10. Carter
10
CARTER
The weather outside is nastier than it looked in the cabin.
I walk for ten minutes in a big circle around the cabin before I find one bar of cell service. The whole time my cock presses into my pants expectantly, and rain spatters across my face. Every few minutes the wind blows my hood off my head, and my hair gets drenched.
I try calling Jamie, but nothing. The call won’t go through. I send him a text, saying that we’re still in the cabin and will head into town as soon as the storm stops. I also text Donna and Kate, reassuring them that things are fine, and that we should be back in Harborview by tomorrow or the day after.
I know I could make the hike in by myself right now, but I’m worried about Angela. Even if I give her my coat again, she’ll probably freeze. And patches of the ground are icy, due to the low temperatures overnight and the mix of rain, snow, and hail that fell. She’s wearing pink sneakers that match her pink shirt perfectly, but they aren’t made for this type of weather.
I’d carry her out of here if she let me. But I can imagine how well that suggestion would go over—she’d never agree to it. At the thought of carrying her, her warm body pressed into mine, my cock surges to attention again.
An image of her on her knees before me springs into my mind.
And then I trip on the rock in front of me and fall on my knees.
“Fuck,” I mutter.
I get up and assess the damage. My pants are ripped over one knee, and I’m bleeding. The cut isn’t deep, though. I head back to the cabin and try to concoct a story that will make me sound more masculine and capable than “I tripped and fell because I was fantasizing about you.”
When I get back to the cabin, I find Angela sitting on the futon, looking contemplative and a bit flushed. Her hair is loose around her shoulders, and even in the gray light it’s luminous, like a fuzzy halo around her head.
“Hey,” I say, rather dumbly. What an opener.
“Carter!” She immediately moves towards me and then drops down on her knees in front of me, like she can read my damn mind.
Fucking hell, she looks good like this.
But instead of paying attention to my cock—now solidly at half mast again—she’s peering at my knee with laser focus.
“What happened?” she demands.
“It’s windy out there, and I was hiking over a cliff when this tree branch just?—
“You slipped and fell?” She stands up and levels me with her no nonsense stare.
“Yeah basically,” I admit with a laugh. “How’d you know?”
“When men come into the ER with minor injuries, it’s almost always because they did something asinine. But they always try to cover that fact up with some story of heroism.”
“Glad to be one of the many.”
“Go sit on the futon. I assume your pack has a first aid kit in it?”
I nod.
She starts digging through my pile of things and pulls out the kit. “I said to go sit down.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to tend to your wounds.”
“Ange, I’m fine. I can do it myself.”
“Not as well as I can,” she says.
I shrug off my wet jacket and then do as she says, sitting on the futon and rolling up both of my pant legs past the knee.
Angela crouches down in front of me, and begins to clean the wound with a mug of warm soapy water she got from the bathroom and paper towels. Her hands are gentle, but feel capable and steady. She knows exactly what she’s doing, and as she brushes the dirt and gravel embedded in my knee off, and washes the blood away, I feel my cheeks start to heat.
I have no idea why. Maybe it’s her being so close, something I’m rarely treated to. Maybe it’s the soft brush of her hands against my skin, or the faint scent of her hair products, lingering even after a few days.
Once the scrapes are cleaned, she applies pressure to the one that is still bleeding. Then, she carefully dabs ointment on each of the cuts.
“I swear I can just let it air dry,” I say as she takes out bandages from the first aid kit.
“That is the stupidest thing you’ve ever said. Cuts heal best when covered,” she says without looking up at me. “Men,” she says under her breath.
In the end, she covers both knees with bandages, though only one is really bleeding much. But I know better than to argue with her, or to mention the many cuts I’ve gotten while on field work that I’ve simply let be.
She sits on the futon beside me when she’s done. “How was the weather out there? Can we start hiking back soon? I have work tomorrow and it would be great if I could go in.”
“Ange,” I say gently, “the weather is still bad. And the ground is icy. I don’t think we should try to get back today. We’ll go slower than we were on the way here, because we’ll have to be more careful. And I don’t think we’ll be able to get a boat back tonight anyways. Captain Jones’s boat was chartered. The Isle North mailboat goes to one of the other islands, but not to Mount Desert Island directly.”
“So? We can at least take it and start the journey,” she says defiantly. “Maybe I could sleep on the boats and just turn up to work when we get in.”
“The last mailboat is at 4:30. At least it was when I was here last summer.” I grimace when I say this, knowing she won’t be happy.
“What? Why?”
“Because sixty people live here year round.”
“And I thought Harborview was a small town,” she snorts. “I don’t know what I’m going to do about work, though. They’re relying on me and when I don’t show up tomorrow, absolutely no one will be there to cover for me.” She looks genuinely worried now. “Oh God, Carter, what if I get fired?”
“If they fire you over missing a day of work because you’re stranded on an island, they aren’t an employer worth working for. And someone else will have to pick up the slack for once.”
“But I don’t like not even being able to let them know,” she says. “I’m not like that. I stick to my commitments.” She says that last part fiercely, almost like it’s pointed right at me, and I wince internally.
Because she’s not wrong. I didn’t keep my commitments to her. Maybe we never made any out loud, but we both felt what was between us, and I threw it all away, acting like it meant nothing to me.
“Angel,” I start to say. “I know I fucked up and I?—
“What did you just call me?”
“Angel. Because you hate when I call you Ange,” I say, even though that’s not it at all.
The fierceness from a few moments ago disappears and her face becomes inscrutable once more. I’m left guessing, filling in the blanks, trying to figure her out. Is she upset about the nickname Angel? Is she mad I mentioned how much she dislikes the nickname Ange? Is she unhappy I brought up our past so boldly?
And I know, I know I can’t meet her impassive expression with one of my own. I need to be open—one of us has to. But I’m not used to it—to sharing myself with others.
“I want to apologize,” I finally say. “For how I acted years ago.”
“It’s fine,” she says firmly, getting up off of the bed. She walks over towards the window and looks out of it, her back to me.
“No, it’s not. I didn’t keep my commitments to you. I didn’t—I wasn’t honorable,” I admit.
“You never made any commitments to me, though,” she says. She turns around, a smile on her face. And I can’t tell if it’s real or not.
“Maybe not in name, but we,” I pause, searching for the right words. “We were…we were…”
“What, Carter?” She takes a step towards me and I zero in on her face. Her brows are arched just a bit, like she’s genuinely wondering what I’m going to say.
I imagine saying exactly how I feel for once.
We were in love.
But was she?
We had sex a few times over the course of a week. In between, we spent every waking moment together. Until I got an internship and left Harborview for the summer. She tried to keep in touch, but I was too caught up in my job and my future plans for school and my career. And I didn’t feel ready: for it, for her, for love. I promised myself I’d finish school and fix things. That we’d get our chance when I was ready.
It took me a while, but about five years ago, right as I started my PhD, I felt ready. But Angela…Angela didn’t seem to feel that way about me anymore.
“We were something. We were friends, at least,” I answer lamely.
“Right,” she says. “Friends. And what are we now?”
“You tell me, Angel.”
She laughs at that, but it’s a hard and brittle sound. “You have a lot of nerve, Carter. Asking that question when you’ve hardly ever given me an indication of how you feel. Ever. Getting emotion out of you is like squeezing water from a stone.”
“As if you’re any better,” I bite back. Because we’re two sides of the same damaged coin, tarnished from years of locking things up.
“At least I tried,” she hisses. “I tried to keep in touch. I made it damn clear how I felt, with my actions. But you? I got nothing from you.” She snorts. “Carter Steel can’t be caught dead feeling.”
“I swear it wasn’t like that. I promise.”
“How was it, then?”
I pause. Because I don’t know how to articulate what I’m feeling. Angela has been the one thing, in my entire life, that I haven’t ever been able to process. To intellectualize and sweep away. To think my way through. My feelings for her just sit there inside me, a tangled, aching mess.
“I wish I could cut myself open and show you,” I say.
Hesitation flashes across her face, a brief moment where her poker face slips.
“Not good enough,” she says, pursing her lips slightly. “You have to be able to tell me how you feel.”
It’s a fair test. But not one I’m sure I can pass.
An idea forms in my head. One that could go disastrously wrong, but might be my only real chance at fixing things with her. Because it’s clear that despite how well we were getting along last night, she still resents me.
“Can you give me until the end of our time here on Isle North?” I ask.
“To do what?”
“To make things right between us,” I say. “Just…let me try to make it up to you. If I can’t get you to forgive me by the time we go back to Harborview, I promise I’ll let it rest. I’ll never ask you about it again and I’ll stop—I’ll stop baiting you so much.”
She considers the request for a moment, thinking it over carefully I’m sure, like she does with everything. It’s part of why I fell so hard for her back then—so many people are reckless and stupid, going through life without ever really thinking about what decisions they’re making and where they’re going. But not Angela. Everything she does, she does because she thinks it’s the right thing to do.
“Fine.”
And then she heads into the bathroom, presumably because it’s the only other room in the cabin and she wants to get away from me. But at least she agreed to what I proposed. At least I have a chance. So here’s to hoping we stay on Isle North for the rest of the week—because if we’re back in Harborview tomorrow, I’m screwed.