Page 164 of When Wrecked Meets Ruined
“Pfft. Piece of cake.” As it turned out, I was a little rusty. Not to mention that sandals were not the best footwear for scaling fences. I jumped back down to the ground after another failed attempt. “This is stupid.”
“Take a girl off the streets, and she can’t even scale a fence anymore,” he teased. “You’ve gotten soft, Bellamy.”
I took it as a challenge and refused his offer of help. Instead, I shimmied under the fence and emerged on the other side, victorious as Ridge leaped over the top.
“Show off,” I muttered, dusting off my shorts while he laughed.
I didn’t even know why we were there, but I didn’t turn back as Ridge used his phone flashlight to light our way, and we wandered through the graveyard of broken dreams. The old Impala was gone, and a mountain of flattened metal was in its place.
“I loved that old car,” I said wistfully.
“Me too,” he said. “I beat the shit out of it with a baseball bat the night you were in the hospital.”
That didn’t surprise me.
Ridge and I were so good at destroying the things we loved.
We kept walking past the scrap metal and broken appliances until we reached the fence where we had our first kiss.
I looked up at his face, shadowed in the dusk. “Why are we here, Ridge? We can’t go back and recreate something—”
“I know. And I don’t want to.”
“Whatdoyou want?”
“The same thing I wanted then. You.”
I shook my head. “What about your girlfriend?”
“Is that the only thing holding you back?”
“It’s a pretty big thing.”
He rubbed his hand over his jaw. “We broke up.”
My mouth gaped. Why hadn’t he said something sooner? “What? When? Last night?”
“Five weeks ago.”
“What the hell, Ridge. Why didn’t you say something?”
“I’m telling you now. I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“But she kept calling you last night.”
“To say goodbye. She’s moving to Paris.”
Paris. Wow. I bet she liked champagne too. I looked at the houses across the hill on the other side of the abandoned railroad tracks and thought about how far we’d come and how much our lives had changed. I wasn’t that same girl running from a meth head with a crowbar in my hand, and he wasn’t that same boy with his brother’s whiskey and a baseball bat, looking to mess things up.
We’d built lives. Good ones. We had a future, but I didn’t know if we had one together. Our lives were still headed in different directions.
I turned and faced the junkyard. It held some of our memories, but we didn’t belong here anymore. “Let’s head back. There’s nothing here for us.”
When I stepped away from the fence, he reached for my hand, and I let him take it.
He felt like home.
CHAPTERSIXTY-ONE
