Page 43 of Sam & Justin

The smile on Sam’s face doubled in size. “I will.” He paused. “Just gotta text me your number, yeah?”

I promised him I would. We had one last kiss at his car, and then I could do nothing but watch as he drove away.

An hour after Sam drove away, I was standing in the big gym at the high school. A few of the student volunteers had shown up, and Vanessa was making good use of them. It was a good thing, because I was useless. I felt like I was walking through molasses. Every step seemed to take three times as long, and my mind? It was a hundred miles away. Maybe it was a couple hundred milesaway. I’d have to search the distance between Gomillion and King’s Bay to know for sure.

Vanessa kept giving me strange looks and finally cornered me when the student volunteers left to take the carts of tables and chairs back to the storage room. “Are you hungover?”

“No,” I answered. I hadn’t gotten drunk at the dance, so there was no chance of being hungover. No, this was something completely different, even if the symptoms were the same. Was it possible to be hungover from a good night, from a person?

If it was, then I was hungover from Sam.

“Then what is it?”

“I miss him.” The words tumbled from my mouth, and the weight of them almost knocked me backward. He’d been gone for an hour, and I already missed him in a way that was debilitating. I missed him in a way I’d never missed anyone before in my life.

Vanessa studied me with keen dark eyes. “He left this morning?”

“About an hour ago.”

I thought I might get some kind of sympathy, but instead, Vanessa started laughing. My jaw dropped, and it only made her laugh harder. “Justin, it’s been an hour! You’ve spent what? Two days with him?”

“And nights.”

Her laughter stopped. “Please tell me you didn’t go back to the motel with him after prom. Justin, the bed bugs.”

I rolled my eyes at her. “I told you, the motel is cleaner than it looks.”

“So, you went back to the motel with him?”

“Nope.”

Vanessa’s eyes widened. “You took him back to your place? Isn’t that a little serious for a weekend fling?” I didn’t have a chance to answer before she put all the pieces together. Her features softened, and her smile became almost dreamy. “It wasn’t just a weekend, was it?”

“It wasn’t,” I told her softly. “I think it was supposed to be, but there was something real between us. We both felt it.”

“Tell me everything.” She looked at the half-decorated walls, at the garbage cans that still needed to be emptied. “Well, tell me everythingwhilewe work.”

And so, I did. I told her our entire history, starting with tutoring him in the library. The student volunteers came back, and I lowered my voice so they wouldn’t overhear. I don’t think it worked, because a few of them kept following behind us like they were hanging on my every word and needed to know what happened next. They weren’t alone in that. I wanted to know what happened next, too.

When I finished, Vanessa looked like someone had just told her some grand, epic love story. “You’re right,” she sighed. “Fate had a hand in that, but fate’s not going to be enough for it to work out.”

“I know that.”

Fate might have thrown us back together, but it was our choices that would keep us that way. And starting today, I was choosing Sam.

17

Reunion - Sunday

I was thirty-nine, and for the first time ever, I wasn’t happy when I crossed that town line out of Gomillion. The whole drive back to King’s Bay, I wasn’t thinking about how pleased I was to escape. I was thinking about what I was leaving behind.WhoI was leaving behind. I kept replaying our kiss in the parking lot, the way neither of us wanted this to be over. It wasn’t a goodbye, and we both knew it. It was a beginning of something. I just didn’t know how it was going to become anything more than a beginning. Not when I was leaving him behind. I almost wanted to turn around, take him in my arms, and never let go.

But I couldn’t do that, because I had a life in King’s Bay. I had shit I had to get back for: clients and friends, the whole nine yards. I couldn’t just disappear back to my hometown and stay there.

I got home a few hours later, and my apartment felt colder. I’d gotten too used to Justin’s warmth. How the fuck had he made that big of an impression after only seventy-two damn hours? That wasn’t the type of person I’d ever been. Took me at least two months to fully warm up to my ex-husband, but I guess that was different. I didn’t have any history with Tim when we’d met, and I had more history with Justin than I’d even known.

Because he’d felt some kind of way for me back in high school, even if he hadn’t known it back then.

I made quick work of unpacking my bag and tossed it in the bottom of my closet. I was just about to figure out what I was going to do for dinner when my phone vibrated in my pocket. I figured it was probably Axel, making sure I got in alright. When I saw the name on the screen, my face split open in the kind of smile that made my cheeks hurt.