such a special person. I know from what you and Addy told me…and I know because of who you are. I see her so clearly in you. I feel like I know her too.”

She felt a drop of moisture land on her hand and realized he was crying, which pushed her over the edge, and then she was crying too, tears coursing silently over her cheeks, falling on their joined hands like rain.

The last time around, he had turned to comfort her, to hold her, but this time she turned to him, holding him from behind, her hands clasping over his heart.

His sigh was one of pure contentment, of a relief so profound it had a presence all its own.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you. She was a wonderful person. I just wish I’d been a better son. That I’d done more to show her. You know…she made us Christmas sweaters every year. Knitted them from her own patterns. I used to groan every year when I opened one, like I was above the whole thing, but I kept them all. All these years. I still take them out every Christmas just to look at them and pretend they still smell like her. When I saw your work, I couldn’t help but think…I couldn’t admit it to myself, but it felt like a sign.”

The words rolled through her, healing her.

“I think it was,” she said, holding him tighter, reveling in the beating of his heart and the way it sped up the closer she pressed. “And I think she knew exactly how much she meant to you. You don’t have to tell a person for them to know. When you love someone it beams through in everything you do. In everything you are.”

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