Page 105 of Fall for Me

So it wasn’t Eli’s truck. Obviously.

Chelsea?

I wanted to smack myself. Why would Chelsea be driving Eli’s truck? Without Eli? I was just seeing her because the truck looked like his. When I first left home, I’d seen Chelsea everywhere. In every young woman who looked remotely like her. Every wave of brown hair and smattering of freckles. Every laugh from a woman walking down the street. It was never her, of course. I hadn’t had one of those jolts in a while, but that’s all this was.

I felt a hand on my arm. Lucy, keeping me from moving forward. “Seamus, are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Oh. Uh…” I swallowed, looking down at her. Lucy, if anyone, would understand.

“For a second I thought that was Eli’s truck,” I confessed, my voice close to cracking. “And that it was Chelsea driving it.”

Lucy looked toward the truck. There was no one there anymore, the person having disappeared into the office. It was probably any one of the dozens of people who came and went from the office every day. Lucy turned back to me.

When she looked back at me, her eyebrows were slanted in concern. “I thought that had stopped? Have you talked to her recently?”

I forgot I’d told Lucy about seeing Chelsea everywhere. I shrugged. “She sent me a text on my birthday, but that was weeks ago.” I know I looked chagrin when I added, “I didn’t respond.”

“What?! Why not?”

I rubbed the back of my neck with my free hand.

Because I wanted to say I’m sorry. That I was still hopelessly in fucking love with her and I made a mistake leaving.

I was too weak to care right at that moment that it was what she’d needed, so it had been safer to tuck my phone away.

I glanced at Lucy. She knew. She’d seen everything run across my face.

“You didn’t know what to say,” she offered.

“Yeah.”

Lucy tucked the papers and binder under her arm and wrapped her other one around me, tipping her head against my shoulder. “Oh Sea. I’m sorry.” Then she yelped as she nearly dropped the stack of papers and the binder.

I reached to grab them and nearly lost the umbrella.

“God, what a shit show!” Lucy laughed. “Come on, let’s get into the tent.”

I sighed, following her, but allowing myself one last glance at the other lot.

The person was standing there, I swear, looking right at me.

Then they opened my truck’s door.

For a moment I was too confused to react. To register what the hell was happening when they thrust a bag in my door and then ran around to the driver’s side of their truck. The last thing I saw was a pair of red sneakers slipping inside before the truck’s engine revved and it peeled out of the spot.

“Chelsea,” I whispered.

I felt the umbrella pulled from my hand, and when I looked at Lucy, I saw she was holding it now.

“Go,” she said.

I looked back, my heart in my throat.

“Go!” she yelled.

I didn’t wait then. I turned and sprinted toward the other side of the lot.

The running I’d been doing in place of baseball training this spring had paid off—I made it back to my truck in under a minute. But it still wasn’t fast enough to catch up to the truck. Its taillights bumped over the dirt road and out of sight by the time I was halfway across the building site.

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