Chapter 7 #2
“That’s okay,” she said. “You’re figuring it out. One thing I do know is that you can’t keep hiding all the time. You need friends and you need to meet people who aren’t in your line of work. Come back and eat with my friends. You will like them.”
She tried to lead him back but he refused to budge. She sensed there was more to it than just being around strangers.
“What were you thinking on the waves?” she asked. “You were doing really well and then all of a sudden...”
“I wasn’t thinking, like you said, and then I realized how ironic it was that I had been surrounded by sand not even a week ago and here I was on the water. It was just a surreal moment and I couldn’t shake it. It got me thinking about going back and then I fell and you saw the rest.”
“Wipeout,” she said. “The water is a good place to think.”
“Unless thinking makes you drown,” he said.
She laughed because she thought that was what he intended her to do. But it was forced and she had some doubts that she was the right woman for Jay. For the first time she understood why he’d left her; her life was so different from his.
“I guess so. You’re used to always being on edge. Maybe one of the other guys has a better surfing tip for you.”
“I don’t give a crap about surfing, Alysse. I’m not going to be out here all the time. I came here for you. I want—no, need—to be with you. That’s all that really matters to me.”
She wasn’t sure how to respond to that. His words touched a place deep inside her that she was afraid to admit she still had. And she wanted him to really be here for her but she wasn’t too sure he could be.
“I can’t promise you anything. I’m seeing now how different we really both are,” she said. She understood that her dreams of the future were bound to be very unlike his because he had never even had a home of his own. How could he possibly look at her and see plans for a distant future together?
“Why just now? What did you see that you didn’t before?” he asked her.
“I thought we had some kind of common background, but I’m beginning to suspect we don’t. I never asked you about your past. We never did the fifty-questions thing that most couples do when they first meet.”
“Well, we sort of did, but the questions were more, do you like the way my mouth feels on your neck?” he said.
She shivered as a pulse of desire went through her. It would be easy to let this be about sex, but she refused to let it go that way right now.
“We both know I like it,” she said.
“No, we never did the getting-to-know-you part, did we?”
“So...” she said, not about to let him divert her again. There was so much more happening with Jay right now than a bonfire on the beach. This was her chance to really get to know him and she wasn’t about to pass it up.
“My family’s from Texas, the northern part near the Oklahoma border. My dad had a ranch,” he said, his voice taking on a reminiscent quality. “Our family had been ranching there for over a hundred and fifty years.”
“Why aren’t you a rancher?” she asked.
“We lost the ranch in my senior year of high school. Had to move into town and live over the diner where I worked as a dishwasher.”
“What kind of work was there for your dad?” she asked, trying to imagine how horrible it must have been to move during your senior year of high school.
“He took to the rodeo circuit taking care of the livestock on the road,” Jay said.
“At least you had your mom with you,” she said. “That kind of change must have been hard.”
“It was.”
Silence grew between them and she realized that Jay wasn’t going to offer anything else. Good thing she had a million questions.
“What did your mom do for a career?” she asked.
“She was a bank manager,” Jay said.
“They make pretty good money, why did you have to live over the diner?” Alysse asked.
“Because she left us when I was eight. Had enough of the dusty, isolated ranch,” Jay said. “Dad had to mortgage the ranch when she left and by the time I was in high school he’d fallen behind on the payments.”
“That’s horrible. Why didn’t your mom take you with her?” Alysse asked. Jay’s childhood had been so different from hers. Her dad had owned a car dealership and made good money. He and her mom had doted on both her and Toby and they’d had a fairly good life.
“Who knows? She always said I was a handful and more like my dad than like her,” Jay responded.
“In what way?” she asked, trying to understand how a mom could leave behind her eight-year-old son.
She tried to see the boy Jay must have been, but he was too much a man for that to happen.
Any softness in him had been burned out long ago.
He was a tough Marine through and through, and she saw the evidence with her own two eyes.
“Just rough, I guess. We hunted and took care of the ranch together. I was his little shadow. Everyone said so. I guess she thought I needed to be with him.”
Alysse hugged Jay close to her, trying to comfort the little boy who had been abandoned. But she knew that she couldn’t. That event had changed Jay. Could he ever trust, be with anyone?
She was beginning to wonder if she was fighting a losing battle where he was concerned. She knew she’d wanted to mend her broken heart but a part of her had hoped to find the keys to real happiness with Jay and she was beginning to believe that would never happen.
JAY LIKED THE FEEL of Alysse in his arms and knew that he was winning her over not by doing anything but simply by showing her parts of himself that he usually kept closed off. He hadn’t wanted her to see the lost little boy he’d been, but he knew that this time he had to do things differently.
It occurred to him that they were finally alone. Exactly what he’d wanted all day. He pulled her closer, skimming his hands down her back until he could cup her buttocks. He wanted her.
He felt his cock stir and wished they were really alone.
He scanned the area, hoping for an isolated place that would allow them to be all but invisible.
He wanted to carry her away from here and make love to her and reinforce the bonds that were already there between them.
His caring was the first step to winning her back.
“You okay?” she asked. “I didn’t think I’d ever feel...sympathetic toward you, but all of that has changed. I want to know more about your past and more about the person you really are. Want to walk for a while and talk?”
No, he wanted to slowly strip the wet suit from her body and kiss her until they both forgot their names and where they were.
“I don’t see why the past should have anything to do with you and me,” he said.
“Well, maybe you left me before I left you...maybe the little boy you—”
“Stop. I don’t think that has anything to do with it. I don’t want to talk. I want to take you away from here and go someplace where we can make love and leave all the obvious differences behind us.”
“You’re running away again, Jay.”
He knew he was. He’d probably always run away from her. She made him uncomfortable in his own skin, but at the same time he couldn’t imagine not having her in his arms.
“I need more,” she stated.
“I know that,” he said. “Tell me about your upbringing. Where did you grow up?”
“Right here. Well, Oceanside, not San Clemente. My dad owned the local Chevy dealership and my mom did the books for him, even after they’d divorced.
My brother and I got into the usual mischief but nothing too crazy.
He went to UC Santa Barbara. I did one year at Berkeley before I flaked out and came home. ”
“Berkeley? You must be pretty smart,” he said.
“Sort of. But I hated it. I came home and my dad said I’m not supporting you if you aren’t going to school and so I enrolled in cooking school. Found I really loved it.”
“Looks like you ended up where you needed to be,” he said. “What does your dad think of you now?”
“I imagine he’d be pretty proud of me,” she said. “He died of a heart attack before I graduated cooking school. It was a huge shock for us. He went out jogging one morning and that was it.”
“I’m sorry,” Jay said. “My dad died on the road.”
“How?”
“Drunk driver.” He didn’t like to think about that too much. It had happened during his first six months in the Corps and after that, Jay had nothing to come back home to.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
For the first time ever, Jay didn’t mind talking to someone about the past. There was something about Alysse that made some of the rougher parts of his life seem okay.
“Let’s go back and join your friends,” he said, taking her hand and leading her down the beach.
“Do they all know that we were married?” he asked, stopping before they got to the group. “I don’t want to have to do the whole thing I did with your brother with each of them.”
“Only Toby and his girlfriend, Molly, know,” she said. “Don’t worry, if this doesn’t work out, we can go back to my using you for sex—but not tonight.” She laughed.
“Why not tonight?”
“Because you’ll leave and I’ll stay here and paddleboard and pretend that I’m happy.”
His gaze narrowed on her. “Why pretend?”
“Because I think you need something from me that has absolutely nothing to do with making up for the past. And no matter how hard I try to be objective, I just can’t and that makes me just a little sad.”
He swallowed hard, listening to the honesty that came so easily to Alysse and that made him feel small and ashamed.
He wanted her, and he wanted his life to be so much easier than it could be right now.
He was at a crossroads, she wasn’t. So he could either be the man she needed him to be or he could move on.
“Fine, let’s go back to your friends.”
“Not like that,” she said. “I didn’t say that to force you.”
“But you did. You’re taking control of this relationship and I don’t blame you. Just give me some time to adjust as we go along, okay?”
He saw her weighing it over and thought she might say no, and tonight, as aggravated as he felt at the world in general, he almost thought that it was okay if she said no. Major decisions could be influenced by things smaller than this moment. And if she said no now he would have no reason to stay.
“Sure, it’s okay. This isn’t easy for me either. I am still trying to find my way forward,” she said.
He knew that and he understood that his coming back into her life had seemed to spur her on some sort of quest.
“Did you invite me tonight to see how much I didn’t fit in or to get back at me?”
“No. I invited you because I thought it’d be nice for you to see what my life is like. To get a chance to know the people in my life and, as much as I want just to get over you, I also have a hard time not liking you.”
“You are a paradox,” he said.
“I’m not. I’m simple and straightforward. You just have to look beneath the surface,” she said, leading him over to her friends—and he let her.
He wanted to go wherever she led him. Which was a sobering discovery because he’d thought he was back in San Diego to make a tough decision but more and more he was coming to realize he was back here because this was where Alysse was.