Chapter Twelve
CHAPTER TWELVE
S HE WAS THANKFUL she’d had a heavy breakfast because she watched him work until well past one o’clock without stopping for even a snack.
He put in swinging platforms that hung from trees that you could go between like they were stepping stones.
He also fastened climbing handholds to a big board that he mounted to some trees.
There was a balance beam and a few other easy things for kids.
Or at least he claimed they were easy. She doubted she would be able to do any of these things.
Coordination was not her middle name.
But he seemed to think he was going to have her rope climbing by the end of the week.
Well, it would give her something to talk about on her date, anyway.
“Go ahead. Test out the balance beam.”
“No,” she said. “It’s fine. I mean, it’s very low to the ground.”
“Are you insulting my balance beam?”
No. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself on the world’s easiest-looking balance beam.
But she couldn’t even walk in a straight line. Something like that was going to take an embarrassing level of concentration, and she didn’t know whether or not she wanted him observing that.
“Fine,” she said. “Here I go.”
Because in the end, her pride got the better of her.
As well as her desire to see him smile again. Which he did.
This whole exercise had been a trial.
Because he was beautiful while he worked. The play of his muscles beneath that tight T-shirt did strange things to her stomach.
And then there were his forearms.
She couldn’t say she never really noticed forearms on a man, as she was regularly surrounded by muscular, hard-working men on the ranch. But Gideon’s were something else entirely.
A distinct sense of sadness made her stomach feel hollowed out.
Was it always going to be Gideon?
Was he always going to make others pale in comparison?
“Stop it,” he said.
“What?”
“Stop second-guessing yourself.”
The accuracy with which he’d narrowed in on her train of thought, even if he didn’t know the exact topic, made her feel like she was gasping for air.
“I don’t...”
“Listen. This is boot camp, okay? Summer of Rory boot camp. I’m prepping you to complete that list. Right?” He came close to her, his blue eyes locked with hers, and suddenly her mouth went dry.
He breathed in deep, and she noticed a hitch in that breathing. And she wondered if it had anything to do with her.
Stop it.
“I want you to repeat after me.”
She looked at him, forgetting for a second to get lost in his handsomeness. Because suddenly he was acting like this was a kindergarten class. “Why?”
“Because,” he barked, suddenly in drill-sergeant mode, “I’m giving you a mantra, Rory. A fucking mantra . And you’re gonna say it.”
She was staring down the soldier again. This was not kindergarten.
This soldier had that ruthless intensity about him, but she had a little bit more understanding of what that meant now. This soldier who had known that if the men in his care didn’t take the training seriously, they could die.
He was intense, but it came from a place of being protective.
Did anyone know the weight that he carried on his shoulders?
“Mantra time,” he said, snapping her back into the moment.
“Okay.”
“I can do whatever I want.”
“I can do whatever I want,” she said, her voice trembling.
“I can do whatever I need .”
“I can do whatever I need.” Her voice faltered at the last word.
“I can’t hear you, soldier. Say it louder .”
She took a breath. “I can do whatever I need,” she shouted.
“That’s it.” His eyes blazed into hers. “And no motherfucker gets to tell me who I am.”
“And no...” She swallowed hard. “I’m not going to say that.”
“Say it.”
It wasn’t like it was imperative. Like the world would end if she didn’t, or a bomb blast would kill her. The fire blazing in his eyes made it clear this was life or death, and she knew it wasn’t. But it felt like it.
She squared her shoulders and faced him down. And she found her own soldier. “No... No motherfucker gets to tell me who I am.” She was breathing hard, her heart beating rapidly. “Including you.”
“Including me.” He nodded. “Be whatever you want. Get on the balance beam if you want. But if you don’t get on it, don’t let it be because it scares you. Because you’re afraid of doing a bad job. Who the fuck cares? Get on, try. If you fail, this isn’t war. Nobody’s going to die. You understand me? The only kind of failure that’s fatal is not trying in the first place.”
She had a feeling that he was saying that to himself just as much as he was saying it to her, and she didn’t know why that felt like it meant something. She didn’t know why she was responding to it.
This was something they both needed.
Maybe he needed to feel like he could help her.
Because she thought of everything he must’ve lost when his military career went away. And she wondered if the purpose, that sense of being somewhere he was needed, was one of the hardest things to lose. She swallowed hard.
It was just a balance beam. And the worst that would happen if she fell was that she fell.
She couldn’t get hurt. He was right. This wasn’t war. But she was so afraid to try because she was afraid of failing. She had identified as a quitter for all these years, but the truth was she had gotten to where she wasn’t even a starter. She was a never trier.
And that needed to stop.
She took a deep breath and walked to the balance beam. “I can do what I want,” she said, stepping up onto the beam.
“Atta girl.”
“I can do what I need.”
“Yeah, you can.”
“No motherfucker gets to tell me who I am or what I can do or...or how much I can have.”
“No, they don’t,” he said.
She took a step, wobbled and fell.
She landed on her feet, she was like one whole foot off the ground, but she felt incredibly deflated.
“Back on, Rory.”
“I was distracted.”
“Don’t quit.”
She stood for a moment, breathing hard.
“I said, don’t be a quitter , Sullivan.”
The words were like a hot iron poker, goading her forward. “I’m not quitting.” She growled, took a breath, and this time, with all her concentration focused on the beam, she hurried quickly across it like she was a rat coming down off a sinking ship.
Except there was no sinking ship.
Because she did it.
Because it wasn’t actually hard. And falling hadn’t vaguely embarrassed her.
She let out a growl and put her hands on her knees. “Why do I care so much about that?”
“About what?”
“Looking stupid. Because some people made me look stupid... Because...” She swallowed hard. “Because I felt stupid when I woke up one morning and my dad was gone. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that he wasn’t happy. I didn’t know he was going to leave.” Her eyes suddenly welled up with tears, which was dumb, because she didn’t cry about that. There was no use crying over a man who was half so ineffectual as all that.
“Hey,” he said, moving over to her. He reached out and cupped her chin, tilting her face up, and it was the strangest thing. Because it was a crackle of lightning electricity that transcended the sadness within her.
“It is just a terrible thing that people let you down and made you feel like you were stupid for expecting them to be decent human beings. You get cynical in the military. Of course you do. You can’t do work like that without a little cynicism. But I’ll tell you what. I can always trust my family. My parents. Even knowing what I do about the world, I always trusted them. You are not the foolish one. Your dad is. You’re not the foolish one.”
The words were like a balm, soothing. But also...highlighting how very much she needed a balm. How much of a wound this was.
“That feeling... The feeling just... It kills me. It reminds me of just the worst moments. That sensation of discovering that everything you thought is wrong. That everything you thought is just a lie. That’s what it reminds me of.” Her eyes stung, her throat ached. “It’s dumb. It’s just a balance beam. And all I did was fall off in front of you.”
“And then you got back on. And then you finished.”
“I did.”
“And you’re gonna climb that rope.”
“I don’t know if I want to climb the rope.”
Except now she felt like she did. Because maybe she would fail.
Maybe she wouldn’t be able to do it.
But this time she would try. She wouldn’t just sit down and refuse.
And yes, she still thought mandatory PE was stupid. But that wasn’t the point. Not right now.
“Okay. I’m going to do it.”
“You know sometimes the real issue is that you weren’t set up to succeed. Some of it is needing to teach technique, and work on your muscles a little bit.”
“I never really thought of it that way.” And she hadn’t.
But the truth was they hadn’t been taught any kind of technique in school. They had just been sent on their way. It had blown her mind when she’d found out that there were techniques to running. In school, they had just sort of sent you careening around the track and hoped for the best.
She had to wonder if there was something truthful in that. Something she hadn’t ever really unwound before.
Maybe some people just flailed around the track more convincingly. Maybe there wasn’t something quite as fundamentally wrong with her as she thought.
She had always thought the girls who showed up with the perfect hair and makeup when they were thirteen years old were perhaps a different species from her. That they had it together. But, of course, her mother hadn’t been showing her how to put makeup on, and partly because she hadn’t found it all that important.
Maybe the thirteen-year-old girls who’d had perfect makeup had their own neuroses. Their own problems.
She had always just assumed they were prettier. That they were more clever, or maybe more female.
She had never been the life of the party, but she was a very good and loyal friend.
She had always done well being driven to school by Gideon. She could talk to him and Lydia; she didn’t have any problems with that.
It was big, unwieldy groups of people that made her uncomfortable. It was the lack of control in those situations.
Obviously, he had always felt comfortable in them. He had always been assured he would be met with a positive response.
She wondered if that was the secret. If those formative moments decided whether you felt like you were awkward or not. If you were met with applause or skepticism.
She had always been met with skepticism. At best.
And it was weird now to try to disentangle what she wanted, what she was hoping to get out of this gambit, her date with Mike, everything, and feeling like she didn’t care about popularity.
She had always told herself she was maybe above them because she wasn’t shallow.
But didn’t she like Gideon the same as everybody? And wasn’t she still consumed by the fact that she couldn’t make them all like her? Is that why she’d agreed to go on a date with Mike?
Maybe people were just all the same. Maybe they were all the same and whether or not you were good with a big group or a small group was what determined if you controlled the feelings of other people. Except... She must bring up some feelings in somebody . She had always thought of herself as a beige sweater. But if she made those kids at her school so upset just by standing there, they must’ve been pushing her down for a reason.
This was quite the revelation to be having over thoughts of mandatory PE.
“Do you think that everyone is secretly insecure?” she asked.
“I don’t know about that,” he said, frowning. “But I do think that maybe everybody has that one block in their Jenga tower, the one that’s holding everything up. And if life removes that, they fall apart. In fact, I would say that people like me... That’s even more true. If you haven’t struggled, then I think you often don’t know what to do when you aren’t excelling.”
He was fit, healthy, here—all after his life had imploded. If that wasn’t succeeding, she didn’t know what was. He hadn’t chosen to get injured in a war. But he’d chosen to do all of this since.
“Well if it helps, from my perspective, you look like you’re excelling. I’m not saying I don’t recognize that you have difficulties. But I’m just saying, even with them, you seem like you’re doing well.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I didn’t come here at the worst point of my struggle. Just so you know. I didn’t come here to lick my wounds. They’re pretty well healed up. Cassidy and I split two years ago. It’s just still taken time for us to deal with the house and all that.”
“What was...what was the worst?”
She watched as his expression became guarded. “This part isn’t about me, Rory. It’s about you.”
“We’re helping each other.”
“Right now, this is about you.”
And by now she knew him well enough to know he was stubborn. He wouldn’t share more until he was good and ready.
She cleared her throat. “I’ve always felt like maybe I was uniquely anxious or faulty in some way. Because people look at me and see a soft target. But I didn’t even think of it that way ever. I just thought of it as people seeing a weirdo. And reacting accordingly.”
“I think it’s more than that. I do think people see threats to their power.” He took a sharp breath. “I like to think that I was never a bully.”
“You weren’t. You rescued me from my bullies, remember? Everybody liked you.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sure everybody didn’t, though. There was probably somebody who felt like they were pushed into my shadow who didn’t like me. And I am certain that I wasn’t above acting a bit superior when it suited me. I’m sure that I wasn’t the best all the time. And for a while there, I was kind of living two different realities. Because when I was deployed, I had a community. I had these men I was in charge of. Their safety, their well-being, that was all that mattered. There was the mission, but my personal mission was to bring them home. I told you when we did basic, I identified everybody’s weaknesses, and I pushed them hard. But knowing their weaknesses meant that I knew them.”
He knew them.
And she knew that in that last mission he had lost men.
“So that’s what you think? All those middle schoolers just saw all my strength, and they felt threatened by me?”
“I’m not saying that. But I think that’s probably closer to the truth than there being something wrong with you. And what I’m really starting to think is that it comes for you eventually. You can’t live like that forever. It’s not a question of if the block will get removed. It’s when . You know, you’ve had things happen, but they happened while you were being built. So you might’ve fallen over a little bit, but you were only a couple stories up. So it wasn’t catastrophic. And you rebuilt from there, and when life knocks you down again, you rebuilt a little further. And a little further. And look at you now? Going to Boston. When that tower crumbled, it kicked my ass. So... I don’t know why people do what they do. I’m not an expert in human nature, I wish I were. I can sense things and people, though. And you’re strong, Rory. I have never seen you as anything else. You’ve never seemed boring to me. Why were you such a target?”
“Braces, glasses. Skinny. Redhead. Freckles. Four eyes, carrottop, you name it. Brace face. Somebody once said that my knees probably had their own gravitational pull. Because they were so knobby.”
He looked down. “I don’t see that.”
“Well, they’re less knobby now. I have a little bit more weight on my body these days.”
“So people had to manufacture something, because there’s not anything wrong with you, and there never has been. People are just so damned insecure. Ridiculous.”
“Well. There were the poems,” she said.
He looked at her, his expression stoic. “Then they hated you because you had passion they didn’t have. You were never boring.”
“Did you...did you read them?”
He nodded slowly. “I did. And I didn’t laugh.”
“I was...”
“You were young. If you’d been my age... Hell, I think I...”
Everything stopped, for just a moment. Because Gideon had been so nice, defending her from everybody, but she had never assumed the poems might have actually been nice for him to read. Or that he even liked them.
Or her.
He straightened, and the spell between them was broken.
“After you do a little working out. After I teach you some technique, I’ll tell you more about my stuff.”
“Okay. Agreed.”
But she was going to be pondering all of that for a long time.