Second Chances by Abbie Williams Read Free Book Online

despite my speed, my heart unsettled by the emotions mixing together under my breastbone. Exhilaration and terror, mostly, but a ribbon of pure thrill wound through me, too, at the fact that I was doing something like this. Going after what I wanted for myself, instead of sitting by and letting life happen to me. I felt alive, in a way that I hadn’t in over a decade.
    Blythe, Blythe, don’t be angry that I’m coming , I thought, my breath catching a little at just the thought of my lover . Come back with me, we’ll make it work. Somehow, we’ll make it work . I couldn’t bear the thought of the alternative.
    The interstate hummed beneath the tires as I drove south past mile upon mile of rolling green hills and cornfields a month from harvest. Driving solo had always been something, for me, that invited reflection, and my thoughts spun back to the nights in Blythe’s truck, sneaking away into the darkness to find a few hours alone. I revisited the night we’d met, playing over that moment again. I’d just arrived at Shore Leave from Chicago, kids in tow, to discover that my mother had hired an ex-con. Angry, exhausted and emotionally drained, I’d walked into the café that night expecting…well, certainly not the future love of my life.
    I’d been almost too shy to shake his hand. And afterward, during those first few weeks, I’d tried so hard to ignore my feelings for him, but it had been useless, out of my hands. My initial and intense attraction had been slowly replaced by something more. The last thing on earth I’d been expecting was to fall in love. But then, that’s the way of it…
    I’d believed myself in love once before, totally under the spell of Jackson Gordon’s smile. It still rankled me this morning that he could so casually, in last night’s drunken state, speak any words of love to me. The man who’d told me just a month ago that he was in love with another woman and wanted to marry her. The man I’d fallen out of love with long ago (though it took almost equally as long to realize it), when our marriage began to wither on the vine. To be fair, when I was a teenage girl Jackson had been my ideal: charming, sexy, tan and lanky, never wearing a shirt during our long hot summers on the lake. He’d been a fan of wearing his neon-tinted sunglasses pushed back on his head, squinting into the sun, his toothy grin constantly flashing. He’d teased me all the time, untying my bikini top, slipping his hands over my stomach, always ready to make love, and in those days I had been always willing.
    I bit my bottom lip now, all these years later, remembering the morning I’d realized I was pregnant and that I must tell Jackie. How abruptly our virtually carefree relationship came screeching and grinding to a halt.
    â€œPregnant?” he’d repeated on that spring afternoon, May 1985, roughly three weeks after our senior prom.
    I nodded, my insides shaking and heaving with tension, though I’d held it together reasonably well on the outside. We’d been sitting on the arbor swing in his parent’s big shady yard, alone but for the lazy spring sunlight and about a million birds, Jackie keeping the swing in motion with an idle foot. When I revealed my news, he’d stopped it with a jolt. His eyes were dark and serious on mine. But despite everything he’d taken my right hand between both of his.
    â€œAre you sure, Jo? You did a pee test and everything?”
    â€œYes, and yes I’m sure,” I said, desperately willing away the ocean of frightened sobs that kept threatening to hurricane through my body. “Oh, Jackie, Mom will kill me. She’ll murder me. She’s warned me about this for so long.”
    And he’d smiled, a little hint of his grin, and teased, “Warned you about me?”
    I glared at him for trying to make a joke of it at this moment, and his grin had slipped