Page 37 of Drifting Hearts
I looked over at Clay and shot him a reassuring smile. He still seemed uncomfortable, but he no longer looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear, so I called that a win. Now we just had to make it through the rest of the evening.
Chapter 19
Clayton
Archer looked good. Happy.Happier still when he didn’t look at me. That was fine. He could go on pretending that I didn't exist and I could go on thinking about what might be different if I’d never fucked him over.
I missed him. I’d missed him for months. Years. Decades, it felt like. But it was somehow worse with him ten feet away from me, acting like I was a ghost. I might as well have been one.
Tia’s girlish laughter filled the yard. She was a hell of a storyteller. It almost made me sorry that she wasn’t here when I came, but I was happy for this stranger who’d seemed to glow, captivating everyone around her.
I did, however, know Julie. She worked at Bennett’s and she often came over to see Patricia and have coffee. They talked like old friends. Like mother and daughter. I didn’t know either of these women before, but I’m glad they found this place. Their lives on the other side were probably still hard, because nothing’s easy, but they both had a joy that I didn’t think I’d ever get. Included in their little group was a guy named Milo. He volunteered with the girls every now and then, helping them with makeup and hair for interviews. He and his boyfriend, Colby, seemed like nice, stand-up guys and I could tell how into each other they were. They had that starry-eyed, soupy-hearted, so-in-love-with-you expression whenever their gazes met. They werethe kind of guys I’d liked to have been friends with, if I could manage to talk to anyone. But I felt see-through. Like I was a spirit haunting the edges of life.
The conversation flowed around me and I didn’t mind so much that I wasn’t included. Ghosts don’t talk, after all. Once in a while, I caught Shane looking at me with that same stony, almost murderous expression. But then he’d glance at Kieran and look away again, take another sip of his beer, and go back to trying to pretend I was invisible.
Archer was better at it than Shane. Honestly, I didn’t know what Patricia had hoped to accomplish by putting us all in the same vicinity. It wasn’t like Archer was going to suddenly forgive me. Things weren’t ever going back to how they were between us.
Patricia put Shane to work barbequing for everyone and that’s when Kieran leaned over.
“You okay?” he asked, his voice pitched low like he didn’t want to be caught talking to me.
“I’m good.” It didn’t matter if it was the truth or not. I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d been sitting here for the past thirty minutes imagining myself to be a ghost.
Kieran nodded and went back to the conversation around us as if he’d never asked at all. It was almost like it never happened, but then I looked up from my drink and Archer was looking at me.
Once upon a time, I’d been able to look at him and know what he was thinking, the way that only best friends can do. That silent language was gone now and Archer was a mystery. His gaze was walled-off and cold. His expression was carefully blank. He looked at me with neither fondness nor disdain, and then his focus slid away and I went back to being invisible.
It felt like a missed opportunity. Like I should have used those five seconds of acknowledgement to beg his forgiveness. The ache in mychest turned into a sinkhole, consuming everything inside me, bit by bit.
“Kieran, you’ve been awful quiet. Tell us what you’ve been up to.”
The mention of Kieran’s name brought me out of my fog and, for the first time that evening, I paid attention.
“Nothing really,” Kieran answered.
Nothing really, just holding me close and protecting me from my own mind and then pushing me away. Nothing really. Just kissing me in secret.
“There has to be something,” Tia probed.
“Well, my truck got stolen. Burned to a cinder.”
“Holy shit!” Tia said. “I’m sorry.”
My gaze went to Kieran, even though I’d tried my best not to look at him at all. Looking at him made my skin tight. It made me want to look at him more, and if I sat there making love-sick faces at him all evening, ghost or not, Archer would catch on.
“I’m not,” Kieran said. “I bought a car and I’m going to take it on a road trip. Maybe a few of them.”
“That sounds like fun,” Patricia said. “Where will you go?”
Kieran shrugged. “Wherever I want. I think I’d like to just drive, you know? Play it by ear. I’ve always wanted to do something like that.”
“Since when?” Shane asked, not in a malicious way, but a curious way. “I didn’t know that.”
Warmth, and a little smugness, bloomed in my chest and suddenly I felt real. I knew something about Kieran that he hadn’t told anyone else, or maybe he had and they weren’t listening.
“Since always, I guess. But it wasn’t relevant before because work and debt, and you get the idea. And then I guess I forgot about it. But other than the whole stolen truck thing, being on the road reminded me that I’d wanted to do that.”
“It sounds like fun actually,” Shane said. “Now that Vivian runs the bar, I could go with you.”
