Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle (ebook offline reader .TXT) 📕

I wince.

“Yeah. She felt bad, but farming is a business and dairy cows that don’t produce milk are money pits. Anyway, I found out later what ‘a farm upstate’ really meant, and . . . now I want to be that farm upstate.”

My heart has been torn out of my chest.

“Wesley,” I say calmly. It requires all of my restraint not to wrap him in a bear hug, even though enough time has passed since this happened to him that he can speak on it unemotionally.

“Yes?”

“I am going to get you a thousand elderly roosters. I’m going to raid farms and steal their Rubys.” I spread my arms. “All of this will be cows.”

Wesley bursts out laughing. “That might be the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me?” He returns my phone. “I take it you’re feeling better. I told your friend you’d call her back tomorrow.”

That’s not happening. “Thanks. She isn’t my friend, though.”

I sense he wants to ask questions but is too polite to. “No more running off, okay? There’s no escaping me anyway.”

“Sorry.” A new kind of embarrassment is creeping in. Fantastic. “I don’t know what happened.”

“I do.” He sits up, studying me closely. “I think you had a panic attack.”

A panic attack. I blink. Wow. “Is that what that was? I’ve never had one before. I don’t think I like them.”

The corner of his mouth hitches somewhat. “I get panic attacks all the time.”

“Really? I’ve never seen you have one.”

“Oh, you definitely have. Some are invisible. Some, I try to mask by . . .” He throws his head back, thinking. “By being argumentative, I guess you’d say. One of the reasons I’ve liked passing notes back and forth is because it’s easier to say what I mean to say without defaulting to arguing. Because of nerves.”

“You’re grouchy to hide panic attacks and nerves?”

“Don’t give me too much credit. Sometimes I’m grouchy because I’m part cactus.” His eyes are warm. “You handled it really well.”

I’d laugh if I had the energy. “Liar.”

The other corner of his mouth joins in, a full smile taking shape. He reaches slowly, looking a little nervous, to brush the hair out of my eyes. Then he leaves his palm on my forehead. I close my eyes again, shuddering an exhale. “That’s nice.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s like a weight, so that I don’t fall into the sky.”

“We can’t be having that. The hand stays.”

I smile. Just a tiny bit. When I steal a peek at last, all of Wesley’s amusement is gone, worry clear in his eyes.

Listening to him talk in his low, rhythmic tenor has calmed me. “Thank you,” I say. “I feel normal again. Or almost normal.” I’ll never take almost-normal for granted again. I’m exhausted.

“Now I’m going to ask you something difficult,” he ventures.

I brace myself.

“I would like for you to tell me about Jack.”

My focus strays past him to the Little Dipper. “All right. I can maybe do that.” But only because he shared first. Only because to look at him now, I can’t imagine him responding with unkindness.

So I tell Wesley about Gemma, and Caleb, and Jack. Who, interestingly enough, I haven’t given a second thought to in what feels like ages. And whom I’d regarded as the ideal boyfriend even though in retrospect it was a laughably superficial connection. If he’d been real, we wouldn’t have been a good match. “I liked the idea of a spontaneous, world-traveling, loud, social-butterfly boyfriend,” I admit, blushing, “but in reality I think I’m better suited to . . .”

“Yeah?” Wesley prompts. His voice is strange, like he’s borrowed somebody else’s.

“I think someone a little more serious, a little more grounded,” I make myself finish, “to balance me out. Someone understanding. Dependable.”

He’s quiet for a spell. And then:

“Hm.”

“Hm,” I agree, painfully aware of, well, everything. The grass flattened beneath me, the cool air whispering against my cheek, the smattering of stars in a vast, velvet sky. The warm body beside mine, with a big, ballooning thought bubble I want to pop with a pin to see which words fall out.

“I still don’t understand why,” he says out of nowhere, puzzled. “I mean, you told me why she did it, but it still doesn’t make sense. Even if she had the best of intentions, who treats people this way? She could have just told you she had feelings for Caleb, and knowing you, I’m sure you would have reassured her she had nothing to worry about.”

“I think it’s because a guy she once dated came into the hotel and hit on me. I wasn’t interested, but I guess she didn’t fully trust me after that. The most frustrating part, though, is that during all that time she was distracting me with Jack, she never even asked out Caleb! She got over him pretty quickly, so it seems so pointless in hindsight. All that energy, and for what? Gemma picked the most drastic option for plan A. I think she likes the drama.”

“Maybe it’s a good thing we can’t understand the type of person who’d act like that,” he says darkly. “I’m glad you’re going to have a hotel of your own and don’t need to be around that parasite and her father anymore. You know that saying about success being the best revenge? With your work experience, Falling Stars is bound to be successful.”

Oh, boy.

It’s coming out.

I can’t keep it in. “I have another confession.”

He listens, not interrupting.

“I’m not a real event coordinator.” I clap my hands over my face. “I was a housekeeper. They gave me the promotion so that I’d sweep what Gemma did under the rug and not raise any complaints to corporate, but I never got the go-ahead on any of the events I planned. None of the activities I pitched were accepted.”

“Hm,” he says again. “Well . . . a history of housekeeping is just as handy as event-coordinating experience, when you think about it. You’ll know better than most how to clean everything that needs cleaning, keeping every room looking nice. That’s important. On top of that, you have