Daff stared at the other woman for a long moment and then smiled. She was relieved to now know why men had behaved the way they had with her. And simultaneously surprised by how little it actually mattered to her now that she did know. She wasn’t even angry with Shar. Just sad for her. She had allowed petty jealousy and vanity to ruin her perception of the women she had called her friends. She was a sad, pathetic, desperately vain woman who deserved pity more than hatred.
But right at this moment, Daff felt neither emotion toward her. She felt curiously apathetic and keen to get away from the woman and the messed-up past she represented.
“Jake Kincaid?” Daff said, leaning toward Shar confidentially as she spoke. “You could have had him. All you had to do was tell me you liked him. Because that’s what friends do. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Because you’ve never been a true friend to anyone. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go slumming with my man. You know the one? Big, gorgeous, sexy Spencer Carlisle.”
With that, Daff turned away from Shar and the past. More than ready to fight for the man and the future she deserved.
Monday seemed endless. The expansion that Spencer had been so excited about just last month now couldn’t ignite a flicker of interest in him, and he passed just about every nonessential task to Claude.
The day dragged on, and all he could do was stare at Nelly. Mason was out fishing with his buddy Sam and kept sending selfies of them posing with huge fish. Apparently the fishing at the river mouth—Kleinbekkie—was “epic as fuck” today. Spencer seriously considered ditching work to join them, but in the end he couldn’t even summon up enough interest to play hooky.
After eight hours of doing absolutely nothing, he left the store right at the stroke of 5:00 p.m. and went straight home for an evening of much the same. He was contemplating dinner and his lack of appetite when he saw her. Just sitting on his porch swing and watching the car come up the drive.
She didn’t move when he got out and watched him somberly as he climbed the three steps up to his large porch. There were three midsize cardboard boxes at her feet and he kept his attention on those, because it hurt less than looking at her.
“What are you doing here, Daff?” he asked her feet.
“These are for you,” she said, getting up. The movement automatically drew his scrutiny to her face, and he locked eyes with her and found himself quite unable to look away. Was it his imagination, or was she as miserable as he was?
“What are they?”
“This”—she gestured to the boxes as a whole—“is not who I am.”
What the fuck was that supposed to mean?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“What?” She had the grace to look embarrassed and shrugged self-consciously.
“It’s a gesture,” she admitted, her cheeks flushing. “Just, please . . . go with it, okay?”
Confused, Spencer peered at the boxes again. They weren’t taped shut; the flaps were just folded over.
“I’m supposed to open them?”
“Yeah, of course, Spencer,” she said, sounding a little exasperated. “Why else would I say they were for you?”
He lifted his hands, palms up, trying to placate her. She looked apprehensive and kept lifting her forefinger to her lips as if to chew before remembering that she had kicked that habit and lowering it again. The little display of nerves bolstered him a bit, and he warily sank to one knee in front of one of the boxes and opened it up.
He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it definitely wasn’t a stack of Miles Davis CDs.
“You like jazz?” he asked, confused.
“No,” she said, her voice soft as she sank back down onto the swing. “I hate it. But Jeremy Boothe loved it. I dated him for about two months five years ago. And during that time I absolutely loved jazz. Jeremy and I could talk about jazz for hours. He thought we had a real connection. We had so much in common.”
Spencer lifted the small stack of CDs and turned them over, staring at them for a long time before putting them aside. He sat down on the porch step and reached into the box again and withdrew a pair of binoculars. He looked at them curiously for a moment before turning to face her. Her eyes were shining with tears, but she forced a little smile.
“Peter Weyland, three years ago, also two months. He was an out-of-towner, a keen bird-watcher, and I took him to all the best bird-spotting sites in the Garden Route. I knew them all, you see, because I absolutely adored bird-watching.”
“I see,” he said, dropping the binoculars, uncaring where they landed. His eyes remained riveted to hers, and one of the tears that had been threatening slid down her cheek and hung from her trembling chin for a long moment before dropping to her fidgeting fingers. She seemed unaware of it and just kept watching him steadily.
“There’s more,” she prompted him, and he nodded without looking at the box again.
“I know.”
“It’s important,” she said, her voice quiet.
“It’s not.”
“I also have a guitar. I’m quite proficient at it. I learned to play when I was dating Aaron Marks. He was an aspiring musician.”
“I remember him,” Spencer said, keeping his voice carefully neutral even though his heart was breaking for this beautiful, intelligent woman who had felt the need to pretend—for fucking years—to be someone she was not. When she was amazing just the way she was.
“A-and I have a surfboard, cookbooks, all these really shitty black-and-white movies, a—”
“Daff,” he said, inserting just enough volume in his voice to halt the stumbling tide of—what she clearly considered—guilty admission. “Stop. I just want to know which one of those fuckers loved eggs.”
She made a wet, snorting giggling sound and covered her mouth and nose in horror. He dug into his sweatpants and dragged out a clean hankie and handed it to her. She accepted it gratefully and blew her nose before shaking her head ruefully.
“Nobody carries hankies anymore.”
“I do.” She nodded and twisted the handkerchief between her fingers.
“The eggs? That was Byron Blake, back in the sixth grade. He offered me an egg-mayo sandwich and I liked him, so I accepted it.”
“That far back, huh?”
“Told you I was messed up. To be fair, none of them really expected me to lie about my interests. That was all me, in my sad attempts to be interesting to them. This past year was the first time I found myself without a boyfriend of some kind, and I found it kind of liberating to just do what I wanted to do.”
He nodded, unable to take his eyes off her. The tip of her nose was pink, her cheeks were blotchy, and her eyes were red. She wasn’t a pretty crier, but he couldn’t remember her ever looking more beautiful.
She sniffed messily and reached for another box, a shoebox that had been tucked away out of sight beside her hip.
“Daff, I told you I don’t need to see—”
“This,” she interrupted firmly, “is who I always longed to be.”
He scrutinized the box for a couple of heartbeats before reaching for it. She seemed reluctant to relinquish it, and that raised his curiosity.
He opened the box and stared at the neatly folded slips of notepaper for a moment. They looked familiar. He lifted one and opened it and felt his face go bright red as he instantly recognized what it was.
“You kept them?” he asked hoarsely. Frankly, he was amazed his voice actually worked.
“Every single one of them.”
He cringed and opened the note again.
“God, this is awful,” he muttered.
“I love it. I loved all of them. I was such a bitch, Spencer. But I couldn’t bring myself to part with a single one of them. They were so sweet.”
“I was a horny, troubled teen.”
“Don’t you dare denigrate my love poems. I never understood why you kept giving them to me. I didn’t deserve them, not the way I behaved, reading them out loud and making fun of you in front of the other girls. I was horrible. Even now I can’t really explain why I did those things, except that I was really scared the other girls would think I liked you back and I’d never hear the end of it. Fitting in meant so much to me; I was so shallow. And every time I read one of your poems, I felt worse about myself, because I could never be the girl you seemed to see.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“I wanted to be this girl, Spencer. I really did.”
“I put a lot on you, Daff. My home life was shitty. You were this perfect and beautiful girl and I built this fake romance up in my head. You would make my life different and wonderful and worthwhile. It was unfair. I did to you what all those other assholes did—I placed my expectations on you. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“No, Spencer. You’re nothing like the rest of them. So many of your notes asked questions and showed interest in me. Did I take sugar in my coffee? What was my favorite movie? What was my opinion on”—she laughed softly—“on Hanson?”
“I hated those little assholes,” Spencer recalled, shaking his head. She giggled outright at that.
“Anyway, my point is, you were different. You cared. You wanted to know me. You didn’t expect me to like what you liked. And while none of the other guys expected me to like what they liked, either, in the end, none of them actually cared enough to ask me about any of my other interests. They just accepted that I was this perfect, feminine reflection of them. I liked what they liked, and that was it.”