Page 9 of Somehow You Knew

“Thank you. He’s adorable and hopefully will never treat a woman the way that asshole Derek treated me.”

Laney clears her throat. “Well, spill then. Tell me everything.”

I spend the next several minutes of my drive home recounting the horrendous details of my date.

“Okay, I don’t blame you for giving up on men after that one,” she says.

“Right?”

Now it’s her turn to sigh. “God, why can’t they all be like Hummingbird Guy?”

“Ah, yes…the elusive Hummingbird Guy. I mean, he barely said more than a few sentences to me, but I was already picking out China patterns.”

Laney and I share a laugh as I bring up my stranger from over a month ago for the thousandth time. The truth is, the brief encounter plays on a loop in my mind..

“Don’t feel too bad. We don’t have men like that here in my little town either. But a girl can hope, right?”

Laney lives in Blossom Peak, a small town in the North Carolina mountains, about a seven-hour drive from Carrington Cove. Our mountains might not be as vast as the ones they have out west, but they hold a different kind of magic—the kind that makes you forget where you came from and wonder if you ever want to go back.

A few years ago, Laney reached out to me in need of professional photos for her salon, Blossom Beauty, after she found my photography page on Instagram. As a fellow business owner, I know the importance of the right pictures to portray a brand, so I took care of her and we hit it off instantly. We’ve remained friends ever since.

Every once in a while, I’ll leave town without telling anyone and go visithersmall town, needing the escape from my own. Not only do we share a love of good wine, 2000s rom-coms, and female empowerment, but shegetsme. We’re both single, both business owners, and both surrounded by married people who have forgotten what it’s like to be alone.

I love my friends here, and even though my brothers don’t deserve them, they’ve each married women that I’m proud to call my sisters-in-law. But they’re all so happy in their married life bliss bubbles, while I’m sitting on the outside looking in.

And Laney knows exactly how I feel.

“I still can’t get over him, though,” she says, bringing me back to our conversation and the man who made an impression on me faster than any man has in a long time.

“Girl, you and me both. But I’m almost convinced that I made him up, you know?” I exhale, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. “I’ve never seen him again, the hummingbird he drew has long since been washed away, and the whole encounter sounds like something straight out of a romance novel.”

“Such a shame. He was tatted too, right?”

I swallow, my mouth watering as the mental image forms. “Oh yeah.”

Jet black hair, piercing green eyes, and fully tattooed arms, ink all the way down to his knuckles. The scruff on his chin only added to his sex appeal, and how his rugged demeanor was contrasted by the delicate way he held my arm while he sketched a hummingbird on my skin. He wore all black, but sitting across from him for those twenty minutes felt like being blinded by the sun.

It was the most surreal, out-of-body, orgasmic experience of my life—and then he was gone. Like it never happened.

And the part that unsettles me the most, the part that makes me unable to forget about him, is thehummingbird.

Only one person could know the importance of that.

And he’s not even alive anymore.

“Maybe it all was a dream,” Laney muses as I pull into my parking space in front of my apartment. “Maybe being perpetually single and going on strings of bad dates is making us hallucinate.”

“Uh, that doesn’t give me much hope, Laney.”

She laughs. “I know. Hope is overrated anyway.”

“Then let’s just vow to be single together.”

“Deal…especially given that Seth has pretty much scarred me for life.”

“I never met the guy, and I think I might hate him more than you do.”

“He’s not worth the energy,” she says, referencing her ex. “Honestly, I think I knew deep down we weren’t meant to be. I just wish he hadn’t shaken my confidence so much.” She sighs. “But the truth is, he never made me feel anything like what I felt for Fletcher.”

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