27. Avery

“Wesley, wait!” I called out, chasing him into the parking lot of the school building. My heart pounded wildly, and I was completely uncertain how to slow down the intense thoughts shooting through my mind.

Wesley reached his car and started to open the door. As I approached him, I placed a hand against his shoulder. “Wesley, wait,” I urged.

He turned around to face me, flowers still in his grip. His eyes flooded with emotions as he sat on the edge of tears falling down his face. “What, Avery?” he snapped as he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “What do you want?”

“I…we…it…” Guilt filled me as I swallowed hard. “What are you doing here?”

His shoulders dropped, and he waved the flowers around. “I thought I was coming to win you back, but clearly, that isn’t a possibility.”

“Win me back?” I asked, confused. “I thought you were supposed to be off getting prepared for your new…life.”

He cleared his throat and sniffled. “It turns out the position wasn’t locked in as much as I’d thought. Drew miscalculated the situation. The position went to another.”

“Oh…gosh.” I almost told him I was sorry, but I didn’t like to lie to jerks who left me on my wedding day.

“As if you care,” he huffed, his coldness stinging my system.

“Why do you have an attitude with me? You’re the one who left me on our wedding day, not the other way around,” I expressed.

A part of me was still stunned that he was standing in front of me. A part of me thought I might’ve got hit in the head with a ball at the game, and I was suffering from a terrible concussion. Over the past few weeks, I assumed Wesley didn’t want anything to do with me. I figured he rode off into the sunset of his happily ever after. I made peace with that. Not all stories received decent endings. Some ended abruptly in the middle of a chapter.

Wesley’s shoulders dropped. “I know…I know. Sorry it’s just...” He took a deep inhalation and released it. “You already moved on with that freaking guy who you swore you hated! I didn’t imagine I’d find you sucking face with him as I came to talk things out.” He paused. “Is it true you moved in with him?” he asked with a tinge of disgust.

I shook my head slightly, thrown off by the question. “That’s nothing that we need to talk about right now.”

He huffed. “It’s just funny…you gave me such a hard time about Drew, but then you end up playing house with your ex.”

“Stop it, Wesley,” I whispered, feeling chills race up and down my body. “That’s not fair.”

“At least it makes it clear why you were so okay with calling off the wedding. Who knows how long the two of you had been hooking up behind my back? I knew I got a weird feeling from him when I went into the butcher shop. I bet you told him to take the coaching gig, too, so you’d have more time together.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true,” he argued. “It’s clear as day how true it’s been.”

What in the gaslighting was going on right now?

I did nothing with Nathan up until about five minutes ago, and if Wesley could’ve seen how I’d reacted to Nathan getting the coaching gig, he would realize how ridiculous his comment had been.

“Why couldn’t you live with your sisters?” he asked. “Or your father? You all are glued to each other’s hips. I don’t understand how Nathan Pierce was your first option.”

“He wasn’t,” I told him. “But I don’t have to explain all this. It doesn’t matter.”

“Have you been sleeping with him?”

A wave of annoyance hit me. How dare he ask me that? He was the one who left me, not the other way around. “It’s actually none of your business.”

“That sounds like a yes to me.”

“Then maybe you should fix your hearing.”

“So him snapping at me at the butcher shop weeks ago, threatening to slam my head into the glass display, was just out of the good nature of his heart? You can’t convince me that you two weren’t screwing around.”

Nathan snapped at Wesley? That was news to me.

“Wesley, I never once cheated on you.”

“You’re telling me that the two of you haven’t even kissed until just now, huh? You want me to believe that?”

My chest tightened, thinking about what happened between Nathan and me not that long ago in my office. It was such a flurry of events that I hadn’t even processed yet.

“When I was with you, Wesley, I was with you. I never stepped out on our relationship.”

“Right,” he huffed. “You just didn’t waste any time getting into your ex’s pants. Noted. After all the years we spent together, I was wrong about you. If I knew you were a cheater, I would’ve never wasted my time on you.”

“I didn’t cheat on you!” I barked, feeling my rage building from the idea that he was painting me as a cheater when he was the one who left me. Still, somehow his words affected me. Somehow, I’d felt guilt filling my chest, and I wasn’t the one who chose a career over a relationship.

But still, you weren’t emotionally available for him, Avery.

Maybe if you weren’t so damaged, he would’ve been able to love you right.

There they were again. Those intrusive thoughts that loved to poison my brain. Luckily, enough sanity floated through my mind as I thought about our past relationship.

“What’s my favorite color?” I questioned.

He huffed. “What?”

“What’s my favorite color?”

“Is this some kind of test of the strength of our relationship? Colors don’t matter, Avery. Those are kiddish facts.”

“Okay. What position did I play in softball?”

No reply.

I shifted. “What vegetable do I hate?”

“Carrots.”

“I love carrots.” I crossed my arms. “What’s my middle name?”

He rolled his eyes. “We aren’t doing this, Avery.”

He didn’t know.

I felt a wave of disappointment wash over me as the realization settled in that I’d been spending the past few years of my life with a stranger.

“What’s something we have in common?” I questioned. “Anything, Wesley, that connects us.”

He tilted his head before his brows lowered in thought. “We both enjoy tacos.”

My heart sank at his reply. “Everyone likes tacos, Wesley. That’s not a reason to fall in love, let alone get married.”

“We made sense on paper,” he argued. “We made sense.”

“No,” I disagreed. “We didn’t. Be honest with me and with yourself. If that job didn’t fall through, would you be here right now with flowers?”

He hesitated a moment, which was more than enough to tell me his answer.

“Goodbye, Wesley,” I said.

He sighed and pitched the bridge of his nose. “Gosh, why are you like this all the time? How can you be so coldhearted?”

“Someone once told me that I’m hard to love,” I sarcastically remarked. “So it probably has something to do with that.” He didn’t say another word, simply because there was nothing left to say. The two of us were done. Truth of the matter was, we were finished long before we made it to our wedding day.

As he climbed into his car and drove off into the night, I stood alone in the parking lot, under the glow of the streetlights, trying to remind myself how to breathe.

After a while,I headed back to Nathan’s house. As I walked inside, I found him loading the dishwasher in the kitchen.

“Hey,” I said, drawing attention to myself.

The moment he heard me approaching, he looked up at me. “Hey. Is everything okay?” He leaned back against the kitchen island and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” I snickered a little as I shook my head and walked over beside him. I leaned against the island and crossed my arms, just as he had. “That was, um, unexpected.”

“To say the least.”

“But, well, I guess in the end, he and I got closure. So that’s cool.”

“I’m sorry, Avery.”

“Don’t be. It’s for the best. Do you know he didn’t know basic things about me? Not my least favorite vegetable, not my middle name, and not my favorite color. I know those are silly, stupid things that don’t hold meaning, but how did that man know so little about me? The only thing he said we had in common was that we liked tacos.”

“Everyone likes tacos.”

“That’s what I said!” I huffed. “I mean, I can’t put it all on him. I think I stayed with him because he didn’t go deep with me. Which meant I didn’t have to open up completely. He couldn’t shatter my whole heart if I only gave him a few pieces.”

He grimaced and slid his hands into his pockets. “You want to go out back and hit a few balls around on the baseball field?”

“Yeah”—I sighed—“I do.”

“Here,” he said, grabbing a sweatshirt off one of the barstools. “It’s cold out there.”

We walked to the diamond together, and Nathan threw me a few pitches. Some I missed, others I knocked across the field. The chilled air brushed against my cheeks as his sweatshirt draped over my body. The more balls he threw my way, the more my body relaxed from the interaction with Wesley.

After we finished, I walked over to the pitcher’s mound where he was and took a seat. He sat beside me, bending his knees as he rested his crossed arms on them. I was slightly out of breath as I stared up at the star-laced sky. That was always one of my favorite things about Honey Farms. The amount of light pollution was much less than in town.

“I liked kissing you, Ave,” he said, pulling me back to the moment in my office. He didn’t look at me when he said the words. His stare stayed on the sky. Mine stayed on him. “I liked kissing you so damn much, but if it was too much for you, if you’re dealing with all your stuff, I don’t want you to think it had to mean anything. It meant something to me but doesn’t have to mean anything to you. No pressure. Plus, I sort of like what we’re becoming.”

“And what’s that?”

“Friends. We kind of skipped over the friendship thing when we were younger and went straight to love. Don’t get me wrong, I liked that. A lot. I’m just saying it also feels damn good to be your friend, too.”

I smiled and leaned toward him, resting my head on his shoulder. “I think I like being your friend, too, Nathan.” I looked back up at the sky. “These were some of my favorite moments with you. Sitting out here on this mound after a long day of working on the farm.”

“You’d always smell like the pigpens,” he joked.

“And you’d always try to kiss me.”

“What can I say? I liked my woman filthy.”

I laughed. “You were my first ever kiss, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.” He snickered, shaking his head. “A part of me still wants to be your last one, too.”

I lifted my head. “Nathan…”

He tossed his hands up in surrender. “Sorry. Friends. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“It’s not that I haven’t thought about you in that way because I have. But I’m still trying to find my footing. And like you said, we are so good right now. I’m scared if we move too quickly or move at all like we did when we were younger, we might explode again.”

His lazy smile spread, and he nodded. “I agree. Besides…what’s better than a bit of a slow burn? But I should get a shower in after working all day.”

“Turns out you’re the filthy one tonight.”

“You have no clue how filthy I can get.”

The sudden tingling between my thighs sure did wonder exactly how filthy that man could become. It turned out my brain and my body had very different reactions to Nathan Pierce.

He pushed himself to a standing position and then held a hand toward me. I took his hand, and he helped me stand.

“Thanks, friend,” I told him.

“Welcome, friend.”

“Just to be clear, even though we’re friends, I still hate you.”

He chuckled. “I’d actually be worried if you didn’t hate me anymore. It’s kind of our thing. You love to hate me, and I just kind of love to be within your orbit as you do so.”

We walked over to his house, and he held the back door open for me to move through. His voice made me pause as I walked down the hallway toward my room.

“Peas,” he said.

My least favorite vegetable.

“Harper,” he whispered.

My middle name.

His smile stretched, and his dimples deepened as his hand rubbed the back of his neck. “And midnight blue.”