The Rider List: An Erotic Romance (6 page)

“Do they keep track of where you are every minute?”

She shrugs. “I don’t think so, but…I’m just paranoid, I guess.”

I put my hand on her shoulders, looking down into her eyes as she looks up at me. “Are you regretting any of this?”

Her reply comes instantly. “No, not at all.”

“Good. Don’t worry then. We’re being careful.”

Minutes later, she’s leaving.

“See you Wednesday,” she says. I watch her bound down the steps and down the sidewalk.

Chapter Seven

Audrey

The next day, I’m playing chauffer to Sophie and her friend Kendall. They both sit in the backseat, not talking to each other. They’re on their phones. First they want to go to the mall, and I walk around with them for a little while before they decide they want to see a movie. I drop them off and tell them I’ll be waiting outside in two hours.

That gives me time to meet Stacy on her lunch hour. We meet at a deli downtown. Parking is scarce because it’s tourist season, and I end up four blocks away. It’s hot and humid, there’s no breeze, and the sidewalks are clogged with people.

Stepping into the refreshing coolness of the deli, I see that Stacy has already secured a table.

She stands and extends her arms. “Oh, you’re all sweaty.”

“I know, sorry.”

She sits back down and I sit across from her.

“I already ordered for us.” We always get the same thing here. She holds up the card with our number on it. I notice she’s also gotten my drink for me.

“Thanks, I’ll get the next one,” I say.

“The next one is tonight.”

“What?”

She’s sipping her drink through a straw. When she lets it go, it has a ring of lipstick around it, and my mind awkwardly recalls images of last night with Evan. Was I wearing lipstick? No, I don’t think so.

Stacy is saying, “Tonight, at The Windjammer. Remember?”

I’d forgotten. She had texted me yesterday about getting tickets for a double show at The Windjammer, a beachfront music club. She once hooked up with the lead singer of the band performing there. A guy named Keenan. That was years ago, before Trent, and the guy never called her back. Surprise, surprise.

Before I can say anything, she leans close to me. “Trent isn’t going, so I can flirt with Keenan.”

I squint at her. “You’re not serious.”

She leans back. “I’m not going to do anything with him. I’m just going to tease him. Payback’s a bitch. Hell, he probably won’t even remember who I am. That’ll just make it more fun.”

“You do know you’re a lunatic, right?”

“Oh, totally.”

A guy behind the counter calls our order number. Stacy tells me she’ll get it, and she’s back within thirty seconds placing our grilled salmon salads in front of us.

She stabs a piece of the fish. “I still can’t believe that guy the other night.”

Without looking up from my food, I say, “What about him?”

She laughs. “What about him? I know it’s been over six months for you—sorry, I won’t bring his name up—and that’s a long time but you haven’t lost the ability to detect hotness, have you?”

If only she knew.

I squash the subject by asking her about work. She always has an interesting story about someone who works at the law firm or a client. I’m always interested in hearing her stories. She tells a good one, and she’s funny, but sometimes, like now, I do it to stop her from talking about the name she bought up without actually saying it: Wyatt.

. . . . .

After lunch, I pick up Sophie and Kendall.

“How was the movie?” I ask, when they get in the car.

Kendall is her usual quiet self. I don’t think she’s rude, she’s just shy and quiet. She looks at Sophie, as if deferring to her for an answer.

Sophie scrunches up her face and shakes her head. “Lame.” She looks down at her phone, then nudges Kendall’s elbow. They both look at the screen and laugh.

They don’t want to go to the grocery store with me, so I drop them off at home and go by myself.

I get back home and start unpacking the bags when Sophie and Kendall come into the kitchen to root around for snacks I might have bought.

Sophie’s looking in a bag when she says words I don’t think are real. “Wyatt called.”

Is this some kind of joke?
I think. That’s actually where my mind goes at first—I try to minimize the impact of the news by momentarily telling myself Stacy is fucking with me. Maybe she called and told Sophie to tell me that. But…no. Stacy wouldn’t do that. It’s real.

“Wyatt?”

Sophie nods as she opens a box of microwaveable popcorn.

“What did he say?”

She shrugs. “Not much. He asked if you were here. I told him no.”

I watch her as she puts the bag in the microwave and starts hunting for the quick-start button for popcorn. I step over and touch it for her.

She looks up at me. “What?”

“He called the house phone?”

Sophie nods, walks over to the table, sits down and picks up her phone. She and Kendall resume texting or Snapchatting or whatever they’re doing.

“That’s all he asked?”

Sophie nods. “Yep.”

. . . . .

Wyatt Fuller was my boyfriend of almost four years. When people talk about finding “The One” well, Wyatt was my “The One.”

We both grew up in the Charleston area, but went to different schools all of our lives and our paths never crossed. We met when I was a freshman at the College of Charleston, and Wyatt was a sophomore. I didn’t have a boyfriend, he didn’t have a girlfriend, and we kept finding ourselves at the same parties, and sometimes ran into each other at various restaurants and clubs downtown.

The getting-to-know-you stage lasted almost my entire freshman year. Wyatt was patient, fun, interesting, and always stable. I never saw him get overly angry or excessively happy about anything. He never demanded to know where I was when we weren’t together, never asked about a guy he might see me talking to.

It seemed like we were headed for a great friendship, and then things shifted to blatant flirting right at the end of my freshman year. By the end of June, we were inseparable. Even on nights when I had to stay home to watch Sophie because Mom was at work, Wyatt would stay there with me rather than go out with his friends.

Sometimes, in quiet moments with no one else around, I’d think:
I have found a perfect, flawless guy.

It was something I was sure didn’t exist before I met Wyatt because before him, I’d had a pretty standard dating history in high school, one semi-serious boyfriend (as much as high-school relationships can be considered serious at all), and that was it.

The only other male figure in my life was my father. He always worked a lot, but he made a point of not missing school events and summer swim team meets. He made it to school plays and chorus events that I was involved in. He was a great dad.

He wasn’t physically or emotionally abusive to me, and of course not to baby Sophie. But sometimes I’d hear my mom and dad arguing late at night and he would raise his voice. But so would she. It didn’t seem like anything out of the norm, even to my eleven-year-old ears. And mom later confirmed that it wasn’t that bad, just typical disagreements between a husband and wife.

That’s why it was so shocking when he left us. I was eleven, and it was just after Sophie was born.

Mom has never talked much about it, and I think it’s as much a mystery to her. All I know about my father is that he lives in Florida, he’s remarried, and Sophie and I have two half-brothers.

I never talked about this with friends. A single mom with two kids wasn’t strange, so it’s not like I had to answer for being in some kind of socially outcast family situation.

But I did talk to Wyatt about it when we were getting to know each other, and a little more in-depth once we started seriously dating.

His mother and father were still together, so he had no idea what it was like growing up with a single parent. I didn’t mind his questions. In fact, just the opposite. I welcomed them. After all, he was interested in knowing everything about me and it was a feeling I’d never had from a guy before.

It was a storybook relationship for three and a half years. We met when I was a freshman, still losing weight, and the thought of a boy interested in me, at that age and as self-conscious as I was, well…it was like a fairy tale, and it remained that way all through college.

Wyatt graduated and landed a job in Seattle, which meant he’d be on the other side of the country for my senior year. I missed him so much that it was a few months before I realized that his absence from my life for that year wasn’t the biggest issue.

The impending problem was: what would happen when I graduated?

My finishing college didn’t mean Wyatt was coming back. And considering how I was basically a second mother to Sophie, there was no way I could pack up and move across the country to be with him.

It didn’t matter whether I’d be able to find a job in Seattle. The experience with my father made family infinitely more important to me, and I’d made my mother a promise that I would be around until Sophie turned sixteen, the age when my mom said she’d feel comfortable leaving Sophie on her own at night.

We have a small extended family and most of them are in central Florida anyway, but even if we’d all been in the same town, I still would have kept that promise to my mom.

Wyatt was understanding. At first, anyway. He came home for Christmas of my senior year and we spent a lot of time talking about the issue.

He said he loved me, he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me, and we’d figure something out. That attitude vanished by the second Valentine’s Day we weren’t able to spend together in person.

We talked a lot over FaceTime, and I’d gotten used to it. It was strange at first, not only because we couldn’t reach out and touch each other, but because he looked different.

He’d always had slightly shaggy hair, like a stereotypical surfer’s hair, and he was always brushing it out of his eyes. I loved that hair. Now that he was in the business world, the Wyatt hair that I loved was gone, traded in for a conservative cut, parted on the left side.

We were a couple of thousand miles apart but thanks to the magic of FaceTime, I had planned a Valentine’s dinner for us. We would eat and talk, each of us with a candle in front of us.

Lame? Maybe. But I thought it was cute, and so did Wyatt so that was all that mattered. What little chance there was at romance that night, though, dissolved when the call started.

I was sitting in my room at my desk, a candle flickering off to my right, my phone propped up straight ahead of me. The plate in front of me held angel hair pasta with shrimp, our favorite meal that we shared often back when he was in town. Wyatt had made some himself, the first time he’d attempted it.

“I miss you so much.” I could see it in his expression. He was being genuine. It wasn’t some kind of empty statement made on a special night. Plus, Wyatt was never like that anyway. He said what he was thinking and you always knew he meant what he said.

“I miss you, too. I wish I could visit.”

This was about a year into his new job in Seattle, and we’d had this exact conversation several times. They were always filled with sad longing. But this was different. I knew it when his eyes dropped from the camera and he looked straight down.

When he looked back up he said, “We always said we’d be together.”

“I know.” It hurt to look in his eyes. Hurt even more that I couldn’t see them crystal clear, as if he were here. The deep blue was just darkness on my screen.

“So move here, Audrey. It’s been a year. I’m settled. My job is stable. We can actually get married instead of just talking about it.”

“Can we talk about this later—”

“No.” He cut me off, something he rarely did. “What’s the difference in talking about it now instead of later?”

“I thought we were going to enjoy a Valentine’s dinner together.” I was getting angry. This was my idea, and he’d loved it, and now he was ruining it.

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, sliding my hands under my legs.

Wyatt shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know…”

“You don’t know what?”

He looked straight into the camera. “I thought you loved me, Audrey.”

I couldn’t believe he’d just said that. “What?”

He said nothing.

“It’s not that I don’t love you,” I said, lifting my hands and leaning on the desk. “I can’t believe you said that.”

“Sorry.”

“You know I can’t move there now. I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

I pushed the plate of food aside. My appetite had vanished. “Can’t.” My voice was stern, harsh. “And won’t. So both.”

He folded his arms across his chest. “It’s more like you won’t.”

I let that sink in for a moment. I couldn’t believe this was happening. “You know what? You’re right. It’s more that I won’t. I could come out there, but would you want me there knowing the whole time that I would be thinking I should be back here?”

He didn’t say anything.

I picked up my phone. “I’m going to hang up. I’ll call you in a little while.”

I didn’t wait for him to say anything before ending the call.

Twenty minutes later, he called. Not on FaceTime, just on the phone. I’d had time to think about what had just happened and it didn’t take me long to realize what was going on.