Page 54 of Sunsets & Slow Dances

“Youhaveto tell him,” Ashley emphasized.

“You have to tell him the truth,” Daphne seconded.

I didn’t need to look at Zoe to know her opinion, but I did anyway, and if an expression could speak, Zoe’s would be saying,See, I told you so.

Deep down, I knew they were right. The problem was, Callumhatedliars, and I just got him back in my life. I didn’t want to risk losing him again, even as a friend. He didn’t seem to be holding what he thought I’d done against me as a friend, so why would I risk losing that by digging up the past?

I knew the answer to that. It was because I hurt him. Whether or not my intentions were noble, he’d spent the past decade thinking I’d slept with a guy he’d never liked. That would be the same as me believing he’d slept with Kendra Abernathy. Just the thought of that felt like a knife in my chest. My friends were right. He deserved to know the truth. I just hoped he wouldn’t hold my lie against me.

18

CALLUM

“I still can’t believeyou grew up here.” Miles Ford leaned over, lined up his shot, and hit the cue ball, knocking it clean across the table, where it clipped the red seven, which caused it to roll and sink in the corner pocket. “That’s so crazy!”

He wasn’t the only one who was surprised by things. When I heard that Miles and Zoe were engaged, I was shocked. Not because he was an A-list movie star and she was a single mom, widow, a nurse from a small town, and eight years older than him. No, I was shocked because I never thought Zoe would marry again after Austin died. The two of them shared a kind of love that was so special, so rare, I thought it might have ruined her for other relationships.

Unlike me and Nadia, who were always fighting and then making up, those two were glued at the hip from the day they got together. Even when she got pregnant at sixteen, they handled it so maturely. What they had was so real. They were soulmates. It was a once-in-a-lifetime, true love. But I was happy to see that, in her case, lightning had struck twice.

From what everyone around town said, she and Miles seemed to have the real thing. He adored her, and she equally adored him. I was happy for both of them.

I wondered if I would ever have that with anyone. Anyone other than Nadia. I also wondered why we’d never been able to get it right when we were together. Why we’d broken up so much. I told myself it was just because we were young, but Zoe and Austin were the same age, and they hadn’t had our issues.

“How do you two know each other?” Dawson chalked his cue.

“I trained with him for six months before I shot Caged.”

“No shit?! I loved that movie,” Dawson enthused.

“It really is a small world.” Harlan tipped his beer back.

“Small world,” Skittles, the parrot, squawked behind me.

“So, what’s the plan?” Harlan pointed his question at me as he chalked his cue. “Are you going to move back to Arizona after Chloe finishes the school year?”

“I don’t know.” I honestly had no clue what the best thing was for her.

I felt a slap on my shoulder before I heard, “Boy, I heard you were back in town. I was wonderin’ when I’d see you!”

When I turned around, a warm feeling of nostalgia washed over me. “Hey, Ray.”

Ray’s once thick, tightly curled black hair was now salt-and-pepper. He stood about a foot shorter than me at five foot three and was a hundred pounds soaking wet. He’d never let his slight stature get in the way of his luck with the ladies, though. He had moves like Fred Astaire and was a smooth talker with more stories to tell than LeVar Burton fromReading Rainbow. He was born and bred in Firefly and lived above the bar for over fifty years. He worked odd jobs as a handyman/jack-of-all-trades and had seen this place through three owners, including James Comfort Sr., who bought the business over thirty years ago. When James Sr. passed away a couple years back, his sonsHank, Billy, and Jimmy Comfort inherited both the bar and Ray with it.

Ray, James Sr., Sheriff Dawson, my father, and his lawyer, Jennings Abernathy, used to hold weekly poker games in the back that I would attend because my mom worked odd hours as a nurse and midwife. Ray rescued animals that were deemed ‘bar mascots,’ and I would always keep myself occupied by hanging out with them.

The current ‘bar mascots’ were Skittles, the foul-mouthed parrot, and an Insta-famous pig named Kevin Bacon. But when I was growing up, he had a bearded dragon named Minnie Mouse, Axel Rose the goat, and Cleopatra the python.

He sighed loudly. “Sure do miss your old man.”

That made one of us. I wish I had the capacity to compartmentalize the man I loved and idolized as a young child vs. the man I was never good enough for as a preteen and teenager vs. the man I discovered was living a double life who was a lying, cheating, hypocrite who had another family as a young adult. But I couldn’t separate my feelings for each one of those men. They were all tangled into one big ball of confusion, disappointment, and betrayal.

“Heard what yer doin’ for Chloe. Your old man woulda been real proud.”

“I’m not doing it for him.”

I hoped that people didn’t think I was doing this out of some misplaced loyalty to a man who’d made me feel like I wasn’t good enough from the age of eight on and then ended up being a piece-of-shit cheater. I was doing this because I didn’t want Chloe to go into care. That was it. That was the only reason.

“Still.” Ray patted my shoulder one more time. “Good to see ya.”

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