Free One Track Mind by Bethany Campbell

security up there. Somebody could call the police on us.”
    “Fine,” he said, starting the car. He shouldn’t try to take her there anyway. They’d had too many necking sections by or in the carriage house. He remembered them so clearly that his lips tingled, his throat tightened, and his body ached.
    “But I just want to drive up that way and see it again,” he said. “Just a little closer. It’s been a long time.”
    He’d worked on the castle grounds that fateful summer he was seventeen. That was the weekday job for Old Man Merkle. Helping tend that gigantic yard. He felt he’d ridden that lawn tractor for hundreds of miles under the hot sun. But he checked gardening books out of the library and studied, and soon Merkle promoted him to tend the shade gardens, all ten of them.
    Sometimes the owner of the place, Junior McCorkle himself, would often come outside, carrying a pair of gallon thermos jugs of iced tea for the workers and handing out salt tablets. Occasionally he even hung around and helped Kane pick slugs out of the hostas and knock Japanese beetles into jars of soapy water. Junior enjoyed waging war on the beetles and just passing the time of day.
    Kane had liked the old guy a lot. He’d been surprised to learn that the man hadn’t been Lori’s uncle at all, only a family friend. “I read about Junior passing on,” he said with atypical solemnity. “I was tempted to come back for the funeral. He was one of a kind. He had a fortune and a castle, but he never stopped being a good ol’ boy.”
    “I know,” Lori said. “He was Daddy’s silent partner. When he died, he left his share of the speedway to Daddy.”
    “That sounds like Junior,” Kane said, remembering. In the dusk, at the Bin Birnam’s top, he could see the spires of the castle, bluish in the dimming light. He felt odd, disjointed in time, unsettled in his emotions. He hadn’t expected it to be like this.
    “This is the first time we’ve ever been in a car together,” Lori said pensively. “I never imagined that it would be like this.”
    She didn’t seem impressed by his fancy car. After all these years, he was perplexed that he still couldn’t quite figure her out. “What did you imagine it’d be like?”
    “I didn’t try to imagine,” she murmured. “The future seemed a long way off. I didn’t think very far ahead.”
    He hadn’t, either. He had a vague idea of being a success, of showing all of Halesboro what he really was and what he could accomplish. And he, in turn, would scorn the town that had once scorned him.
    He didn’t know how he’d do this. Being an agent? That had never occurred to him. What he’d thought about most that last year was Lori Simmons. He’d succeed, and he’d take her with him. He’d steal Halesboro’s princess and take her where the lights were bright and the buildings were tall and the opportunities were limitless.
    So naive. So stupid. So young. He’d come back rich, after all these years, and he found it gave him no satisfaction. He had the power to meddle with the destiny of this town, a fantasy he’d once cherished, but now that he was here, it seemed a petty goal.
    And he’d expected to put Lori Simmons Garland in her place. Not to hurt her. He actually meant to help her—in his way. And he’d meant his way to do two things. First, she’d regret how she’d treated him, and she’d spend the rest of her life kicking herself for being such a shallow little twit back then.
    Second, he would exorcise her. Because she was his first love, and lost at that, and lost with maximum melodrama, he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind. Ever. She held part of him captive, and he was determined to be free.
    He expected to find everything he remembered about her wrong or changed. Twenty-one years had passed, she’d married that asinine jock Scott Garland, and she’d never left Halesboro. Her fortunes had fallen and her wrongheaded marriage had failed.
    He’d expected to