You & Me Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Kudos for Stephanie Kepke

  You & Me

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  She belonged in blossom pink or cerulean blue, sage green mixed with crisp white. But, all she wore was black or occasionally charcoal gray. On my single mom budget, I bought her skinny jeans at Target and cute cotton tops at Kohl’s. Still, she wore her baggy sweatpants and that black hoodie that hid her figure. Not that I wanted her to flaunt it, but I wanted her to own her beauty. Her glossy, raven hair was kept in a messy topknot at all times. Her stormy gray eyes, just like her father’s, almost blue, but not quite, were ringed in thick black liner. She was hiding. Better not to be noticed.

  I was the complete opposite at sixteen. I wore tight, faded jeans: bleached and frayed, the denim almost white; and fuzzy angora sweaters that hugged my curves. My hair was in wild curls, just as inky black as Josie’s, but never pulled into a bun. The higher my curls were, the better and I went through a bottle of hair spray a month. I may have hit my peak back then.

  My boyfriend, Billy, was crazy about me and we were kind of like a verse in a song, a song about longing and perfect love and innocence. We dated from the time we were fifteen until we were almost twenty. We were born three days apart and as we planned our yearly joint birthday party on the beach, I suddenly felt suffocated. I had celebrated my birthday the same way with the same people for four birthdays in a row and I just couldn’t do a fifth. I needed to break away and see what else was out in the world. But, I always wished I didn’t break Billy’s heart in the process. The song ended as I turned out of the parking lot and left me wondering what ever happened to Billy Leibowitz.

  Kudos for Stephanie Kepke

  Winner of the Northeast Ohio Romance Writers of America Cleveland Rocks Romance contest—Mainstream with Romantic Elements category.

  ~*~

  Finalist in the Charter Oak Romance Writers Golden Acorn Quick Look Hook Contest—Mainstream with Romantic Elements category.

  ~*~

  Finalist in the Connecticut Romance Writers of America Write Stuff contest—Women’s Fiction category.

  ~*~

  Her short story, A NEW LIFE, was published by The Wild Rose Press in February 2015.

  You & Me

  by

  Stephanie Kepke

  A Candy Hearts Romance

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  You & Me

  COPYRIGHT © 2016 by Stephanie Kepke

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by RJ Morris

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Champagne Rose Edition, 2016

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-0378-9

  A Candy Hearts Romance

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To Jeff, Drew, Joshua & Aidan

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my mother, Beverly Kepke, and my siblings, Jodi Schinz, David Kepke, and Shari Morris, for your support and encouragement.

  Thank you to Scott Syat for your particular expertise—certain scenes would not be nearly as good without your input. Thank you to Jeannie Berman-Feldman and Steve Osterweil for reading and your insight. Thank you to Rachel Kubrick for your teen girl, voracious reader perspective.

  Thank you to Tracy Gorman and Barri Feuer for being early and enthusiastic readers. And thank you to all of my friends and family who have cheered me on—whether in person or on Facebook. Every hug, text, comment and even “like” means a lot to me.

  Chapter One

  I was about to turn into the high school parking lot when the song came on. My sixteen-year-old daughter, Josie, groaned in the seat next to me. I knew my penchant for cheesy love songs—especially from two decades ago—drove her crazy. “Don’t worry, you’ll be getting out in a minute.”

  She’s hated me since I left her dad five years earlier and made her go with me across the country, from California home to Long Island. Didn’t mean I had to turn the song off, though.

  “I wanted this to be my prom song so badly,” I told her. “It was my song with my high school sweetheart.” An annoyed sigh was all I got back, but I continued, “I lobbied for it, but they chose some other song that all the cheerleaders liked. I was so upset, but then I realized there were bigger battles, like getting Grandma to let me wear the dress I wanted to wear. It was this gorgeous lavender slinky, silky thing with a slit up the thigh.”

  Silence.

  “She was pretty strict with me. You don’t realize how lucky you are. I let you wear whatever you want. But, I’d give anything in the world to have her tell me what to wear again. I wish I appreciated my mom when I was a teenager.” I was sure that garnered an eye roll, rather than sympathy. I simply couldn’t do anything right with Josie and I so desperately wished I had given her a sibling, so she had someone else to lean on besides a mom she wanted nothing to do with. “Do you think you’re going to go to the junior prom?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Are your friends going?”

  “Why does it matter? It’s not for a few months anyway. It’s only February. Can you just stop asking about it?”

  “I only asked once,” I protested as she climbed out of the car. “I love you,” I yelled after her. Not even a nod of the head.

  She pulled the hood of her black sweatshirt jacket—not even a winter jacket on this cold day—up over her head and walked away. It killed me to see her delicate beauty drowned in oversize sweatshirts and dark, drab colors.

  She belonged in blossom pink or cerulean blue, sage green mixed with crisp white. But, all she wore was black or occasionally charcoal gray. On my single mom budget, I bought her skinny jeans at Target and cute cotton tops at Kohl’s. Still, she wore her baggy sweatpants and that black hoodie that hid her figure. Not that I wanted her to flaunt it, but I wanted her to own her beauty. Her glossy, raven hair was kept in a messy topknot at all times. Her stormy gray eyes, just like her father’s, almost blue, but not quite, were ringed in thick black liner. She was hiding. Better not to be noticed.

  I was the complete opposite at sixteen. I wore tight, faded jeans: bleached and frayed, the denim almost white; and fuzzy angora sweaters that hugged my curves. My hair was in wild curls, just as inky black as Josie’s, but never pulled into a bun. The higher my curls were, the better and I went through a bottle of hair spray a month. I may have hit my peak back then.

  My boyfriend, Billy, was crazy about me and we were kind of like a verse in a song, a song about longing and perfect love and innocence. We dated from the time we were fifteen until we were almost twenty. We were born three days apart and as we planned our yearly joint birthday party on the beach, I suddenly felt suffocated. I had celebrated my birthday the same way with the same people for four birthdays in a row and
I just couldn’t do a fifth. I needed to break away and see what else was out in the world. But, I always wished I didn’t break Billy’s heart in the process. The song ended as I turned out of the parking lot and left me wondering what ever happened to Billy Leibowitz.

  I’ve searched for him everywhere I could think of—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. I even looked on MySpace. I Googled him every few months for years—nothing. I couldn’t understand how someone could just disappear off the face of the Earth. I would have heard if he died, God forbid. There was a Facebook page dedicated to all our high school classmates who passed away before their time. I checked it on a regular basis, morbid as that was.

  I dropped my keys in the holder by the front door and grabbed my laptop as soon as I got home. Once Billy entered my brain, it was tough to get him out, so I Googled him one more time before getting ready for work. Maybe I was just wistful for my own teenage years, since it seemed to me like my daughter was squandering hers. Or maybe, I was lonely. Or maybe being alone for so many years, I was ready to forget the verbally abusive bastard I left and try to reclaim a love that was pure. But, finding him remained elusive.

  I wouldn’t blame Billy for somehow hiding himself from me, especially since our last encounter almost two decades earlier left us both in tears. I was moving in with my ex, Trent, after only six months of dating. I should have realized the jealous streak that made him demand I cut all ties with Billy would eventually drive me insane. But, at the time it seemed so romantic. And, Billy was a part of a past I figured I should leave behind like the threadbare teddy bear I dumped at Goodwill, despite my mother’s pleas that I let her keep it as a memento from my childhood. “I’ll put it in the attic,” she promised. “You don’t have to get rid of everything when you move in with that man.”

  That was what she always called Trent. “That man.” To be fair, he was a man—while I was still a girl. I had just turned twenty-three when I moved out of my parents’ house and in with him. He was forty-one. “He’s almost twenty years older than you. It’s too much of a difference,” my mother argued over and over. “What about Billy? You know he’d get back together with you in an instant. He was a good boy. Sweet—always put you first.” She shook her head and sighed. “He wasn’t a man picking up young girls in a bar. What could he possibly have in common with you? I’ll tell you what—he probably got a nice eyeful when you bent over the bar. Dirty old man.” We stared at each other in silence. She spoke first, softly, “I told you bartending wasn’t a good way to make extra money. I would have given you the money you needed for a car.”

  “I wanted to earn it,” I snapped. “And, I love Trent. It was the best day of my life when he sat down at my bar.”

  That moment, my mother looked very old, even though she was barely fifty. I wished now that I could tell her I was sorry for everything I put her through.

  “You could use your college degree and get a real job.”

  “I doubt that would happen.” My degree was in philosophy—not the easiest field to find a job. That’s how I ended up bartending when I moved home after college graduation. I searched for a job for months while I tended bar at night, but eventually gave up the search. I took on days behind the bar too and was making pretty decent money. The liquid-lunch businessmen crowd tipped generously. That was when I met Trent, in his impeccably tailored suit and subtly elegant tie with a matching pocket square.

  Trent was overwhelmingly affectionate at the beginning. And he was so handsome—those intense gray eyes, close-cropped salt and pepper hair. He told me in order to move on I should shed everything from the past, people included. I listened. It felt like us against the world. I knew people judged our love, but they couldn’t see past their May/December preconceptions. I knew the truth and I would do anything to protect it. When Trent instructed me to cut ties with Billy, still one of my best friends at the time, I obeyed.

  It was getting late, so I gave up the search and stepped into the shower. Standing under the comforting rain of hot water I recalled the last time I saw Billy. We met at our favorite ice cream stand, The Creamery, under the canopy of an impossibly blue sky. Trent had agreed to let me meet Billy at that spot because it was public—right on a main road. He didn’t want me to be alone with Billy anywhere. He knew in a public place there was no chance we’d rekindle our romance with a stolen kiss or more. A crowd of parents and little kids licking ice cream cones pretty much guaranteed our meeting would be platonic and Trent knew that.

  Billy and I sat at a splintery wood table; the one with our initials carved in it, and ate our cones in silence. I licked my favorite bubble gum ice cream as a thin river of fudge brownie dripped down his cone and onto his wrist. I broke the silence. “Did you sit at this table on purpose?” I asked.

  Billy wouldn’t look at me. He squinted against the sun behind me as he nodded.

  “I thought maybe you did,” I said softly. “You know, this spot will always be special to me. You’ll always be special to me. But, we’re not kids any more.”

  He nodded again. I thought his eyes glistened a bit. He knew what was coming. “I know, but…” he said, then trailed off.

  “Trent doesn’t want me to see you any more.” I had to just say it, like ripping off a bandage. “He doesn’t even want us to talk on the phone or you to send me anything any more—like the candy hearts you send on Valentine’s Day every year, or the cute gifts from trips. He just feels like it takes away from us—from me and him.”

  Billy got up and threw his half-eaten cone in the garbage can a few feet away. He turned back and blinked hard, shielding his eyes from the sun and me. I jumped off the bench and launched myself at him, wrapping my arms around his waist and pressing my head against his chest, sobbing. He buried his face in my hair, and whispered, “Shh. Shh. It’ll be okay.”

  “How do you know that, Billy? How do you know it will be okay? Maybe I’m making a big mistake.”

  “You’re you, Alex. You’ve always known exactly what you wanted and done it. You’ll land on your feet and if you don’t, I’ll…”

  I finished Billy’s sentence. “Be there to catch me.”

  “I will. I’ll always be there to catch you when you fall.”

  He leaned down and kissed me, so gently that my heart cracked. It was only after Billy walked away that I realized my hair was wet from his tears.

  Six months later when Valentine’s Day came and went without a package of those conversation hearts arriving in the mail, I felt an undeniable loss. It was just a box of candy, but it was a sweet reminder of my youth and all that I’d left behind. Even after we broke up Billy still sent me a box in the mail every year. From fifteen years old until I was twenty-two, I received that little pink box. I missed pulling it out of the padded brown paper envelope it always arrived in and reading the message Billy had penned on the box.

  Chapter Two

  I still felt a sadness…even all these years later. I just stood in the shower letting the hot water run over me and the bathroom steam up, remembering how lost I was without Billy back then. Trent didn’t even buy me anything that first Valentine’s Day. He said Valentine’s Day was a commercial holiday and he wasn’t about to add to the consumerism. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since Trent’s early affection was slowly being replaced by snipes carefully shrouded in the guise of helping me.

  Drying off after the shower and pulling on my jeans and sweater, I suddenly understood with absolute clarity that Trent likely realized Billy’s kindness and thoughtfulness made him look bad. Of course he banned me from seeing him and banned those sweet candy hearts.

  Some nights back then, I glanced around in awe at everything I had that most girls my age didn’t. I didn’t get flowers and chocolates for Valentine’s Day, but I did have a big house with a formal living room filled with crisp white furniture and a formal dining room housing an ornately carved mahogany table—only we never entertained. Trent didn’t think it was important.

  I got pregnant
not long after that first Valentine’s Day. Trent never asked me to marry him, but he knew that since he was the father of my child, I wasn’t going anywhere. Plus, he convinced me I could never survive on my own. I could never be a single parent. He even said once, “You were nothing before I met you and you’d be nothing if you left.” His whisper was more menacing than the loudest scream. I started to believe the things he told me. I internalized it and pretty soon I thought, Of course I’m useless.

  A few years later Trent moved us out to California, thousands of miles from my home. He took the job and simply told me, “We’re moving.” He never consulted me. I never even got to see my mother when she was dying. She went so quickly I didn’t have a chance to break free. My dad passed away not long after my mom—probably of a broken heart—while I was stuck on the other side of the country, drowning in my own sorrow and loneliness.

  Sometimes I wondered why I followed Trent. Sometimes I beat myself up. Even now, driving through the icy roads on my way to work, the question still haunted me, distracted me from life. Really it was for Josie; somehow she was a daddy’s girl. Even though Trent was awful to me, he was sweet as sugar to her, at least when she was little. I had to follow him, even without a ring on my finger. But, I lost everyone and everything that mattered to me, except my daughter.

  There was one memory I held onto, one moment of peace. Trent had allowed my mom to help when Josie was born. She was so thrilled. She helped me set up the nursery and rocked Josie to sleep while I napped. I revisited those moments, like yellowing photographs, when I was at my loneliest. I finally got up the courage to leave Trent for good when Josie was eleven. She was a little chunky—just a tiny bit, just the remnants of baby fat left before she stretched out and her height outpaced her weight—and a little awkward. Her hair was frizzy and she had just gotten braces. I could clearly see the beauty she would become, but the disdain in Trent’s eyes when he looked at her was unmistakable. The moment he snatched a cookie out of her hand and told her she needed to “lose a few”, I saw the future in front of us in a split second.