Page 67 of Hound Dog
Keep him at arm’s length. Don’t get too friendly.
I glanced down at my ratty softball t-shirt. The same one I used to sleep in and study in during college. There was a faint stain at the hip where I’d spilled red wine and was never quite able to get it out. My hair was in a sloppy bun on top of my head. And I didn’t bother to wear a stitch of makeup on my face. Just sunscreen.
I was literally trying to use my clothes and appearance as a shield to keep him away from me. To drive home the point that I wasn’t available. I wassonot available that I didn’t even care to look pretty in front of him.
I untwisted the foil from around the cork of the champagne bottle and looked back over my shoulder where Finn had taken several steps back with the dogs. “Ready?”
He gave a nod and held both dogs' leashes tighter. “Ready.”
“Here’s to you, Mom,” I whispered and pushed the cork with my thumbs. With hardly any effort on my part, the cork popped, and champagne fizzed out the lip of the bottle, splashing on the toes of my hiking boots.
Finn ran forward, dipping the plastic cups beneath the stream of champagne and catching the liquid gold… literally. That bottle couldn’t have been cheap.
I set the bottle down at my feet and took the half-filled cup he handed to me.
Tapping the edge of his cup to mine didn’t have the same satisfying clink as glass on glass, but the view more than made up for that.
“To Sharon,” Finn whispered.
“To Mom.”
I closed my eyes as I pulled the sip of champagne through my lips. It was bright with fruit flavor, acidic, and had notes of coffee, cream and… toast? Yes, toast.
It was delicious.
Emotion ballooned in my chest. Mom would have loved this champagne. She would have downed this entire glass unapologetically, and even though she would have wanted a refill, she would have never helped herself.
Not with such an expensive bottle. It would have taken someone else pouring it for her to have that second glass, even if it was what she desperately wanted.
And thisview. I could almost picture her plopping down in the center of the grass. Just sitting. And staring. She could have stayed here for hours, until I had gotten bored and complained.
But not Mom. When it came to hiking and nature, it was the only time she was happy to sit in peace and justbefor a while, with nothing else on the agenda.
A sob hiccupped from my chest, as I couldn’t contain the pure, undiluted grief that swelled inside me like an out-of-control wave.
Finn’s smile broke, disintegrating into a confused frown. “Haylee,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I thought this was a good idea—”
I sniffled and swiped my fingers beneath the stream of tears falling from my eyes. “It was. Itis. I’m just sad. Sad that I’m having to do this for her. Sad that she never got to mark these off herself. Sad that having me so young seemed to dull her shine. The stories Aunt Meryl tells me about her when she was younger—the groupie who followed my dad around for months and partied—that’s not the Mom I ever knew. And she gave that piece of herself up… for me.”
Finn pressed his mouth into a line. “Or maybe she was lost before you. Maybe that wild groupie was the sad one and you made her complete.”
“If that was true, she wouldn’t have had a list.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe she made the list and then realized she didn’t need to do arbitrary things to feel complete.”
“That’s a lot of maybes.”
His defeated sigh told me he knew he was losing this argument. That heknewthe truth in what I’d said.
Finn reached into his bag to grab some napkins and handed them to me. I pressed them beneath my eyes before blowing my nose.
Well, hell, I wanted to look unattractive? Mission accomplished. Snot plus zero makeup equals blotchy skin.
“What can I do?” he asked, the rims of his eyes tightening.
“Nothing,” I whispered, looking out at the clouds rolling over us. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do… except be here. And listen to me.
Which, admittedly, was more than Ben had ever done. It wasn’t exactly that he didn’t listen when I talked about my mom, but because his own mom was such a basket case disaster, Ben always just quickly reminded me how lucky I was to have a loving mom for almost eighteen years. How that was better than having a narcissist mother like his for a lifetime.
