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“No. I’m talking to you.”
“Well, maybe you should call your sister.”
Billy didn’t respond immediately, and his silence said more than words could have. When he got mad, really mad not just upset, he didn’t speak. I’d only seen him that angry twice and neither of them turned out well. Once was actually after his daddy’s funeral. He’d come over the bar swinging on Jennings Abernathy, a man that had been a nemesis to the Comforts for as long as I could remember. I still couldn’t believe that Mrs. Comfort had had an affair with him. Thankfully, Hank and Jimmy had stepped in and kept him from doing anything that could’ve landed him in jail.
If I was standing in front of him now, I was pretty sure he’d be swingin’ on me.
“What is she doing there?” he repeated his question in a deadly calm voice.
“You need to talk to her.”
“What’s going on between you two?”
I rubbed the back of my neck and looked up at the ominous black clouds rolling in. It felt like the perfect analogy of what was going on in my internal life.
“Billy, this isn’t a conversation I want to have over the phone. We can talk when I get back.”
The next thing I knew the line went dead. In all the years we’d been friends, Billy had never hung up on me before. I had no idea what things were going to be like when I saw him again. Hell, I wasn’t even sure if I still had a job.
When I walked back into the house, I went straight to the guest room that Cheyenne was staying in and knocked on the door. I figured she must’ve ducked in here at the end of the party and I wanted to check on her. Plus, I figured I better give her a heads up about the conversation I’d just had with her brother.
There was no answer, so I knocked again. After a minute or so, I pressed my ear to the door to see if I could hear her snoring, but it was silent. I turned the knob, while I continued to knock and found that the room was empty. The only light came from her phone, which was plugged into a charger and sitting on the nightstand. I could see from her screen that she had several missed calls.
After checking the bathrooms, kitchen, game room, and garage, I only had one more place to look so I walked down to the basement and that’s where I found her.
Cheyenne was sitting in the middle of the mattress with pictures spread out all around her. She was still wearing the dress that had taken my breath away, but she’d put on my gray Semper Fi hoodie and her hair was piled high up on top of her head and she looked adorably sexy.
I don’t know what it was about seeing that woman in my clothes that turned me on so much, but I was having a difficult time controlling my body’s reaction to her as my jeans grew tight.
I wanted to walk over, cup her face in my hands and kiss her senseless, but I knew that I couldn’t do that. Yet. But soon. Hopefully soon.
“Hey,” I said softly trying not to scare her, but letting her know she wasn’t alone.
Her head lifted and I saw that she was crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as I crossed the space in two long strides.
“Oh, no, nothing.” She smiled and sniffed as she wiped her face. “I just, your mom gave me all these and I just…” Her voice cracked.
I lowered down onto the mattress across from her and the bed dipped causing some of the photos to shift toward me. I picked them up and started looking through them. There were a lot of my mom and Sabrina. Some of just Sabrina. Some of Sabrina and Hank. Then others of Sabrina, Hank, and Billy. And some with Sabrina, my mom, and all us kids.
There were some at the ice cream shop. At the park. At the beach. At the pier. At the drive-in movie theater. On the trolley. Riding bikes on the paths that weaved through the island. It looked like one big photo shoot for a tourist brochure for Firefly Island.
I had never seen any of these so I grabbed another stack and began flipping through it. These had a lot more of just the kids. We were dressed up for Halloween. There was one of us with baskets looking for Easter eggs. And another one of us all sitting on Santa Claus’s lap.
“We were so cute,” I commented on a picture of me and Cheyenne on the pier. I was probably six which would have made Cheyenne four. I was giving her a piggyback ride and she was laughing.
“Can I see?” she asked.
I handed her the photo.
“Aw, we were cute.” She smiled widely as she held the photo.
“I really missed you so much after you left,” I finally admitted to her.
She looked up at me. “You did?”
I’d never told her that, or anyone for that matter. My mom was so upset after Sabrina died that I didn’t want to bring Cheyenne up because I thought it would upset her. And I sure as hell didn’t want to mention anything to Billy since he’d lost his mom and his baby sister whose nickname was Shadow because she followed him around.
