Chapter 25 Am I Okay?
Am I Okay?
My heart skips a beat, sending a rush of excitement through me before I remember I’m mad at him.
Miles kissed me and then ghosted me. Miles was an ass to me when I got here, and for a while after. Miles was married and didn’t tell me.
The soft glow of light shines through the windows on the front of the house. I debate going in or not. If I go in, I’ll be soaked and risk getting hit by lightning or something ridiculous. If I go in, I’ll have to see Miles. I’m not sure I’m ready for that.
Movement at the front door catches my eye. Miles is standing in the door frame, looking serious as always in his signature outfit of a black t-shirt and jeans. He yells something that looks like my name and steps towards the porch steps.
The rain soaks his hair and shoulders as he runs out to my car.
He shields his eyes from the downpour. He opens my door and I slip out of the car quickly.
Icy rain drops sting my skin as Miles puts an arm around me, guiding me to the covered porch.
His body shields me from the rain a bit, warming my side.
We run towards the direction of the porch, my boots covered in mud by the time I get there. It’s not until I’m up the steps and out of the rain that I look up, right into Miles’s golden brown eyes.
About two inches from my face.
“Are you okay?” He says, searching my face. Am I okay? Not when he’s looking at me like this.
His black waves fall over his forehead a bit.
I’m not used to seeing him without a backwards baseball cap or cowboy hat.
I immediately melt inside in his presence, like ice cream on a hot day.
We are breathing the same air and it feels a little too intimate for how confused I am about him right now. Too close proximity.
I step back a step, putting some distance between us. Disappointment flickers on his face as he fights the urge to step back towards me. He stays rooted in his spot, shoving his hands into his pockets as if he’s restraining himself.
“I’m fine,” I start, “I couldn’t make it back to my cabin with the rain, so I stopped here until it passes.” He nods, sagging with relief. “What are you doing here?”
Miles is here, at the cabin at night. With absolutely no reason to be here. In the middle of a thunderstorm.
He pauses for a minute, looking down at his boots. “I was looking for you. When you weren’t here, I started on the floors again.”
His gaze finds me again. I nod, pressing my lips into a thin line.
A flashback of the last time we were on this porch passes through my mind.
His lips on mine, my hands bunched up in his shirt.
I wish I could go back to that moment. Before he left without a word.
Blissfully unaware of anything he was hiding from me.
I wish I could just grab him by the shirt right now and pull him towards me. Feel his short beard brush my cheeks, run my fingers through his hair. It’d be so easy.
I stare down at my feet, hoping he can’t somehow read my mind. My hair is plastered to my head. I brush a couple of wet strands off of my face, more dark brown than red in the rain. Miles clears his throat, his eyes darting over to the door, and I feel like I’ve given myself away.
“Well, I’m here now. What can I do for you?” I ask.
“I was hoping we could talk.”
“Now you want to talk to me? Okay, let’s start with why I haven’t heard from you in a week.” I cross my arms, looking at him expectantly. He shifts on his feet a bit.
“I’m sorry for not calling.” His gaze fixates on me as he reaches for my hand. The pressure of his fingers on my palm is a calming presence.
I pull my hand out of his grip, not ready to move on from my frustration quite yet.
It’s bubbling to the surface after brewing deep down all week long.
“I thought you were different. For some reason, I thought maybe this time it didn’t have to be a physical attraction.
I actually liked you. Can you believe it?
I can’t.” Miles’s eyes widen, his jaw going slack.
“But you saved me a lot of time, actually, so I should be thanking you. This was a great reminder why I don’t do relationships. ”
“I know you don’t do relationships, Katie.
I know that. And I only do relationships.
That guy you met in Utah? That wasn’t me.
That’s the only one night stand I’ve ever had in my life, and I hated that I couldn’t see you after.
It was like a knife twisting in my gut for weeks.
So trust me when I say I’m truly sorry for doing the same thing to you.
” The pain in his eyes is so real, I reel back a bit.
His cheeks warm slightly, as if he didn’t mean to say that but couldn’t hold it in.
“You could have seen me after, I left you my phone number,” I say softly.
“No, you didn’t. You left me a note, but there was no number on it. I would know, I looked everywhere on that thing and it wasn’t there.”
Holy shit. This whole time I just thought he didn’t call because he didn’t want to see me again.
“Oh,” I say as he steps closer to me. Always chasing each other absentmindedly like magnets, attracted without thinking about it. If I take a step, he follows. If he takes a step, I crash into him.
“I didn’t see you after the Fourth of July because I had to go take care of something. But I’m back now, and I’d really like to see you now,” he says, voice so low I can barely hear him over the rain.
“I can’t do this.” A tear rolls down my cheek, and all I can think is I’m grateful for the rain to blend it in.
“What?” he says, eyes crinkled with confusion.
“I don’t really know you, Miles. You don’t really know me, either. There’s a reason I don’t do this. It’s too complicated. My entire life is already complicated enough,” I breathe.
He crosses his arms, “Of course you know me.”
“I didn’t know you were married until today.”
Miles freezes in his place. He definitely wasn’t expecting me to know that. My heart sinks at the confirmation he was hiding it from me.
“Who told you that?” he says, voice rough.
I sigh, “It doesn’t matter who told me. You didn’t. It should have been you. I’ve told you all about my shitty family, living with my aunt, my dating past for God’s sake. And you left out a huge, important detail about yourself. Were you ever going to tell me?”
“Of course I was going to tell you. I just– it’s not really something I like to relive,” he says carefully. “I haven’t talked about it.”
“Ever?” I ask.
Miles sighs, running a hand down his face. “Look, can we go inside? It’s not safe out here. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
I nod as his hand comes instinctively to my lower back to lead me inside the cabin. I’m not sure he even realizes he’s doing it. His touch is warm, as always, against my rain-soaked clothes.
We kick our mud-covered boots off outside, and I take off my raincoat once I get in the door.
I use the inside as a makeshift towel to ring out my hair a bit.
I’ve never been in a downpour that has instantly soaked me before today, like we were in a movie.
Under a hose for dramatic effect. Not even the rain in town was as heavy as it was out by the cabin.
I follow Miles to the fireplace, where a small fire bursts to life. We both jump back slightly at the flames.
“Did you start a fire?” I ask.
Miles turns to me wide-eyed. “No I didn’t. Did your crew install a starter or something?”
“No,” I reply. “We didn’t touch the fireplace. It’s the one part of the cabin that didn’t need any updating.”
I’ve never seen an actual fire in it before. It’s gorgeous, casting a soft glow throughout the entire room. Yellow and orange flames flicker under the chimney, warming the room.
Miles grunts, shaking his head at the fireplace. “This cabin is so weird. I’ll see if I can fix that.”
He stops at the hearth, sitting on the edge of the rock in front of the fire. I sit on the other side, just a few feet separating us. But it feels like miles.
At first, I’m not sure if he’s going to talk at all.
He sits with his elbows on his knees, staring at a spot on the floor.
A dozen emotions pass through his eyes, although I’m sure he thinks I can’t see them.
He clears his throat a few times. I’m about to say something just to break the silence when he starts.
“Alex and I met when we were kids. We started dating when we were seventeen years old. My family knew her family. We went to school together. After high school, she stayed in Jackson Hole, and so did I. I thought it was meant to be. We didn’t really fight.
We argued sometimes, but we were so alike that we got along pretty well most of the time.
I proposed to her when we were twenty-one, and we were married by twenty-two.
Everyone expected that of us. The whole town knew us as a couple.
I thought that was how it was supposed to be.
You find someone you can love easily. She was easy to love. ”
He swallows, looking up into my eyes for the first time since he started speaking. My heart cracks when tears form in his eyes. The gold specs glow in the firelight.
“We were married for four years. Everything was going pretty well. Now that I have spent time looking back and decoding everything, I can see there were signs that we weren’t happy.
Like I said, we never fought. We didn’t care enough to.
She was gone a lot, beyond normal things like having friends or work.
She’d be gone for weekends at a time and I’d only get a text when she was on her way back.
“I tried so hard. My parents even tried. They gave us this cabin. I don’t think you know that.
We were going to fix it up together, her and I, and live in it.
Start a family. But she was never around, and when she was, there was always something stopping her from wanting to start on it.
Then one day, I woke up and she was–” Miles’s voice cracks on a word.
I wait, not making a sound, as he takes a deep breath. Afraid that if I say something I’ll scare him back into his shell.
“She was gone. She didn’t even pack her things.
She just left, in the middle of the night, I guess,” he laughs dryly.
“It all sounds so ridiculous when I say it outloud. I never thought I’d be divorced.
But I guess no one does. Anyway, she sent me the divorce papers in the mail six months later and it was final a couple weeks after the year mark of her leaving.
I haven’t seen her since. I guess I’ve begun to hate this cabin somewhere along the way.
Everything it represented. All of my plans, crushed.
Until you came along to bring it back to life. ”
My heart sinks. “I’m sorry, Miles, I had no idea.” I shift towards him enough to be able to put my hand on his knee. Static electricity zaps us at the contact, probably from wearing my socks on the plastic film covering the floors from construction dust.
“I should have told you. I just haven’t really told anyone.
My parents know, and Parker knows because he was there with me through it all.
But we don’t really discuss it. I can’t stomach the pity looks from anyone who knows she left,” he says softly.
His gaze shifts to the fire, the flames reflecting in his eyes.
I always thought he had fire in his eyes.
But now, I can see it was just pain. No wonder he was mad at me, I left him after one night when he had just been left by his wife.
That was probably just about a year after she left, if he was twenty-seven when we met.
Right when his divorce was final. My stomach bottoms out at the thought.
“I may not know exactly what you’ve been through, but I know being left sucks. I’m sorry you never had an explanation,” I offer.
“I didn’t. Until last week.”