Once in a Lifetime

Sam was waiting for him at the pier, running in place, his breath puffing out in little white clouds. “Thought maybe you weren’t coming,” he said, and looked Ben over carefully. “Rough night?”

Yeah, not exactly. “I’m good,” Ben said. And he was. Possibly a little too good.

Sam let it go, and they ran hard, as usual. No words necessary.

An hour later, Ben was in the bookstore when Aubrey stormed in with eyes flashing, boots clicking as she moved across the floor, anger coming off her in waves. She was wearing yet another businessy dress, this one made of soft, sweater-like material that covered her from chin to knee but nicely hugged the curves he now knew intimately.

He was pretty damn sure he should have been over her enough not to get hard at the sight of her. “What’s up?” he asked.

Like he didn’t know…

“My car won’t start,” she said animatedly, furious and beautiful. “Something happened to it overnight.”

Yeah. He’d happened to it. He’d pulled the coil wire late the night before after a drink with Luke. The coil wire was still in his pocket, as a matter of fact.

Aubrey stalked across the store, straight to Ben’s still-steaming to-go cup of coffee, which Leah had poured for him. She drank from it as though it were her lifeline.

All without making eye contact with him. “Black. Blech.” She sighed. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t afford a mechanic.”

She wasn’t going to need one.

“It’s always something,” she said, sounding tired. Frustrated. At the end of her rope.

Still not looking at him directly.

Another man might have felt guilty as hell, but Ben told himself he wasn’t another man. He wanted to know what she was up to, what was wrong, and he’d meant it when he’d said he wanted to know if she was okay. And yeah, after last night, he was more curious than ever. There was no better way to figure her out than to drive her around. “Where do you need to go?” he asked.

She looked down at her phone, thumbing through screens with dizzying speed.

He put a hand on her. “It can’t be far,” he said. “You need to open the store in an hour and a half, right?”

She finally looked at him and then blushed. He figured that was the “wild monkey sex,” as she’d called it. The best wild monkey bathroom sex he’d ever had. “Do you need a ride?” he asked.

“No,” she said quickly. Too quickly.

“Look at you, lying so early in the morning.”

She blew out a breath. “Okay, so I have a few…errands to run.”

“I’ll take you.”

She drank some more of his coffee and just stared at him. “Why would you do that?” she finally asked.

Because he was a jerk. “It’s the neighborly thing to do,” he settled on.

“We’re not neighbors.”

“Okay, it’s the thing to do for someone who screamed your name as she came.”

She sputtered. “I so did not scream your name.”

“The mirror practically shattered,” he said.

“I can’t believe—that is just so rude of you to say.”

“I loved it,” he said simply, and watched as a good amount of her defensiveness drained away. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s hit the road. I’ve got an errand, too. The stain came in for your shelves. Oh, and I need to buy more condoms.”

“You do not need more condoms. Remember? We decided we were a one-time thing—” Then she seemed to finally catch his drift and realized, belatedly, that he was just yanking her chain. “Shut up,” she said.

He gave her a slow, long, hot look, and the last of her temper appeared to vanish. She squirmed a little bit, and with that little telltale move, made his entire day—though he couldn’t have said why to save his life.

“What are you going to do while I’m…doing my stuff?” she asked suspiciously.

“I’ve got my own stuff to do in the truck while I wait.”

“Yeah?” she asked. “Like what?”

He pulled out his phone. “Like kicking Jack’s ass on a game we’re playing.”

“Call of Duty, or something equally alpha and macho?”

“Something like that,” he said.

She finished his coffee and handed him the empty cup. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s go. I need to hit the grocery store first.”

Two minutes later they were on the road, huddled up to the heater vents in his truck.

“You need a newer vehicle,” she said, squinting through the foggy windshield.

“Shh!” He lovingly stroked the dash of the truck. “Don’t listen to her, baby. You’re perfect just as you are.”

Aubrey rolled her eyes. “A little attached, are we?”

“Very,” he said. “This was my uncle Jack’s truck, you know.”

She glanced at him. “No, I didn’t know.”

“I helped him rebuild her.”

“He died while fighting a fire, right?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Ben and Jack junior had been fourteen at the time. It had devastated the both of them—Jack, who’d lost his dad, and Ben, who’d lost the only father figure he’d ever known. His aunt Dee had given Ben the truck, though officially he’d had to wait several years to be old enough to drive it.

Unofficially, though, he and Jack had used it to make more than a few illegal and illicit late-night trips. The truck had seen him through some pretty hairy times. He’d never get rid of it.

“That must have been a terrible loss for you,” Aubrey said quietly.

It hadn’t been his first loss, and even at age fourteen, he’d known shit happened. But yeah, it’d sucked hard. “I had Dee,” he said. “She kept me on the straight and narrow.” Even when he’d only added to her grief, she’d never given up on him.

“I’ve met her,” Aubrey said. “She’s a wonderful woman. Strong, too.”

Ben smiled. “She had to be to keep a rein on Jack and me.”

“I bet,” Aubrey said on a soft laugh. “I can only imagine the holy terrors you guys must have been. Are you in contact with your parents at all?”

“No.” And what went unsaid was that his dad refused visitors and he didn’t even know where his mom was.

Aubrey turned from him, looking out her passenger-side window. “I was raised mostly by my mom,” she said quietly. “She was twenty-one when she had me. My dad was a few years older, but still not ready for a family—though he took my sister in the divorce.”

Ben glanced over at her, but she still wasn’t looking at him. “They split you up like two pieces of furniture?” he asked.

“Yep,” she said lightly, but the tenseness in her shoulders gave her away.

“And you don’t see him much, right?” he asked.

“No.” She shrugged. “He’s pretty busy,” she said. “He has two new daughters now.”

“And a puppy.” He paused. “And a dollhouse.”

She turned her head and met his gaze, looking surprised that he remembered.

Didn’t people listen to her? Care about her? He hated the idea that it was probably far more likely that she rarely opened up and let anyone listen to her. “Parents can really suck,” he said.

She choked out a short laugh. “Yeah.”

The coil wire in his front pocket was starting to weigh him down now, big-time, but he pulled up to the grocery store.

“Be right back,” she said.

Good as her word, five minutes later she was back with a mysterious brown bag, and then directed him to a town house complex. “Be right back,” she said again.

When she reappeared a few minutes later, he once again slid his phone away and looked at her.

“What?” she asked. “Do I have something in my teeth?”

“Can’t tell unless you smile.”

She flashed him a very fake smile, and he made a big show of looking at her teeth. “Perfect,” he said, and flashed her a real smile. “Are you going to cross a name off your list?”

She studied him a moment. “Not yet.”

He looked at the town house she’d just come from. “Who lives there?”

“Carla. My sister.”

“You bring your sister groceries?”

Aubrey shrugged, a little embarrassed, he thought. “She’s a resident at the hospital and working crazy hours,” she said. “She’s exhausted and doesn’t have time to do stuff like get food.”

“That’s…sweet of you.”

She looked at him. “You and I both know I’m not sweet.”

It was true that he’d never thought of her as particularly sweet, but he was beginning to change his mind. “Your boots are wet.”

“I watered her plants.”

Yeah, he was definitely changing his mind about her. “Where to now?” he asked.

She hesitated.

“We can just sit here if you’d rather.”

She was turned away from him, staring out into the gray morning so that he couldn’t see her face. He didn’t have to; he could sense the eye roll. “The pier,” she finally said. “And this time, no questions.”

Aubrey’s nerves were high and getting higher. She didn’t wait for Ben to turn off the engine at the next stop. The moment he pulled into the pier parking lot, she slid out of the truck and then paused, glancing back at him. “You’re waiting here, right?”

“Right.”

She didn’t trust him. “Promise?”

“What are you so worried I’m going to see?” he asked in that lazy, calm voice that made her want to crawl into his lap and cajole him into taking her to the same place he’d taken her last night in her bathroom.

But that wasn’t going to happen. That had been a one-time thing.

The best one-time thing ever…

Shaking that off, she looked at him. It hadn’t escaped her notice that he hadn’t promised. He was in dark reflective glasses, so she couldn’t see his eyes. His hair was finger-combed at best, and he had sawdust on his jeans from working at her bookstore. “I mean it, Ben,” she said. “This is my business.”

“Whatever you say, Sunshine.” He pulled out his phone, presumably accessing whatever shoot ’em up, kill ’em game he was playing with Jack.

It was as close to a promise as she was going to get, and she knew it. She blew out a breath and then caught sight of his screen. Not a shoot ’em up, kill ’em game at all. “Words with Friends?” she asked. “That’s the killer game you play?”

“It can be killer,” he said lightly, his manhood apparently not threatened in the slightest. “Hey, do you know a seven-letter word that’s got the letter X in it? I’ve got a triple-word opportunity here.”

“Extinct,” she said, “which is what I’m going to make you if you follow me.” She shut the truck door on that ridiculous threat and walked off.

The Ferris wheel was lit up but not turning. It was icy cold outside, but she ignored the wind as she walked past the diner and then the arcade. Between the arcade and Ferris wheel were two kiosks. One sold ice cream, another sold locally made items.

Both were closed now. The ice cream shop was actually boarded up. The two brothers who ran the place didn’t work during the winter months. One of them, Lance, suffered from cystic fibrosis, so they usually—providing Lance’s health allowed it—took off somewhere south for warmer weather.

The other kiosk wasn’t closed for the season. In fact, the woman who ran it was there right now, getting ready to open up for the day. She was busy flipping through a stack of receipts and not paying any attention to the pier around her until Aubrey stopped right in front of her.

Her name was Cathy, and she sold beautiful handmade scarves, hats, and throws she and a few other local women created.

Looking up with a friendly smile, Cathy said, “I’m still closed, but if you see something you like, I could probably be talked into a quick deal.”

Aubrey reached out and ran her fingers over a knitted infinity scarf the color of a rich ruby. Soft as heaven. “It’s beautiful. They’re all beautiful,” she said.

“That one would look good on you, with that coat and your golden hair.”

Aubrey pulled it off the rack and draped it around her neck. She peered into one of the mirrors hanging on the side of the kiosk.

“Pretty,” Cathy said.

Aubrey looked at her reflection and met Cathy’s eyes in the mirror behind her. “You don’t remember me.”

“Oh, I remember you,” Cathy said. “We were in PE together. And cooking class.”

Aubrey let out a breath. “I came here to see you.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve never been able to forget how I teased you for being so skinny,” Aubrey said quietly. “It was rude, and so wrong.” It’d haunted her all these years.

“Well, I was skinny,” Cathy said, and adjusted Aubrey’s hair so it fell better over the scarf in the back. “And I’ve always thought you did it because you were jealous.”

“Definitely jealous,” Aubrey said. “I had to run off my nightly junk food every single morning and I was still curvy. I was unbearably jealous of how you looked, but it’s no excuse.”

Cathy once again met her gaze in the mirror. “I was anorexic. Did you know that?”