The Torches We Carry Read online

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “So, what do we do?”

  Reuben shrugged tightly. “Not really much we can do except—”

  His work phone jingled on his belt.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and swore, and now I could really see the frustration and worry radiating off him. He unclipped his phone. “Give me a sec.” Before I could respond, he said, “Engineering, this is Reuben.” Pause. The furrow between his brows deepened. Then he closed his eyes again. When he pinched the bridge of his nose, my heart sank. We weren’t finishing this conversation, were we? And if we didn’t do it now, we wouldn’t have another opportunity before we left.

  “All right,” he said to the caller. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Damn it.

  Reuben lowered the phone, and as he clipped it back to his belt, he looked at me. “I have to go handle a crisis down in engineering.” He rose. “I guess we’ll have to deal with this…” His eyebrows pinched together.

  “Well.” I sighed. “We’ve got all day tomorrow.”

  We locked eyes.

  All day tomorrow. In a car. Him and me. No escape.

  Oh God. This was going to be one long trip.

  Chapter 3

  Reuben

  The universe was apparently conspiring to keep Marcus and me from snagging a few minutes to sort things out between us. He was up to his eyeballs in organizing supplies for the trip to Boise, and I was putting out fires left and right in my department. By the time I left the office that night, it was almost eight, and I still needed to pack and at least try to get some sleep before our early start in the morning. So much for suggesting we meet for a drink to talk things through.

  Which I supposed wasn’t entirely a bad thing. I was liable to drink too much just to numb all the guilt and the other unwelcome emotions that came to life whenever I looked at him. And drinking too much around Marcus was never a good idea. Lesson learned the hard way.

  So I went home, I packed, and I tried to sleep, and when the Welding & Control Equipment van pulled into my driveway at four o’clock the next morning, I was an exhausted, queasy, nervous wreck. But hey, at least I could blame some of the fatigue on needing to be awake this stupidly early.

  After we’d put my suitcase and garment bag in the back—there was just enough space—I climbed into the passenger seat, and we were off.

  “You want to stop and get coffee?” Marcus’s tone was flat but not unfriendly.

  “Unless you want me dozing off on you before we even get across the bridge.”

  He laughed quietly. “Where do you want to go?”

  Back to bed and not to this trade show. “There’s a QFC a couple of blocks down. They’ve got a Starbucks inside.”

  Marcus grunted in acknowledgment, and minutes later, he’d parked in front of the supermarket. As I unbuckled my seat belt, I asked, “You want anything?”

  He held up a 7-Eleven travel mug. “I’m good.”

  “’Kay. I’ll be right back.”

  Just walking from the van to the store was almost enough to wake me up completely. It was cold as balls these days, even for February. Which got me thinking—had Marcus checked the forecast? We had to go over the mountains, through Eastern Washington, and into Idaho. There was probably snow on the ground right now, and there could still be more. Would we need chains? Did we have chains?

  I barely noticed the warmth of the grocery store as I walked in through the automatic doors. My mind was going a million miles an hour, running through all the worst case weather scenarios and every possibility that Marcus might have overlooked. I was downright jittery when I stepped up to the counter to order my coffee. Thank God there was no line; probably because most people were sleeping soundly in their warm beds rather than being upright and “functional” at this hour. I ordered, paid, and waited, shifting my weight and gnawing my lip because I needed to get back out to the van and make sure we weren’t going to wind up in a snowbank or something.

  Coffee in hand, I hurried back to the van. I’d barely closed the door before I said, “Have you checked the weather for the pass and Idaho? And we have chains, right? Do—”

  “Reuben.” The firm sound of my name shut me up. Marcus smiled across the console, the bright light from the grocery store casting harsh shadows across his face. He reached between his seat and the door and pulled out a clipboard. “I’m ten steps ahead of you.”

  One look at the clipboard, and all my panic was gone in an instant. Of course Marcus had thought of everything. He always did.

  I swallowed, relaxing against the seat as I put my coffee into the cupholder. “And we’ve got chains?”

  “Of course.”

  “Oh. Okay. Good.” I felt like an idiot now. If there was anyone on this planet who could possibly be on top of things more than I was, he was sitting right beside me. That man took his organizing and scheduling as seriously as an air traffic controller.

  Neither of us said anything as Marcus pulled out onto the road and wound his way to I-90. Seattle was mostly still asleep, so we flew out of the city and across Lake Washington. In no time, we were past Bellevue and Issaquah, and it wouldn’t be long before we’d left North Bend in the dust too. At this rate, we’d be over Snoqualmie Pass before the sun came up.

  “If you want me to drive,” I said as I tucked my now-empty cup back into the holder, “just say so.”

  “I’m good for now. Thanks.”

  And… silence. Again. I thought about suggesting we put on the radio, but it would start getting staticky once we were up in the mountains. No point in turning it on now only to switch it off again later. Shame the maintenance department had never gotten around to upgrading the age-old AM/FM radio in this van to include XM or something that would still function even in the mountains.

  I stared out the window, but of course it was still pitch black outside, so I couldn’t see much. Well, aside from my own semi-transparent reflection. And Marcus’s.

  I caught myself staring at his reflection while he drove. He was barely visible—just a few features picked out by the faint blue glow of the gauges and what little light bounced back from his headlights on the blacktop. It was enough, though. I’d memorized his face years ago, so my mind filled in what the darkness covered up.

  The longer the silence dragged on, the deeper it cut. Even after we’d broken up, even after he’d started seeing his now-ex-boyfriend and I’d married my soon-to-be-ex-wife, we’d always stayed friends. This awkwardness? This distance? It wasn’t us. Never had been. Not until that damn Christmas party.

  So what do we do now?

  He’d always been better at talking about feelings and shit like that. I could follow suit once he guided me toward the right words, but I’d always had to let him take point on those conversations. I just wasn’t wired for it. I sucked at it. So did my ex-wife, for that matter; the irreconcilable differences on my divorce papers may as well have said we’re terrible at communicating, especially him. Hell, I couldn’t count the number of times I’d gone to Marcus to ask how to approach my wife about something.

  Now she’s gone, you’re all the way over there, and I don’t have a clue how to fix this.

  Oh yeah. I was in a perfect state of mind to be joined at the hip with him for the next several days. Fuck.

  ***

  I-90 wound us through the Cascade foothills toward Snoqualmie Pass. As we inched up into the higher altitudes, we went from a sprinkle of white along the shoulder to deep, dirty snowbanks and repeated warnings about black ice. Marcus took the curves extra slowly, staying in control even when the van tried to fishtail a few times. Good thing he was driving—I was a perfectly competent driver in the snow, but I hadn’t driven a heavily loaded van in these conditions before. Least of all in the dark.

  Almost three hours after we’d left Seattle, we’d gone a total of about eighty-five miles. The sky was still dark, the silence still hanging between Marcus and me, when he pulled off the interstate in Cle Elum, a tiny town no
t far beyond the pass.

  “I need to eat something,” he declared as he slowed to a stop at a red light. “You want anything?”

  I shrugged. “I could eat.”

  “Should we just grab fast food and get back on the road? Or do you want to sit down?”

  The thought of us sitting down for a meal, especially without a buffer of potential clients who needed wooing, made me want to gag. I didn’t want to say it, though. Things were awkward enough. “You’re driving. Whatever works better for you.”

  He picked a sit-down place. Damn.

  It was one of those all-night diners that catered to truckers. The menu could basically be summarized as Reuben, if you order anything, your trainer will make you pay dearly, but hopefully she’d give me a pass. After all, I was traveling on business, it was barely seven in the damned morning, and I was with my ex-boyfriend and our gigantic herd of living room elephants. The stress alone probably burned enough calories to justify biscuits and gravy or something.

  I didn’t get biscuits and gravy, though. I settled for a vegetarian omelet with cheese and an English muffin. And coffee, of course.

  What came, however, was a vegetarian omelet hidden somewhere beneath a half-inch thick blanket of melted cheddar, a side of enough home fries to support Idaho’s entire economy, and how the hell did I miss the part about a stack of pancakes the size of my head?

  Forgive me, trainer, for I am about to sin.

  Across the table, Marcus surveyed the similar mountains of food that had been spread out in front of him. “Are we… are we supposed to eat this all in one sitting?”

  “I think so.” I blinked a few times. “Pretty sure it’s just one meal, too. Like, there’s still lunch after this.”

  “Oh my God,” he murmured. Then he chuckled. So did I. Our eyes met across the table and—

  The laughter instantly dried up.

  Right. It’s you. And me. And things are awkward. Sorry.

  We both dropped our gazes to the safety of our food and didn’t speak as we started eating. I didn’t rib him for slathering his omelet in A-1 Steak Sauce. He didn’t tease me about putting the jam straight on my English muffin without butter. All the usual jokes—the ones we knew so well we could contain them in a couple of glances and smirks—were absent. Of course they were.

  And suddenly I wasn’t hungry at all.

  Marcus put his fork down and cleared his throat. “We, um, never did finish our conversation yesterday.”

  My stomach lurched. Definitely not hungry anymore. I put my fork down too and nudged the barely-touched plate away. “No. We didn’t.”

  We met each other’s gazes over the table. I stared into his eyes. His warm brown eyes that were still so gorgeous even when he was this tired and worried.

  Are we going to finish it now?

  I swallowed, ignoring the ball of lead in my gut. If ever I’d needed him to take the lead and get a conversation rolling, it was now.

  Marcus chewed the inside of his cheek. When he dropped his gaze, the disappointment almost broke me.

  But then he said, “There’s something I need to know.”

  I picked at my omelet to give my hand something to do. “Okay?”

  He stared down at his food for a painfully long moment. Finally, he whispered, “Are you and Michelle divorcing because of what happened in December?”

  Exhaling, I laid the fork down again and sat back against the hard bench. “It…” There was no simple answer to that, was there? “Kind of yes. Kind of no.”

  His forehead creased. “What does that mean?”

  It was my turn to break eye contact. I stared at the food neither of us were touching, and tried to work out how to explain how things had gone down.

  “For what it’s worth,” he said quietly, “I didn’t want that to happen. I never wanted to cause any problems between—”

  “I know.” I met his eyes again. “I’ve never doubted that for a second.”

  He inclined his head, but didn’t speak.

  I took a deep breath. “Look, she and I were in a bad spot already. We’d been sort of skirting around the subject of separating for a while. Just… neither of us could figure out how to drop the hammer.”

  “So a drunken threesome with your ex-boyfriend was… what? A Hail Mary because neither of you could find another reason to call it quits?”

  I didn’t know what startled me more—the coldness of the accusation, or the undercurrent of hurt. “No. It wasn’t that.” I shook my head. “We were drunk. You were drunk.” Sighing, I made a dismissive gesture. “Things got out of hand.”

  Marcus set his jaw, and the hair on my neck stood up. I knew that look. My answer may have been the raw, unvarnished truth, but it was the wrong answer somehow. His voice stayed flat and chilly. “So if it hadn’t been me, it would’ve been someone else.”

  I blinked. “I… I don’t know, honestly. We’d never talked about having a three-way with you or anyone else. Not seriously, anyway.” When that didn’t chisel away any of the hardness in his expression, I sighed. “We weren’t out looking for the nearest warm body or anything. She knew I’m still attracted to you, and she thought you were hot, so when we all ended up in the same place at the same time, and everyone’s inhibitions came down…” I half-shrugged. “It happened. I can’t give you any rational reason for it. All I can tell you is we weren’t using you to make or break our marriage.”

  “But it did break your marriage.” It wasn’t a question.

  “It…” I sighed. “It made us realize a lot of things we’d been ignoring for a while.”

  “Such as?”

  I held his gaze.

  Such as how unsalvageable my marriage really was.

  Such as how my feelings for you stacked up to my feelings for her.

  Such as how much more it hurt to have lost you than it did to be losing her.

  But I didn’t know how to say any of that out loud. Not without making things even weirder between us. I couldn’t risk pushing him further away than he already was, and anyway, I had no idea how to put any of this into words.

  I broke the staring contest and glanced out the window. Daylight was just starting to warm the edges of the dark sky. “We should keep moving. You want me to drive for a while?”

  Chapter 4

  Marcus

  As soon as the question came out of Reuben’s mouth, I deflated. I’d known him too long not to take it for exactly what it was—him shutting down. If I tried to push him now, he’d just keep putting up more walls until one of us snapped, and then we’d have a fight on our hands.

  So much for making things less awkward.

  I sighed and put my napkin on the table beside the food I’d barely eaten. “I can keep driving. Just let me get some coffee to take with me.”

  Reuben nodded, but didn’t speak. Of course he didn’t.

  I supposed I couldn’t be as pissed at him as I’d usually be when he did this. He and Michelle had only separated recently. Just days after the Christmas party, in fact. It was hard not to imagine that night’s activities hadn’t led to their split, but I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to talk about it. Getting him to talk about things had always been like getting blood from a stone, but maybe it was just too soon for this. Maybe he needed to lick his wounds for a while first.

  And maybe, just maybe, throwing us into a vehicle and forcing us to spend a week together in close confines isn’t a good idea right now.

  Not that either of us—or Reuben’s father—had much choice. Plus we’d vowed long ago never to let our romantic history interfere with our jobs. No one at work knew we’d ever been a thing, and I intended to keep it that way. Which meant there had been no tactful way to tell Bob Kelly that we couldn’t handle this trip together.

  Keeping my frustration and resignation as far under the surface as I could, I flagged down the waitress for the check.

  “Do you want a couple of boxes?” she chirped.

  I looked at the food. I�
��d feel guilty asking her to throw all this away, so even though I didn’t foresee any reheated eggs, potatoes, or pancakes in my future, I nodded. “That’d be great. Thanks.”

  Under normal circumstances, Reuben would have playfully rolled his eyes and given me a hard time for taking a doggy bag that I probably wouldn’t eat. It used to annoy me when he did that. Now I wished he would.

  After we’d paid the bill and collected our doggy bags, we went back out to the van. Before I’d even left the parking lot, Reuben was typing something on his phone. Probably a work email. I wasn’t mad—my inbox was probably jammed already, and I’d be facedown in my phone once I wasn’t behind the wheel anymore. That, and as long as he had something to do, it made the silence between us feel a bit less weird. A bit.

  As I-90 whipped past us and Reuben took care of whatever crises were erupting in the engineering department, I had nothing to do but stare at the road and think about the night of the Christmas party.

  We hadn’t really been that drunk. All three of us had had a few—enough to make us all a little louder than normal, including Reuben, who was a notorious introvert—but no one had been incoherent or blackout drunk. Michelle had been buzzed enough to make a few playful comments about Reuben and me. Reuben had been buzzed enough to laugh about it instead of getting uncomfortable. And at the end of the night, I’d been buzzed enough to suggest we all pool our money for a single cab instead of calling one for them and one for me.

  The three of us wedged into the backseat of a Crown Victoria had led to jokes about Michelle being between us (and we’d all been sober enough to remember that a joke about a “Reuben sandwich” would make him dry heave because he thought the actual food by that name was disgusting). Somewhere along the way, those stopped being jokes. And somewhere between the party and their house, we’d decided the cab didn’t need to take me home after all.