Page 132 of Fifty First Times (Sharing You 0.40)
When I see her face, I’m certain that my mind conjured it. She doesn’t disappear when I blink, though, and the hesitant, familiar smile sucks the oxygen out through my spine. Attraction and nostalgia sizzle with dread hot on their heels, a million memories rushing back in a blur.
Dizzying heights of laughter and euphoria. Black depths of angst and anger and frustration. A humming intensity that I miss most of all.
Nerves shoot through me, and I down the rest of my beer, my eyes fastened to hers. I have no idea how I feel or should feel, seeing her again. Or what she’s doing here.
All I know is that Alice would freak out if she knew.
Wade follows my gaze and clears his throat. “I told her we’d be here.”
“What? Why would you do that? What the fuck is she doing here?”
“I asked her the same thing. I didn’t know she was coming, I swear. No one did, I don’t think, but she’s staying with Sammie.”
Fucking Sammie. Too sweet for her own good, and she’d always loved Tressa. Said love might come around a bunch of times, but the person who drove you crazy and still couldn’t drive you away . . . that only comes around once.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Didn’t want to ruin your night, I guess, and hoped she’d chicken out and not show up. That’s kind of her strong suit, if I recall.”
Not lately. Deflecting and hiding, pretending life didn’t exist, had been part of the Tressa I’d fallen in love with almost four years ago, but the girl who had come to that last party had stopped running.
If anyone but Tressa showed up out of the blue, I’d haul ass the other direction. I’d think they were crazy, maybe dangerous, but she’s just Tressa. Unpredictable. Impulsive.
Beautiful.
“I think she just wants to talk,” Wade finishes lamely.
My older brother, James, sees Tressa and waves. He’d always liked us together, too. His smile drops when he sees my face, which I imagine in an impressive shade of pasty. “Just talk to her, Noel. Don’t you owe her that much?”
Indignation pulls my eyes from her, and I fix James with an incredulous look. “I don’t owe her anything. Nothing. That girl scrambled my head and broke my heart too many times to count, and it took me a long, long time to put her behind me.”
“Sure, but she never lied to you, man. She was a mess to begin with.”
His words remind me of everything I know and more I don’t, and my heart softens, as it always does. My feet find the sticky floor of the bar, and the terror tightening Tressa’s cheeks eases at my approach. The piano man starts a ballad, one familiar and so poignant that it must be a joke played by the cosmos—a song that never fails to remind me of Tressa. It’s the only song we ever danced to, one that hadn’t seemed apropos in the moment, but in the days that followed, snapped into place.
The stunned pain that shoots through her gold-threaded eyes tells me she remembers too.
“Noel.”
Her soft voice curls around my name, pummels the walls around my heart erected to keep her out. It reminds me of a night long ago and the only real confession I’d ever gotten from her—that she’d missed me when I went away.
“Tressa.”
We stare for a moment too long, until discomfort wriggles under the warmth of being in her presence again, and I say the first thing that comes out of my mouth. “Do you want to dance?”
It seems best to have this conversation out of earshot of my friends, so we join the other couples on the noisy wooden floor. I settle a hand at her waist and use the other to keep us at arm’s length. The familiar charge when our skin meets, the loose heat spilling through my muscles, raises my guard. It’s too easy to slip into the past with Tressa, and things are different now. Alice is at home, and in two days, she’ll be my wife. I’d beaten the temptation the last time Tressa showed up, and this could be no different.
Nothing but wasteland lay at the path that ended in her bed. Not for me.
“What are you doing here?”
Her fingers tighten on the back of my neck. Her touch makes it hard to breathe, but I manage.
“I . . . how are you?”
“I’m great.”
Her eyes fill with concern, with trepidation, as they rake my face. I wonder if she sees her effect on me, or my love for Alice, or if Tressa ever bothers to see me at all.
