Lorelie Brown - Riding the Wave

“Are you sure?” The doorknob twisted but obviously Sage wasn’t getting very far with Avalon’s butt planted in front of the door.

“Fine. Sure.” She swiped at her eyes over and over, but they wouldn’t quit leaking. “You can go, it’s no biggie.”

There was a long pause and for a moment, Avalon thought Sage might have gone away. And to prove she was as crazily neurotic as ever, she had a painful flash of resentment that Sage would take her word so easily.

Something poked her in the ass, a bare quarter inch above the floor. She scrambled to her knees. A pencil.

Sage had stuck the eraser-end of a pencil under the door and was poking at Avalon. “If you don’t let me in, I’ll pester you ’til you come out. You do realize that, right?”

“Okay, okay.” Avalon took one more useless swipe of her eyes, this one with the back of her wrist, as if that would help. But she was still a mess.

She kept her face averted as she opened the door, then immediately grabbed a handful of tissues and went face-first across the bed. Warm lavender and vanilla filled her head, but it wasn’t enough to drive away the pure spun sadness. If anything, it made it worse.

Sage dropped to the floor on the far side of the bed, where Avalon’s head had landed. Her long legs folded underneath her butt, she stroked Avalon’s hair away from her face. “What happened?”

The sobs Avalon had been holding back so well finally won the battle. A harsh, painful drag up her throat, then her chest collapsed in on its own black hole of hurt. All because she couldn’t even explain. Didn’t have the words.

Saying she and Tanner had broken up wasn’t exactly true. Because they hadn’t ever really been a concrete thing in the first place. And only in his absence did she realize how much she’d invested in him. How much she’d wanted to believe that they could be something. Nothing fancy. Not forever. Just to . . . be. With Tanner.

She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut. But the tears wouldn’t even stop. “Tanner and I are done.”

“I didn’t realize you cared about him this much.”

Face buried in the comforter, she shrugged her shoulders in a stupid gesture. “Maybe I didn’t realize, either.”

“Does he know?”

Another shrug. “Doesn’t matter. I screwed up.”

“Mako?” Sage’s hand ran over Avalon’s head in a soothing gesture.

“Yes.” Her mouth crumpled around the word. She dissolved into another round of tears.

But Sage didn’t go anywhere. She sat next to the bed, providing the comfort Avalon had always absorbed like a greedy sponge.

This, here. This was why she’d been willing to balance everything on a knife’s edge. Because Sage had always been there for her. And she knew without a shadow of a doubt that Eileen would be patting Avalon’s back if she knew. This was home. This was where she ran when her wounds bled too deeply.

If she’d gone to Candy, she’d have gotten some advice on not crying too long because it would ruin the Botox—and what did she mean she didn’t use Botox? Candy would have tried, but ultimately always failed when it came to the kind of comfort Avalon needed.

Sage’s easy peace washed over Avalon, eventually calming her. When Avalon pushed herself up to a sitting position, her joints felt as weak as seaweed. She’d completely exhausted herself.

In a way, she felt better.

The inevitable had happened. Now there was nothing to be done but deal with it.

Sage stayed where she was, but folded her hands on the edge of the mattress and rested her chin on them. “What are you going to do?”

She grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on her nightstand and mopped at her face. “There’s nothing to do. One of those easy come, easy go things.”

Sage’s pale eyebrows twisted into a knot of disbelief. “Bullshit. People don’t sob their brains out over easy come, easy go. You care about Tanner.”

“Of course I do.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. She couldn’t love him if she didn’t care for him. But she didn’t need to tell Sage every single dirty detail either. “But I’ve got to put my big-girl panties on. It’s over. End of story.”

“You could try talking to him.”

Tanner’s cold, hard face rose in her memory. She shuddered. She would do anything to never again see that level of disgust on his face. Even if it meant playing pretty and polite to keep the surface smoothed over. “No. No way.”

“It’s not worth a shot?”

“Why?” She made herself laugh a tiny bit. “Because Tanner’s such a paragon of rationality and he’s open to discussions?” If he’d broken with his father for almost ten years, there was absolutely nothing to keep him by her side.

It would be bad enough to love him from a distance. Having him nearby, knowing that she felt for him so strongly? No, thanks. She’d already had him in her head for years. Going back would be like walking on ground glass.

And she wouldn’t do that, not even for Tanner.

She could only apologize for being herself for so long, and she couldn’t try to fix everything. Because in the end, she was starting to realize she needed to be needed for who she was. Not because of the things she could do for others.

When she’d made the right choice, she didn’t deserve this level of shit. It wasn’t as if she’d intentionally introduced a serial killer to someone who met his victim’s profile. She’d arranged for a man to speak with the other half of his family.

She knew that she shouldn’t have gone behind his back, but ultimately, what she did was right. She couldn’t let Tanner be a dictator. He didn’t get to make those choices for someone else.

Not for her, at least.

She blinked, realizing Sage was still sitting there. The smile she pulled up didn’t feel like much, but at least it made the worry fade from Sage’s eyes a little.

Avalon wiped at her nose again. “Look, it’s not really that big a deal. Not . . . as things go. I think I’m a little overwhelmed. I have to shoot the Pro, and I turn in the final round of WavePro stuff in less than a week. It’s a lot, you know?”

Sage’s head tilted. She didn’t seem to quite believe Avalon’s line, and, well, she shouldn’t. Every word was both lie and truth at once.

Because really, in the end, only one thing mattered. Avalon’s heart was broken.

Putting the pieces together would have to wait for another time because the doorbell pealed downstairs. She scrubbed her wrists over her eyes, wiping away what she could of her tears. “Showtime.”

Sage sat up. “Is that him? Mako? He’s early.”

Except it wasn’t Mako at the front door. It was Tanner. He stood with his back to the entryway, looking at a middle-aged woman who was walking a small Chihuahua, as if he didn’t even want to be there. The late-afternoon sun gleamed off his blond hair. It was hard to believe it had been less than an hour ago that she’d been in his arms. She willed him to look at her.

Avalon swallowed the knot that had found a permanent home in the back of her throat. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

His mouth was pressed into a flat, hard line. When he finally looked at her, she wished she could have taken back her need to see his eyes. There was nothing there, at least not for her. “Where’s my mom?”

“Probably out back.”

He stared at her for a minute more. The sun beat down on them, making her eyes sting against the tears that had already burned her out. “He’s not here yet, is he?”

She shook her head. She clenched the doorknob, and it was cool against the throbbing heat of her blood in her palms. “No. Not yet.”

Tanner’s gaze shifted past her to Sage. “Did you know about this too?” Sage didn’t answer in words, but she must have nodded because Tanner gave a small nod as well. “Fine. Then let’s do this.”