Change of Hart (Wells Ranch, #3)(40)
Then we pull into her driveway, and she straightens up, swiftly pulling her hand away from mine. The harsh roof lights temporarily blind me when Blair opens the truck door and hops out. And I’m hot on her heels, walking up to the front steps.
“Thank you for coercing me into going out tonight.” She unlocks the door with the slow turn of a key, and it swings open. “It was fun.”
“Does that mean I can do it again?”
“Denver.” She exhales hard. “I told you already—I can’t do this with you.”
“Can’t do what?” I step toward her and she doesn’t move back, letting the air between us become electric.
I glance at her full lips, and can’t help but wonder if she tastes the way she used to, if her naked body feels the same against mine, if she sounds the same when she’s coming.
“Can’t pick back up where we left off. Even if things hadn’t ended the way they did, I didn’t come back here for this.” She gestures to the invisible tether between us. “For whatever happened in the truck tonight, or for whatever you think is happening now.”
“Of course not. But would it be so bad to hang out with your ‘childhood friend’ again?”
A childhood friend who crawled across her bed to bury my face between her legs hundreds of times. A childhood friend who begged her to marry me. Having her reduce our relationship to that felt like a slug to the chest, but I’m clearly not above throwing it back in her face as a way of convincing her to spend time together.
“I missed my best friend.” I let one small truth sneak out of my lips. I missed her more than she’ll ever know. “We can be friends and nothing more. Can’t we, Blair?”
“Yeah…” The corner of her mouth quirks. “I guess we can.”
I chance another step toward her, until there’s only the wooden door frame acting as an invisible barrier. The singular thing keeping up this charade about being friends. Then I lean against the frame with a smug smile, reveling in the way her eyes are so clearly tearing my clothes off. She’s never been good at hiding her emotions—not from me.
She should’ve closed the door in my face by now, but instead she stands quietly, eyes locked on mine, chest rising and falling with slow breaths. And, because I know her cues intimately, I know she’s thinking about kissing me. Her tongue darts across her bottom lip, and her body sways a little closer.
My name leaves her lips in a whispered plea. And I reach up to brush her hair behind her ear, ready to give everything up for the taste of her. I don’t care that she doesn’t want to live here. That she doesn’t want me. That we didn’t work out when we were younger.
I’ve never stopped loving Blair. Now I know for certain that I never will. I wish I didn’t have to go the last fourteen years without her, left only with a toxic habit of constantly reliving every moment we shared. Begging the universe to turn back time so I could have her back.
Finally she’s home, and I refuse to lose her again. So I rest my forehead against hers, combing my fingers through her wavy brown hair. Breathing her in. And she does the same—embracing the connection we’ve gone so long without.
“Blair? Is that you?” her dad calls out from the hallway. Heavy footsteps move toward us, and Blair frantically backs away.
“Hey, Dad. Sorry if I woke you up. I just got home from the rodeo.”
She turns to me with a small smile and mouths, “Good night.”
“?’Night,” I whisper as the door shuts on my big moment. My first—definitely not last—attempt at getting my girl back.
Blair
(sixteen years old)
To teens in the 2000s, the most meaningful gift anyone could give was a perfectly curated burned CD. And that’s exactly what I found displayed on my nightstand the morning of my sixteenth birthday.
When Lucy had started chemotherapy a couple months prior, it meant trips to the city every couple weeks. And after Denny and I had become an official couple, he snuck into my room in the dead of night to share a bed anytime his mom and dad were gone for cancer appointments. He insisted it was lonely and weird in his house with them gone, and I wasn’t about to argue that he still had his grandpa and brothers around. Having Denver Wells in my bed made my nights a lot less lonely, too.
I left the window open, waiting patiently in my cutest pajamas for him to slide it open and hop in. Then he’d strip down to boxers, crawl under the covers, and wrap his arms around me. Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything, planting soft kisses on my shoulders until we fell asleep. Other times we’d talk in hushed voices until our words started slurring from exhaustion. In the morning, he’d kiss me goodbye and duck out long before daybreak. Driving his stolen truck back to the ranch with enough time to slip his grandpa’s keys on the rack and sneak upstairs.
And on my birthday, I woke up to find he had gotten up extra early to blow up sixteen balloons and hang streamers everywhere. Then there was the CD, which he’d drawn on with permanent marker—our names inside a red heart.
“Happy birthday, beautiful.” He kissed me softly on the cheek the moment I sat up to take in my decorated room. “I need to head home before they realize I’m missing, but I had to see your face first.”
“Denny, this is the nicest thing ever.” I laid my head on his chest, wrapping my arms around his waist.