Page 35 of Sunsets & Slow Dances

The truth was, I waslucky. Felicity was the one who was missing out. She was never going to get these years back. She was missing so many milestones. She didn’t know her own son.

As quietly as I could, I stood, crossed the room and stepped out, closing the door behind me. On my way down the hall, I heard a noise behind Chloe’s door. I stopped and listened. Through the door, I could hear her soft sobs, and my heart broke for her.

I lifted my hand and knocked lightly. The crying stopped, but there was no answer. I knocked again. Still no answer. My instinct was to open the door and ask if she was okay, but clearly she wasn’t, and she’d made it clear I was not her favorite person. Still, I didn’t want her to feel alone.

Fuck. I was torn.

After seeing Nadia today, I wanted to call her and ask her what she thought I should do. Besides being the love of my life, Nadia was also my best friend. Honestly, that’s what hurt the most about how things ended between us. I lost the person I talked to abouteverything. The person I trusted most in my life. But I couldn’t call her just because I took an estimate for work on her house, and we’d had one conversation. We didn’t have that sort of relationship anymore.

“Chloe, I’m here if you need anything or want to talk,” I said through the door. “Or if you don’t want to talk, if you just want company.”

I waited there for about another minute, but there was no response. Not wanting to make the situation worse, I continued down the hallway. There was nothing I could do for Chloe to make her feel any better. I felt totally helpless. I hated that feeling. If there was a problem, I wanted to fix it.

It had been a point of contention with Nadia and me. She would tell me about something that was bothering her, and I would instantly go into problem-solving mode. Sometimes, my efforts were appreciated. Sometimes, they were not. It caused problems. I never asked if she wanted my help; I just jumped in and tried to fix the issue, and then I would get confused when she was upset or didn’t appreciate what I’d tried to do.

Now, as an adult, I understand that sometimes your partner just needs to vent; they don’t always need your help. And even if they do need your help, you should ask them if the way you want to solve the issue is the path they want to take instead of just bulldozing ahead and fixing it. I’d definitely bulldozed on several occasions.

One situation in particular was with her science partner, who didn’t do his half of their assignment and blamed it on her. I paid him a visit and let him know that if he didn’t come clean, he would be eating soup for the next month because he wouldn’t be able to chew food. She didn’t appreciate my intervention since she’d already handled it by having a meeting with the vice principal. There were several other incidents where my overprotectiveness got me in hot water with her. I had a temper, and I was very protective of her.

We were young. We made a lot of mistakes. But we did love each other, even if we didn’t exactly know how to.

Today, I’d been worried that I might have overstepped once again. But when that asshole wouldn’t let Nadia close the door, I saw red. My mind jumped to what might have happened if I hadn’t been there, and the next thing I knew, I was standing in front of Nadia, ready to put that asshole in a guillotine choke.

Thankfully, it hadn’t come to that. Once the douchebag of the year heard my name, I saw a flicker of recognition in his eyes, and he went from being a frat boy asshole to a fanboy asshole. When I shut the door on his face, I hadn’t meant to push Nadia against the wall; we just ended up that way. I also hadn’t meant to almost kiss her. It wasn’t until I felt the heat of her breath that I realized I’d leaned down and our lips were a centimeter apart.

I shook off the memory of her hand on my chest and the curves of her body against mine and headed to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

On my way downstairs, I heard Buzz snoring from his room. His nocturnal habit of sawing logs was what earned him the nickname Buzz. He was a naval aviator, aka pilot in the Navy, and Buzz was his call sign because he snored so loud.

The first night we slept here, Buzz’s snoring had woken Matty up from down the hall, but now the kid was so exhausted when he went to bed it didn’t bother him at all. In Arizona, it took me at least fifteen minutes to get Matty out of bed in the morning. Now he woke up on his own before sunrise to go out with Buzz and Bandit to work. Betty liked to sleep in, so she’d been bunking with Chloe. Matty’s job was collecting eggs from the chicken coop. He was also learning how to muck the stalls. He was loving farm life. He’d also made some great friends in Firefly. He and Hank Comfort’s stepdaughter Luna were inseparable. I wasn’t sure if the fact that Matty was doing so well here made my decision of whether to stay in town or not more difficult or less.

I walked into the kitchen to grab some water and was startled when I caught sight of my mom seated at the kitchen table in the dark reading one of her romance novels. She was wearing a miniature version of a coal miner’s headband LED lamp.

“Mom.” I sucked in a startled breath. “Why don’t you have the light on?”

“I do.” She reached up to her forehead and switched it off before turning on the overhead light.

I wasn’t going to argue with her, mainly because it would be a waste of breath. Nora Knight might just be the most stubborn person on earth.

She removed the miner’s headlamp and placed it on the table. “I heard you had an eventful day.”

“Did you?” Gossip spread faster than an STD at an orgy in this town.

“Word is you were over at the Carson place.”

“Is that right?”

“And there’s a rumor floating around that you had a run-in with the Patterson boy?”

I assumed the ‘Patterson boy’ was Will. I also assumed that was a rhetorical question; I didn’t respond as I grabbed a glass from the cabinet.

“What happened?” she questioned in her very mom way.

I suddenly felt like she’d just caught me with cigarettes in my backpack, and I was telling her they were a friend’s, not mine.

“Nothing.”

“So, you’re saying you didn’t have him by the throat?”

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