to notice even that brief contact had sent a wave of shivers skittering over her arm. “Good night, Dean,” she tossed over her shoulder.
She should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
“Sarah, I’m sorry—” she heard behind her “—I know it’s way overdue, but I feel terrible about what happened between us.”
Ignoring the little voice that said keep walking, don’t respond, don’t get into it, she whipped around. “And that’s supposed to mean something to me? Please don’t tell me you’re that naive.”
“I’m just trying to apologize here, if you’ll give me half a chance—”
“You are that naive!” she countered, incredulous. She crossed her arms across her ribs so tightly it hurt. “Here’s a flash for you, Parrish—apologies are what people do when there’s some chance of making things better again. You could apologize for, maybe, being late for a date, or dialing a wrong number, or forgetting a birthday, even. There’s no apology for what you did to me—”
“Give me a break, would you?” he shot back, his voice tight with restraint. “I was twenty years old and confused and stupid, all right?”
Her hands flew into the air as she backed away, shaking her head. “I don’t want to hear this, Dean—”
She stumbled over something, which slowed her down enough for Dean to snag her wrist. “Well, too bad, because you’re going to. You don’t think I saw the hurt in your eyes tonight, every time I looked at you? You don’t think I know why you took off before dinner? For God’s sake, Sarah—this is me. Maybe it’s been nine years since we saw each other, but I can still see inside your head better than anyone else.”
He dropped her wrist; she stayed put, pinned by the electricity in his gaze.
“Running away isn’t going to change anything, and you know it,” he said, more softly. “And I don’t think either one of us wants this crap hanging over our heads on Saturday. So let’s have this out, right now, right here, so we can get on with our lives.”
She hesitated another few seconds, realized he’d just pester her to death until he had his say. “Okay.” She let out on a short breath. “Talk.”
A ragged sigh of relief floated over her head, but remorse flooded his features. “My aunt kept hammering away about how different we were, how you had all these goals, and I didn’t. And your folks…I knew they liked me and all, but when things started to get serious between us, you don’t think I knew what they were thinking, too?”
Before she could even think of what to say to that, he went on.
“And eventually, I thought, yeah, they were right…if I stayed around, if we got married, you probably wouldn’t finish college, we’d end up having a couple of kids, and a few years down the road you’d realize you’d thrown your life away for some worthless high-school dropout with no future. I couldn’t let that happen to you. So…I decided the best thing was to leave, to get away so you could do what you needed to do and I wouldn’t get in your way. Especially…” He pinned her with tortured eyes. “Especially after we made love,” he said, his voice low, the words arcing dangerously between them.
She went very, very still.
“No comment?”
All she could do was shake her head.
“Don’t you see, honey? We’d gotten in way too deep. Even as a twenty-year-old airhead, I knew that much.” He paused, still apparently expecting a reply. When there wasn’t one, he added, “I loved you so much…and I didn’t know what else to do, how to fix things.” He lifted his hands, let them fall to his sides again. “It seemed to make sense at the time.”
She stared at him for several seconds, the words not fitting together in any sort of logical order at first. Then, suddenly, they did, and her skin went cold.
“You lied to me?”
A breeze stirred the leaves overhead; something skittered underneath the rhododendrons. “Yes,” he finally said. “I lied. And what really sucks is that I can’t even say I never meant to hurt you, because I did. I had to make you hate me, or I never would’ve been able to leave at all.”
She regarded him for another moment, her hands braced on the back of her hips. Her shoulder bag slipped, the strap banging into her forearm; she let it slide down to the ground, walked away a few steps, then strode back. “All…all that business about hating Sweetbranch was an act?”
Dean ran his hand over his face, then through his hair. “I never hated my home, Sarah. I didn’t want to leave. But I thought I had no choice.”
“And this is somehow supposed to make me feel better?” As the implications began to sink in, she felt bitterness choke her heart like bindweed—invasive, profuse and virtually impossible to get rid of. “Let me get this straight—you lied to me, told me you’d never loved me, that you found everything about me and this town so boring you couldn’t stand the thought of being here one minute longer, not even long enough to take me to my prom. And you did this because you loved me?”
He looked away, a muscle popping in his jaw.
“You jerk!” she shrieked, taking a wild swing at him which he easily dodged. Tears of fury pricked at her eyes, but she would not let them come. She would not. What she did was walk away.
Twenty paces later, she found herself standing next to the forty-foot willow in the middle of the yard, one knee on the wrought-iron seat circling its base, her head and right hand resting on the trunk.
So. He had loved her, just as she thought. No—not as she thought. As he thought, in some convoluted manner unfathomable to her. She would never have just run from a problem, especially not a problem with Dean.
The suffocated laugh didn’t even make it past her lips. Yeah, right. Who was she kidding? Hell, if running from problems was on Olympic event, she’d be a gold medalist.
Suddenly, she knew nothing about anything, except she was so very, very tired.
The grass rustled softly as Dean came closer; she didn’t move. Despite the fury raging inside her, she realized how few males in her admittedly limited experience would have come clean the way Dean just had. Man had guts, she had to admit. Still, his confession wasn’t going to eradicate the past, just like that.
“I cannot believe,” she began, rocking her forehead on the top of her hand, “the only solution you saw to this so-called problem of our differences was to make me think everything we’d shared was a complete sham.”
“You had all these plans,” he said quietly, his voice as much of a caress as it had always been, “these dreams…and I let myself be convinced I couldn’t be a part of all that.” Her eyes actually hurt when she looked at him. He shrugged. “I told you…it was stupid.”
Now she turned, collapsing like a rag doll on the bench, her back against the tree. She could only see his silhouette. Just as well.
“Oh, what you did goes way beyond stupid, Dean. You didn’t care enough to even attempt to talk about what was bothering you. To see if we could work this out together. That concept completely eluded you. Instead, you made me feel like some cheap throwaway who wasn’t
