Page 5 of Lose You to Find Me

Me:Looking forward to mini golf tomorrow

She’s working, so I don’t expect a response anytime soon. After our dinner date, I drove her home and kissed her goodbye. She wore bright red lipstick that was inviting as hell, but it still felt nothing like the soft pair of pink lips that hardly ever saw makeup at all. I wish she’d invited me in, but it was probably better that she didn’t.

Sometime later, Emma replies with three red hearts and nothing else.

All I can think is…Raine hated emojis.

Chapter Two

RAINE

Lightning cracks alongthe sky, accompanied by another rumble of thunder that rattles the porch windows behind me, but the rain never comes. It’s hot and humid, and the wind whipping the trees is causing the branches to make unruly noises against the glass that have the tiny dog in my lap whining as we watch the storm unravel around us.

Fingers grooming the fur of my aunt’s mixed mutt, I whisper, “It’s okay, Buddy. Your mom will be home soon to curl under the blankets with.”

Walking, feeding, and cuddling the cutie curled up on me only makes me want a dog ten times more than before. Especially now that I’m on my own. They say dogs make the best companions anyway.

When Aunt Tiffany heard I’d be in Virginia for the summer, she wanted to stay with me at the family cabin so I wouldn’t be completely by myself like the pathetic, broken-hearted college graduate that I am. Usually, my parents and Caleb would show up for a week or two around the Fourth of July, but not this year. Mom and Dad are in the middle of their divorce, and Caleb is probably casting a spell to curse me for breaking his heart, so that leaves my mother’s cynical sister who likes to make comments about how love is for fools anyway.

Though Tiffany hasn’t exactly been around lately because she likes to sneak off to the local community center under the guise of volunteering. I’m not completely naive to the inner workings of Radcliff. The community center doesn’t typically take volunteers, not even when they host senior bingo.

She doesn’t think anybody knows about Casey, the attractive bohemian man who works behind the counter at the building. The women in my family like to act like they’re better off alone after every single one of them wound up divorced, starting with my great-grandmother Claudette, followed by my grandmother Maud, Aunt Tiffany, and now my mother.

Apparently, my aunt wants to keep her newest man under wraps as if that’ll somehow break the curse we all seem to think we’re stuck with. It’s sort of cute watching her sneak around like a teenager. Pointless but cute.

I find myself smiling at the feisty woman who looks just like me and my mother. From our porcelain-doll skin to our lean statures to our dark brown eyes with speckles of gold in them, we all look nearly identical, with the exception of our various shades of red hair. Mom and Tiffany both look like reincarnations of Susan Hayward—Dad’s favorite classic movie actress. But because of his chocolate-brown hair, mine is a dark shade of burgundy with brown and red highlights that’s pretty in its own way but nothing like either of my parents. And maybe that’s a good thing.

I learned to be independent to a fault because of the women in my family who had to do so much on their own when their relationships fell apart. I spent years looking up to Tiffany and Grandma Maud, wanting to be just like them because I could see the strength in their motivation to build something beautiful for their futures. They were both dealt shitty hands with the men in their lives but managed to get out before it was too late. I didn’t know my grandmother very well before she died, but I was told plenty of stories that always made me cautious about how I’d mold my future.

I swore to myself that I’d never wind up in the same situation as any of them, miserable from my choices.

Well, congratulations, that bitter little voice inside my head taunts.Now you’re alone too, all because of one secret. Happy now?

The next crack of thunder scares me out of my quickly declining thoughts. My startled jump makes Buddy tumble off my lap and bolt through his doggy door into the house.

Despite this cabin being full of fun memories with the people I love, there are some bad ones too, with people I hardly even knew.

Summer was always the season full of mistakes.

The crushing feeling in my chest reminds me that those mistakes are what got me here in the first place.

I think of the boy with brown eyes that I’d fall asleep to dream of almost every night. His eyes were always soft, warm, and full of love whenever they were directed at me.

But those beautiful eyes instantly changed when I opened my mouth at graduation, and to this day I still think about those two words I told him.

I can’t.

I can’t.

I can’t.

Now I’m in a different state, getting eaten alive by tiny bugs as the humid air frizzes my hair. All because of one night after s’mores, one too many beers, and a cute blond boy who flashed me a smile.

It isn’t even that night I regret. I was young and dumb, but I didn’t owe anybody anything. It’s everything that happened afterward that haunts me.

Tiffany told me I should just stay in Virginia instead of going back to New York for grad school, but I think it’s only because she wants more family here. Ever since Maud passed away, she hasn’t had many people in the area unless we visited for the summer. All she has is a small apartment in northern Virginia, the cabin here, which is in Mom’s name, and the man she pretends she’s not half in love with because she doesn’t want to believe in that sort of thing.

Aunt Tiffany never minced her words whenever I’d visit during the summer. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” she’d tell me whenever I’d bring up my high school sweetheart. It isn’t as if my family ever disliked him. A man like Caleb is impossiblenotto like, and even my cynical aunt admitted as much. Still, her comments over the years fed into the anxiety I felt when he dropped to his knee in front of the crowd of people at graduation and asked me to spend the rest of my life with him.

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