Chapter 11
Travis
"Yeah, I stopped," I admit, taking another bite of the hot dog. "It wasn’t the same without you." My head is telling me to shut the fuck up while my mouth has verbal diarrhea, and there is nothing I can do about it. "Nothing was the same without you." She looks at me and then looks down at her lap, and I see her eyes blinking away the tears, and I want to kick myself. "Okay, enough of this chitchat," I say, putting my hot dog down. "It’s time to bowl."
She smiles and then looks at me. "Let’s bowl, let’s bowl, let’s rock and roll." She gets up from her seat, puts her hot dog down, and then picks up the red Solo cup and takes a sip of the beer. "Hey, come on, let’s get the show on the road." I groan out. "You knew it was coming." She laughs, picking up a pink ball. Every single time we used to go bowling, she would bust out the Grease 2 soundtrack. "We’re gonna rock. We’re gonna roll."
She points at me, and I shake my head but say the words anyway. "We’re gonna bop. We’re gonna bowl." She laughs again, and just because, she laughs. "We’re gonna score tonight." She turns and takes her place. "God, I hate that movie."
"You fucking lie," she throws over her shoulder, and she looks so fucking beautiful she takes my fucking breath away. She starts to count out loud. "One." She takes a step. "Two." She takes another step and then another. I can hear her counting when she releases the ball, and all I can watch is the way her ass fills out that fucking dress. She knocks down four pins and then turns around. "That was a warm-up." She comes back and takes another sip of beer. If it was four years ago, I would run my hand up the back of her leg, and she would bend down and kiss me. She would hold my face in her hands, and her whole face would light up with a smile while she leaned down and kissed me. And I would love every fucking second of it. "Okay, get ready for the spare," she says, holding the ball beside her, and I have to laugh at what my wedding night is turning out to be. She starts counting the steps, and the ball ends up hitting one more pin. "Shit," she swears, turning and walking toward me, sitting next to me and grabbing her hot dog. "You’re up." I get up, walking over to the balls to take my turn.
"Ready to get smoked?" I say the same words I said all those years ago. This time without slipping my tongue into her mouth. Which is totally a different experience, especially since I can almost taste the kiss again.
She holds up her hand. "Blah, blah, blah." She smirks at me, taking a fry and dipping it in ketchup. "Let’s see what you got." I grab the ball and hold it up in front of me, looking at the pins, and I shoot it down the middle and knock most of the pins down. "Bullshit." I look over my shoulder at her, and she flips me the bird. "I think you lied about bowling."
I stand here in the middle of the alley and put my hands on my hips. "I don’t lie." She folds her arms over her chest, raising her eyebrows. "Fine, I lied once." I hold up my hand, thinking back to when we started dating, and she decided to cook me a homemade meal. She worked on it for hours, and I mean hours, and the thing was so bad. It was overcooked, burned, half soggy, and tasted like garbage. I don’t even know what it was supposed to be, But I ate it and said it was good because that is what you did when the woman you loved just slaved over a hot stove. The only one who blew it for me was Frankie. When he tasted a bite of it, he ran straight to the kitchen sink and threw up. "And that doesn’t count because you forgave me."
"I had no choice but to forgive you," she huffs at me, her voice going louder. "You ate garbage."
"It wasn’t that bad," I say, and she tilts her head to the side. "Fine, it was the worst meal of my life."
"Thank you," she says, dipping her fry in ketchup and tossing it in her mouth. "For finally admitting it to me."
I sit back down next to her. "So tell me, Harlow." I take a french fry and dip it. "What have you been doing for the last four years?"
"Well"—she puts down her hot dog—"I’ve been traveling the world." She starts to laugh, and I know she’s joking. "Not really much. Went back home and opened a practice. Worked every single day at all hours of the day. Busted my ass to be the best in the area."
"Which you succeeded in, no doubt." I get up and walk over to the balls. "I say this to anyone who asks, you were always the best." And I’m not lying either. Even when we were working together, she was better than me.
"My practice started with one little room in Quinn’s barn," she shares. "And then it just got to be a bit too busy. Since then, I have a practice that has expanded three times." She smiles, and she should because I know that she must have worked her ass off. "I finally decided that the one-woman show is just too much for me. I’ve hired a new guy who just graduated a couple of weeks ago. He interned with me, so he knows how I work, and he’s actually really good. Which is why I could be here this weekend."
"You don’t get time off?" I ask her, wanting to know it all.
"Not usually." She gets up and walks over to the balls. "No rest for the wicked."
"You are a lot of things, Harlow," I state, looking into her eyes. "Wicked isn’t one of them." I want to say she’s the most loyal person I know. I mean, she attended my fucking wedding because she made me a promise. A promise that I made her make, thinking she would be there on all my best days. A promise that every single time I have one of the best days, she was the person I always thought of at the end of the night. Until it got so hard, and I forced myself to stop.
She picks up the pink ball again. "If you think you can say sweet things to me to throw me off my game." She shakes her head. "Think again."
After two balls, she finally knocks down nine pins. "I can feel it." She sits down while I get up, taking a drink of my beer. "The next one is going to be a strike."
"Is that so?" I ask her, grabbing a ball, and when I finally let it go, I get a strike. I stand here in the middle of the lane, turn around, putting both my hands up by my head. "You called it."
She flips me the bird, making me laugh. "I don’t know why you are flipping me off."
"So seriously, when is the last time you went bowling?" she asks, standing up and walking toward the balls. I don’t move out of the way. Instead, I stand next to her. My hand is itching to hold her hip. My fingers also twitch to pull the sash of the bow down and see if the dress opens up.
"Four years ago," I tell the truth. I leave out that every time Jennifer asked me to go, I would bow out at the last minute. I just couldn’t do it.
She picks up her pink ball and holds it up. "There are two things I hate in life." She walks over to the middle of the lane and holds up the ball. "One, surprise." I laugh because I already knew that. "And two, losing." She takes four steps before she lets go of the ball, and it looks like it’s going to be a strike, but the two back pins stay up. "Fuck," she hisses out, turning and going back to get another ball. "What about you?" she asks, bowling the other ball, and it ends up in the gutter. "What have you been up to?"
She stands in front of me, waiting for me to answer. Her green eyes glisten in the almost dark lane. "After I graduated, I stayed on with the emergency clinic for two years. Then I ventured out on my own and opened a practice here with two other people," I say.
"That’s amazing," she says. "It must be so good to have to share the responsibility with the other two." She walks over to the chair and sits down, drinking some beer. "So jealous." I walk back to the chair instead of taking my turn. "What do you do in your spare time?" she asks, and I wonder if she’s as interested in finding out everything about me as I am with her.
"I don’t really have spare time," I admit to her, taking my glass of beer and finishing it. "I’m the only one without a family, so I work most weekends, and I’m on call for the holidays." As soon as I say the words, I feel a little bit of emptiness inside me that I didn’t know was there. "What about you?"
"I wish I could say that I’m out galivanting, but the truth is I barely have spare time, and when I do, I usually spend it with Sofia." She smiles at me, and even when we were dating, she used to call her all the time. I used to tease her during her FaceTimes with her. "She’s a teenager now." She beams. "Thirteen going on thirty."
"Thirteen." I shake my head. "I remember her when she had two missing teeth in the front." We both laugh.
"It’s funny that I don’t see myself as older, but then I look at my nieces and nephews, and I’m like, how did they grow up?" she says, and I can hear a hint of regret in her voice also. She fills me in about her family, and hearing her speak, I know that regardless of how much it hurt when I let her go, taking her away from her family would have been too much for her, and I couldn’t do that to her.
I’m about to say something when the lady from the front counter comes to us. "Sorry, folks, but we are closing up." She looks over at the screen and sees that we’ve been here for over an hour and have played two frames.
"Of course," Harlow says, walking over to the other chair and taking off the shoes and socks.
"Looks like I won," I say once I take off my shoes and look up at the scoreboard.
"Um, I don’t think so," she says, standing up and taking the shoes in her hand. "It’s incomplete."
"But I have more points than you." I point at the board.
"But I could have had five strikes and won." She cocks her hip to the side. "Or you could have had four gutter balls," she scoffs. "Anything could have happened."
"Fine," I give in. "But rematch." I hold out my hand, and she laughs.
"Fine, rematch." She puts her hand in mine to shake it, and it’s as if a lightning zap has been put in my veins. An electric shock, and my whole body lights up in ways it hasn’t before.
She drops my hand, and we turn to walk out. My hand comes out to hold hers, but then I catch myself and place it on her lower back. "I haven’t had this much fun in a while," she says to me when we walk out and toward the waiting car. She looks up at the stars. "I almost don’t want this night to end." She looks at me, and her eyes widen. "I mean, you must be dying for this day to end so you can forget about it."
I smile and look down. "It doesn’t have to end," I say the words that I might regret if she turns me down, "at least not yet anyway."