“Now I find it curious more than anything else. I feel a part of the local lore. Who else has a backstory like this? Nobody.”
“Do you think there’s any truth to it all?”
“What? The stories?” He laughs. The sound bounces off the high ceiling and rockets through the small space. “Nah… I don’t know. Is your mom a Satanist who sacrifices animals under the full moon?”
“Excuse me?” Just when I thought I couldn’t be shocked, here we are.
“Sorry. I guess you hadn’t heard that one. Admittedly, it’s pretty old.”
“No, I never heard the one where my mom’s a Satanist.” Alcoholic, maybe. Town slut, for sure. But Satanist?
“Apparently, she used to be a rock chick. And Marly being the way it is, I can’t imagine that was very well received.”
The last thing I want to do right now is talk about Laura. I take a couple more photos in silence. And the silence is really something. Everything is so still and quiet. Later in the summer there would be insects, and birds chirping. And I can imagine the trees groaning under the weight of the snow in winter. But right now, there’s nothing, save for the soft whispering of the wind.
“I’m sorry, Steph,” Luc says out of nowhere. “So far this isn’t going quite the way I pictured it.”
I lower my phone and turn to him. “How did you picture it?”
“I just—I can’t seem to stop shoving my foot in my mouth,” he says with a guilty chuckle. “I keep telling myself, enough, stop it. But I can’t help myself, I just keep blathering and blathering like a fool, digging my own grave deeper and deeper.”
“No, this is useful,” I say. “Stuff like this is exactly what I could use in the podcast. You’re actually being really helpful.”
He groans. “Steph.”
“Yeah?”
“I didn’t bring you here to help you with your podcast. Come on. Don’t play dumb.”
I only have time to draw a breath to say something, hopefully cold and scathing. But he’s faster. He crosses the distance between us in two steps and dives in to plant a kiss on my lips.
I’m ashamed to say that I don’t dodge or turn my head or do any of the normal things normal people do when their married ex puts the moves on them, like push him away and get the hell out of there. And in the back of my mind, a part of me still longs for his kiss, because deep down I guess I never stopped seeing him as my Luc, my boyfriend. I guess hopping on a bus in my prom dress wasn’t the closure I needed—who would have thought?
So I kiss Luc back. His lips are almost exactly how I remember, like I never left at all. His stubble is a bit pointier, the only sign that a decade and a half passed since we last did this. And his hands—his hands are strong, firm in their intentions. They slide across my back and land on my waist, finding the button on my jeans with surprising speed, and then his fingers are past my waistband.
His hand is freezing cold, which might be what jolts me out of this twilight zone of unreality in which my mind is afloat. His fingers across my stomach feel rough, too rough, and so I pull away, and we break apart.
“Steph…” he breathes, and his eyes are glassy in exactly the same way that I remember.
“Luc, come on. We’re not doing this. Not here.” I gulp. “And not at all.”
I watch him struggle to get himself back under control. “Come on, Steph. I know you. I know you didn’t come back to town for that book of yours, or podcast, or whatever. You came here for the same reason I brought you here now.”
“You think I came here to hook up with you in a creepy abandoned cabin?” My voice is hoarse and at the same time shrill with disbelief. “You think I came here all the way from Montreal—”
“You were never fucking meant to be in Montreal in the first place,” he says. The conviction in his voice strikes me, and with it, a sense of alarm. “You belong here, Stephanie. You always did. And you know it deep down because why else would you have come back?”
I mutely shake my head.
“We both belong here. Think of what could have been. Except you went and left!”
“Yeah. I left. And may I remind you, we were meant to go together. But then you blew it by feeling up my best friend on prom night. I don’t care that she threw herself at you, Luc, I don’t. It’s Cath, I should have known she’d pull some shit like that. She gave my acceptance letter to my mom—”
“She didn’t give your acceptance letter to Laura,” Luc snaps.
“How the hell do you know?”
“Because I did that!”
The silence that falls over the cabin is tinny, unnatural.
“What?”
“I told your mom that you were planning to leave.”
“Luc, why the hell would you do something like that? Why would you—” I shut my eyes. “We made plans. I thought you wanted to leave.”
“I did want to leave. Shit.” He’s tearing his hands through his hair in anguish, the same gesture I remember so well. Whenever he’d fail to score a goal in a soccer game or failed a test, he’d make this same exact gesture, and seeing it makes my heart ache so much it almost drowns out my anger. Almost.
“Then what the fuck did you want, Luc?” I’m a little shocked at how loud my voice comes out. “What the fuck did you want? You say you know me, but now I’m not so sure I know you. You had ambitions. You didn’t want to be a small-town cop or a soy farmer. You didn’t want to be stuck in Marly your whole life like your parents. Or at least I thought so. Is that what you really wanted? Then why bullshit me?”
His look of utter turmoil is heartbreaking. In the semidarkness, I can tell his eyes are too shiny, full of tears. “Because I didn’t get in!”
I gulp hard. “What do you mean?”
“You got into the damn journalism program. I didn’t. I never had such great grades, remember? And I guess they didn’t need any more soccer players.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me that?” I stammer.
