Chapter Nineteen #2
She would have complained—was, in fact, dying to complain—but there wasn’t enough breath in her lungs to form the word stop, let alone, you asshole.
Just when she felt her heart start to stutter, they turned a corner.
Levinger Hill.
They were flying now, racing side by side down the long, two-lane road. Golden pastures studded with apple trees rushed past them.
Dean leaned back, held his arms out . . .
And Ruby sailed into the past. They were fourteen again, that summer they learned to ride without using their hands, when every scraped knee was a badge of courage .
. . when they’d whooshed down this very hill, arms outflung, together, the radio strapped to the handlebars blaring out Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now. ”
The hill slowed down into a long, even S curve, then wound into the entrance of Trout Lake State Park.
Ruby should have known he’d bring her here. “No fair, Dino,” she said softly, wondering if he even heard her.
He heard. “What’s that they say about love and war?”
“Which one is this?”
“That’s up to you. Come on, race you to the park.” Without waiting for an answer, he pedaled away from her, down the long, winding, tree-lined street.
It was dark on this road, even on this hot summer morning. Shadows fell across the thin layer of pavement in serrated strips. The air was cold.
She sped up to Dean, then pulled ahead. She heard him laughing quietly behind her, and she knew they were both thinking of the girl she’d been—the one who couldn’t stand to lose at anything, even a popcorn dare like “race you to the park.”
The road curled around a huge Douglas fir tree and spilled out into the sunshine. Ruby jumped off her bike and set it against the wooden bike rack. There was no need to lock it.
She heard Dean’s bike land against the rack with a clatter, but she was already walking toward the lake.
She had forgotten how beautiful it was here.
The heart-shaped sapphire-blue lake was surrounded by lush green trees and rimmed in granite.
A ribbon of water cascaded over the “giant’s lip”—a flat, jutting rock at the top of the cliffs—and splashed onto the placid surface of the lake.
There were children everywhere, locals and tourists, playing on the grass, shrieking, swimming along the shore.
Dean came up beside her. “Are you up for a climb?”
She laughed. “I’m an adult now. Waterfall Trail is for mountain goats and kids who are desperate to smoke pot or get laid.”
“I can make it,” he said, letting the challenge in his words hang there.
She sighed. “Lead on.”
Side by side, not talking, they walked around to the western side of the lake, wound through the horde of picnickers, Frisbee-catching dogs, and screaming children.
When they reached the heavy fringe of trees, they left the people behind.
Gradually, the sound of human voices faded away.
The gurgling, splashing sound of falling water grew louder and louder.
Once again, Ruby was sweating.
The trail was rocky and narrow. It corkscrewed straight up through the trees, salal, and blackberries (which scratched her exposed arms and legs, thank you very much).
Finally, they reached the top. The giant’s lip.
It was a slab of gray granite as big as a swimming pool and as flat as a quarter.
A thick green moss furred the stone; dainty yellow wildflowers grew impossibly from the moss.
A stream of water no wider than the length of a man’s arm flowed across the rock in a groove worn long ago, then spilled over the edge and fell twenty feet to the lake below.
Ruby stepped into the clearing and saw the picnic basket. It was sitting on a familiar red-and-black plaid blanket.
Dean touched her shoulder. “Come on.” He led her to the blanket, which he’d carefully spread out on a spot where the moss was several inches thick.
They sat down. He reached into the basket, pulled out a thermos, and poured two glasses of lemonade.
Ruby drank hers greedily. When she was finished, she set the glass aside and leaned back on her elbows. The hot sun beat down on her cheeks. “We used to come up here all the time.”
“This is where you first told me you were going to be a comedian.”
“Really?” She smiled. “I don’t remember that.”
“You said you wanted to be famous.”
“I still do. And you wanted to be a prize-winning photographer.” She didn’t look at him. It was better to stay separate and talk about the past, as if they were just two old high-school friends who’d bumped into each other. “That’s a long way from junior executive.”
“Yeah . . . but I still wish for it. If I could, I’d throw everything away and start over. Money sure as hell doesn’t make you happy.”
It bothered her to think of him as unhappy. “Spoken like a man whose family business is on the Fortune Five Hundred.”
He laughed softly. “Yeah, I guess.”
A quiet settled in between them, and she was vaguely afraid of what he would say, so she said, “I saw Eric yesterday.”
“He told me. It really meant a lot to him.”
Ruby wishboned her arms behind her head. A single, gauzy cloud drifted above the trees. “I wish I’d stayed in better touch with him.”
“You?” Dean laughed bitterly. “I’m his brother and I hadn’t seen him in years.”
That surprised Ruby. She rolled onto her side and faced Dean, but he didn’t look at her. “You guys were always so close.”
“Things change, don’t they?”
“What happened?”
He stared up at the sky. “I seem to have a problem with really knowing the people I love. I get blindsided.”
“You’re talking about his being gay?”
Finally, he looked at her. “That’s part of what I’m talking about.”
She understood, and knew that it was time. For more than ten years, she’d sworn to herself that if she ever got the chance with Dean, she would say the thing that mattered. “I’m sorry, Dean,” she said. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”
He rolled onto his side, facing her. “You didn’t want to hurt me? Jesus, Ruby, you were my whole world.”
“I knew that. I just . . . couldn’t be someone’s world then.”
“I tried to take care of you after your mom left, but it was hard. You were constantly picking a fight with me. But I kept telling myself it would be okay, that you’d get past it and come back to me. And I kept loving you.”
Ruby didn’t know how to explain it to him.
How could she? She’d only barely begun to understand it herself.
“You believed in something I didn’t. Every time I closed my eyes at night, I dreamed about you leaving me.
In my nightmares, I heard your voice, but I could never find you.
I couldn’t stand waiting for you to stop loving me. To leave me.”
“What made you so damned sure I would leave you?”
“Come on, Dean . . . we were kids, but we weren’t stupid. I knew you’d go off to some college I couldn’t afford and forget about me.”
Their faces were close together, and if she’d let herself, she could have lost her way in the blue sea of his eyes. “So, you dumped me before I had a chance to dump you.”
She smiled sadly. “Pretty much. Now, let’s change the subject. This is old news, and we both know it doesn’t matter anymore. Tell me about your life. How is it to be a jet-setting superbachelor?”
“What if I said I still love you?”
Ruby gasped. “Don’t say that . . . please—”
He took her face in his hands, gently forced her to look up at him. “Did you stop loving me, Ruby?”
She felt the soft exhalation of his breath against her lips. A second later, she heard his question. She wanted to say Of course; we were just kids, but when she opened her mouth to answer, the only sound she made was a quiet sigh that tasted of surrender.
His lips brushed against her, and it was a sensation at once familiar and new. She melted against him, moaning his name as his hand curled around the back of her neck.
It was the kind of kiss they’d never shared before.
The kind of achingly lonely kiss a pair of teenagers couldn’t imagine, the kiss of two adults who’d been alone for too long and knew that God had given them this moment, and that it was a gift too precious to ignore.
And for a few brief, heart-stopping seconds, their past faded like a photograph left in the hot sun.
When he drew back, she opened her eyes and saw the missing years drawn in lines on his face. Sun . . . time . . . heartache . . . they had all left imprints on his skin.
“I’ve waited a long time for a second chance with you, Ruby.”
If he said he loved her, she would believe him, and she would love him back. She closed her eyes, battling a wave of helplessness. She wished desperately to have grown up, to have been profoundly changed by all that she’d seen and learned in the past days. But it wasn’t that easy.
Her fear of abandonment was so deep it had calcified in her bones. She couldn’t get past it. She’d discovered a long time ago why the poets called it falling in love. It was a plunging, eye-watering descent, and she’d lost her ability to believe that anyone would catch her.
She pushed him away. “I can’t do this. It’s too much . . . too fast. You’ve always wanted too much from me.”
“Damn it, Ruby,” he said, and she heard the disappointment in his voice. “Have you grown up at all?”
“I won’t hurt you again,” she said.
He touched her face. “Ah, Rube . . . just looking at you hurts me.”
She had never felt so alone. When he’d kissed her, she’d glimpsed a world she’d never imagined. A world where passion was part of love, but not the biggest part. Where a kiss from the right man, at the right time, could make a grown woman weep. “I can’t give you what you want. It’s not in me.”
He brushed the hair away from her eyes, let his fingertips linger at her temple. “You ran me off when I was a boy. I’m not seventeen anymore, and we both know, this thing between us isn’t over. I don’t think it ever was.”