Free Lone Star by Paullina Simons Page A

waved at her. “You won’t understand, Chloe. You and Mason are so perfectly aligned.”
    â€œAre we?” Chloe wouldn’t have minded talking about it.
    â€œBut it’s different with me and Blake. He’s so sweet, but . . .” Hannah paused, chewed her nails, stared out at the pines passing by. “Besides the physical, we have very little in common. Don’t get me wrong. The physical gets you pretty far. With Blake, believe me, almost the whole way. If it was the only important thing, we’d be in great shape. But aside from that, what do we have? All the things I like, he couldn’t care less about, and all the things he likes I don’t get at all.”
    â€œBlake’s so into you. He likes everything you’re into.”
    â€œWhat do I care about junk hauling, or building things, or helping old people, or fixing band saws? Or fishing? And what does he care about Paris and museums, and classic literature, and pretty clothes?”
    â€œThere are other things . . .”
    â€œYes, we’ve done them.” Hannah sighed dramatically. “Do you think that boy will ever live away from his dad? He still helps him into the boat, for God’s sake. He wants to write a book so he can start a junk business. I mean, what am I going to do with someone like that?” Hannah waved in dismissal. “Me, I want to travel the world. I want to learn three languages. I want to live in a big city, not in this tiny crossroads in the middle of nowhere. It can’t end with Blake any other way but this way.”
    â€œBut that’s the thing,” Chloe said, keeping her gaze on the road. “It’s not ending. If you ended it with him, that’d be one thing. But you’re not.”
    Hannah turned to Chloe, a frown on her displeased face. “How do I do that? And then what? What do I do with us ?” She made a large air circle, embodying by the broad sweep not just herself and Blake, but Chloe and Mason, too. “We are all four of us together every day. We have one life. If I break up with him, what happens to the four of us? Do you even think before you speak? I mean, could you break up with Mason?”
    â€œI don’t want to.”
    â€œBut if you did?”
    They didn’t talk for a while. The road was narrow, the pines tall, the ride long, what was there to say? What a hypocrite Chloe was, what a deceiver. She decided she would tell Hannah about college on the way home, her heart falling through her abdomen at the thought of it.

    Chloe underestimated the open and public heartbreak a man near retirement age could display on the walkways of Orono, near the river on the University of Maine campus, when his eighteen-year-old lover told him it had to end.
    Chloe stayed as far back as possible. She couldn’t believe Hannah would do this on the avenue where students and faculty strolled on a warm May evening. But his reaction was so extreme that perhaps this was why Hannah had chosen the public square for his flogging; she had hoped he would keep it together. At first they walked arm in arm, overlooking the flowing waters, the mountains beyond. They made quite a picturesque couple against the backdrop of the snowcapped Appalachians.
    Hannah spoke. He stopped walking. He took his arm away. She gestured, in her subtle elegant way, and he stood, a pillar of incomprehension. Then he started to weep. Hannah stroked him, embraced him, talked and talked, a filibuster of consolation. Nothing helped the gray man become less stooped. It was as if Chloe had caught them in a different sort of clinch. She became embarrassed, for herself, for him, for the passersby who slowed down, concerned at his distraught exhortations. He grabbed his chest, as if in the middle of heart failure.
    After an hour he was still crying! And Hannah was still rubbing him, talking to him, gesturing far and wide.
    Chloe understood nothing of this kind of emotion. Nothing. It