Talk Dirty to Me

“Okay, but then, your best friend, Landon, asks me to keep you—of all people—up to date on his journey to the end, knowing darn well I’d never say no because one, I grew to love him, too, and two, for gracious sake, he was dying. Then that best friend in the whole world of yours, I’m guessin’ your only friend left, dies.”

“You’re a fine human being, Em. I mean that.” Dixie refused to take the bait and let Em get a rise out of her.

Em pushed some more. “Adding to all that misery, there’s Caine Donovan. Your heart must be in an emotional tizzy about seeing him after, what is it now? Ten years...”

Dixie remained stoically silent. About all things failed restaurant and especially all things Caine Donovan.

“You remember him, right? One-time Plum Orchard High heartthrob and all-county track star, now one of Miami’s biggest real-estate moguls... Oh, and the man you claimed to love but bet on like a Derby horse?” Em was dropping a line into Dixie’s ocean with a juicy worm on the end of it to see if she’d rear up and bite.

The bet. God, that damn bet.

But the truth was the truth. Her restaurant had failed because she’d been too busy partying and running up her credit cards to bother with silly things like managing the restaurant she’d convinced herself, with absolutely no experience at all, was as good a place as any to escape her hometown and run away from the horrible thing she’d done to Caine.

Her engagement had failed because at the time, Dixie Davis didn’t know how not to turn everything into a three-ring circus.

And yes, Caine was successful, and she wasn’t.

All ugly truths.

Topping everything off, there’d been Mason—the beginning of her end.

Dixie lifted her sunglasses once more and forced a smile, letting her eyes purposely meet Em’s. “Sorry to disappoint, but there’s no emotional tizzy here. Seeing Caine is part of the process of saying goodbye to our mutual best friend. That’s all. He has as much right as I do. He was Landon’s best friend, too.”

Liar.

She’d practiced those words in her bathroom mirror hundreds of times before she’d left Chicago so they’d come off cordial and, above all, gracious. She’d almost convinced herself this imposed meeting was just that—two people who hadn’t worked out, simply running into each other again and chatting niceties until it was time to go back to their lives.

But seeing Caine meant remembering how madly in love they’d been for a time. It meant hearing his voice, a voice so warm it could probably still make her thighs clench.

If they ended up in a close setting, it meant possibly brushing against his granite wall of a chest or watching him confidently smile while he arrogantly tilted an eyebrow at her. It meant that swell of clawing longing for him rising upward and settling in her chest.

It meant reliving emotions that still ached almost as fresh as the day they’d happened.

No one since Caine had ever touched her quite the same way. Caine Donovan was like a drug, and she was his junkie in need of a Caine Anonymous meeting.

Dixie chose to avoid Em dangling the Caine carrot under her nose. Talking about Caine meant stirring up all the emotions that went with everything that had happened. Today all her turmoil was reserved for Landon and her gratitude toward Em.

That Em had walked this far out on the ledge, offering to come with Dixie to Landon’s funeral in front of all of Plum Orchard’s very prying, judgmental eyes, was more than was her due.

The ache of more tears tickled the back of Dixie’s eyelids. “You know, even though I knew Landon’s death was inevitable, it really is just like everyone says—you can never prepare for it.”

Em waved a hand around the room, chockfull of life-size pictures of Landon doing everything from zip-lining in Alaska over an icy glacier to cooking in Bobby Flay’s kitchen. “Well, if no one else was prepared, this sendoff is a sign Landon was prepared. He knew how he wanted to go out, and he left strict instructions about it. You don’t think his mother arranged those drag queens on stilts outside, do you? The Plum Orchard Bible study ladies nearly fell faint to the ground when they arrived.”

A glimmer of a smile outlined Dixie’s lips, lips still chapped and peeling from her nervous habit of tugging them. “He wasn’t shy, was he?”

“Landon was whatever the antithesis of shy is.”

That Landon had been. Loud and proud. Just thinking about him always made Dixie smile.

Yet, each time she thought she might smile, a new wave of loss washed over her, and it reminded her she’d never smile with Landon again. “I hate that he’s gone.” God, she really hated it. She hated even more the fact that she hadn’t made it back in time to be with him when he’d passed.

Everything had happened so fast, in a blur of urgent phone calls from Landon’s hospice care nurse, Vella, and Em’s updates, to the humiliating decline from American Airlines of her very last credit card.

Em pointed to one of the pictures of Dixie and Landon on a nearby table, her eyes fondly roving it. “He hates it, too. Who wouldn’t hate being dead?” She chuckled, eliciting a laugh from Dixie, too.

Dixie’s shoulders relaxed a little in her ill-fitting jacket. She leaned into Em and said, “Landon’s probably pretty upset he’s missing this.”

Em’s hand strayed to her hair with a bob of her head. “Oh, you know better ’n all of us what Landon Wells was like. He had to have his nose in everything, or it drove him positively crazy. I’m sure wherever he is, he hates missing out on the circus outside these doors. Did you see the gentleman who looks like he just left the set of that movie Coming to America? And bless his heart, all those grief-stricken comments from parts near and far on his Facebook page made me tear up.”

Dixie let slip a fond grin of recollection. “The turnout would have tickled Landon’s ‘come one, come all’ bone,” she agreed, referring to the mass of mourners she’d witnessed on their way inside.

Eclectic defined her best friend, or maybe, he’d defined it? Either way, it was what made Landon Landon. His joy in everything great and small—his wonder at the differences in people, cultures—his determination to experience anything he could get his hands on and celebrate it with gusto. His ability to collect people from all walks of life and turn them into lifelong friends.

Shortly after college, he’d invested his trust fund wisely in several startup internet companies and was a self-made multimillionaire by the time he was twenty-five. Those companies continued to provide steady incomes to this day. And along the way, he’d added new ones—via winning bets on everything from a game of pool with a castoff royal to a polo match with some foreign politician.

Because of his savvy business acumen, Landon was able to retire at twenty-six. Since that time, he’d been to exotic, sometimes isolated locales Dixie’d never heard of, had experienced the gamut of a world traveler, from a pilgrimage in an ashram in India to bobsledding with the Swiss Olympic team.

Landon had lived and loved openly and freely, sharing his wealth wherever he went.

Dixie gripped the edge of the couch, her heart overloaded with the empty beat of grief. She’d miss everything about him: his pushy late-night phone calls about her nonexistent love life, his questions about her financial security, his inquiries into her cholesterol levels, and anything and everything else Landon had pestered/mothered/nurtured her about in their lifelong friendship.

The small room had grown oppressive with her sorrow in the last vestiges of the late August day. She reached into her bag and used one of her many overdue credit card bills to fan herself. “Mercy, it’s hot in here.”

“Are your ears hot, too? Because I hear through the iPhone grapevine Louella Palmer’s in the back row of this very establishment, sittin’ next to Caine, and chewin’ his ear off as we speak. You know, the man you’re not in an emotional tailspin over?” Em showed her the text in yet another obvious bid to take her licks. It only made sense she’d think the subject of Louella Palmer would be the straw to break Dixie’s back.

Everyone in town probably thought the subject of Louella was a sore spot for Dixie. The real sore spot belonged to Louella, though, and she had every right to it.

Louella had once been her right-hand, helping her lead the Mags as if they were the mob—Southern contingency. They’d been frenemies of sorts then, and in the end just before Dixie left town, bitter rivals. Not only was Louella currently the head of the Magnolias, she was almost as good at mob relations as Dixie had been.

On the outside the Mags were refined and decorous, and they considered themselves the epitome of Southern grace and charm, but upon Dixie’s harsh inner reflections these past few years, they were all nothing more than elitist snobs with Southern accents—and she’d been the biggest one of all.

Of course Louella was sitting with Caine. It gave her plenty of time to remind him anew how Dixie was spawned from the loins of the devil.

Caine was already here, too. Dixie’s heart sped up as though someone had revved its engine, but her next words belied the storm brewing in her stomach. “You know what, Em? I hope Louella reminds him just how silly he was to ever get mixed up with the likes of Dixie Davis.”

Take that. She would not bite on the matter of Caine Donovan or Louella Palmer. The whole town had witnessed their messy breakup with Louella smack dab in the middle, and in a town as small as Plum Orchard, people were sure to speculate about their eventual meeting after all these years.

It was only natural—expected even. So why was she so jittery about it?

Because what you did was unforgiveable, Dixie. Then you ran away without so much as an apology.

Em’s expression was astonished, her eyes full of some good ol’ Southern shock. “I can’t believe you’re not biting, Dixie. How can you even be in the same room with him after everythin’ that happened between you?”

“Technically, we’re not in the same room. I’m in here, and he’s out there in the foyer.” Right out there. “And I no longer bite,” she teased, snapping her teeth in jest.

“For two people who were gonna get married and had the biggest breakup Plum Orchard’s ever seen, in the middle of the town’s square to boot, you sure are calm and collected.”

Her spine stiffened. Em just couldn’t seem to choose to love or hate her, and while Dixie recognized it as her due, the reminder of her and Caine’s breakup was still like a knife in the gut almost ten years later.