Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
When Zane woke up the next morning, he had Cara in his arms.
She was nestled right up against him, her round, perfect ass pressed against his morning wood. And who was he kidding? It really had nothing to do with the fact that it was morning and everything to do with the fact that it was her.
She was soft. So soft. So much more than he’d dreamed of, so much more than he’d fantasized about.
It was what terrified him about her. She was the kind of soft that hands like his were never meant to touch.
He’d been made rough by life. By working the land, by loss, by war.
Hands like his couldn’t soothe, they couldn’t touch her how she needed, couldn’t hold her how she should be held.
Even telling her about his family had hurt her. He was a liability just by existing. The things that lived in his head could poison her.
He let out a slow breath and unwrapped his arm from around her waist, crawling out of the shelter and looking at the smoldering ashes from the fire.
He stoked it back to life, and then went down to the river to try to catch some more fish for breakfast. He was successful in his efforts, and by the time Cara emerged from the shelter, they were almost all the way cooked.
“Morning,” she said, looking at him, and not looking at what he was doing at all.
Which meant she had woken up thinking about the terrible things that he had told her.
“About last night…”
“It’s okay. We don’t have to talk about it.”
He didn’t realize he had been holding his breath. But it released in a gust after she said that.
“All right. Because I meant what I said. Other than psychologists, I’ve never talked to anybody about that.”
“You’ve talked to a psychologist?”
“Yeah. I… I went to live with my grandparents afterward. They made sure that I got help.”
“Oh. That’s… That’s good.”
He nodded. He didn’t tell her that they had both passed away by the time he was eighteen. Leaving him completely by himself, leaving him with the military as his only opportunity to have a family. And he had discovered that that was a violent, volatile family to get into.
Though the military also provided a lot of psychological services. Especially when you went into it with the backstory like his.
“Yeah. It was all right.”
Except it wasn’t, and neither was he. They both knew that now.
Because she knew exactly why he acted the way that he did, she knew exactly why he held people at a distance.
It was a lot more fun to be mysterious. Or maybe even have people think that you were an asshole.
It was better than tearing your chest open and letting people see your insides.
Letting them see all the ways in which you were actually fucked up, and just plain traumatized by life.
“Thank you. For sharing all of that with me.”
“Thank you?” That was something he hadn’t expected. He pulled the fish off the fire and divided breakfast up the same way that he had done dinner. “That’s not the reaction I expected.”
“I just… You trusted me with that. And you can. I’m not going to tell anybody.”
“Thank you.” He genuinely hadn’t been worried about that.
Not even for one moment. The only thing that was worrying him, or rather, making him uncomfortable now, was the fact that she knew the truth, the fact that they were sitting there with nothing between them, just the broad light of day, and she could see all of his secrets.
All of his pain.
That felt a little bit like a problem. But he wasn’t going to say that either.
“You’re welcome.”
They ate their breakfast in silence, and then they began to break camp. “I try as best I can to leave no sign of myself in the wild.”
They got rid of every last ounce of trash, took the lean-to down, and made sure the fire was completely stamped out. Then, they left that space behind. He noticed Cara lingering as they left.
“What?”
“We did it. I mean, I did it. I spent the night out in the wilderness. And it didn’t kill me. I’m not sure that I’m eager to repeat it. But I really feel like I accomplished something. I didn’t let it become the horse that bit me on the shoulder.”
He chuckled. “All right. I see where you’re going with that.”
“That’s been such a big deal for me. Being afraid of horses. I’ve been working on it, but by myself, which wasn’t as effective as this. So thank you.”
“Maybe I’ll teach you to ride?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Or at least, we need to get out on a clear night so I can show you how to find your way with the stars.”
“That might be the thing that gets me more lost. You said that’s easier than getting more found.”
He nodded. “I did.”
He didn’t want this to be the end. He didn’t want this to be the last thing that he did with her. Maybe last night, maybe telling her about his past, maybe that had been either a last-ditch effort to explain himself or push her away.
He wasn’t really sure.
It would be nice if she were completely freaked out, wouldn’t speak to him, couldn’t even look at him, because she knew about the darkness of his past, because that would clarify things. It would make it all easy.
But she didn’t seem freaked out. She seemed like she felt sorry for him, which was its own difficult thing to bear, but he also couldn’t blame her.
It was tragic.
And very few people had experienced something like it. He knew that. He was in the wrong one percent. He was in the one percent of experiencing life’s tragic bullshit.
Not a self-pitying observation, just a fact. If she hadn’t wanted to deal with somebody like that, he wouldn’t have been angry.
He would’ve been relieved.
“All right. It’s up to you to lead us back. Use your compass just like you did yesterday. You know which directions you came, and that means you know how to find your way back.”
They began to make their way out of the woods, and she was a confident and competent leader who only had to be redirected a couple of times. Mostly, she did great. And given how challenging this was, he was thoroughly impressed.
He had that same feeling again. Like there was a wall between the two of them, the same feeling that he had with everybody else, so it shouldn’t feel notable.
But it did. It felt notable, and he wanted to knock it over.
He wanted to take that and smash it.
It was so long to get back to the truck, and by the time they got back there, he was starving. “You know what,” he said. “We oughta get a burger in town.”
“Yes,” she said, relief in her voice.
It felt like they had left some things behind in the woods. Some heavy things.
Her doubt, her fear of the wilderness, of life, his confessions about his past, all of that was there. It felt like the truck was getting lighter the farther away they got from it. “You did it,” he said.
“I did,” she said. “Thank you.”
There was a little tiny burger shack, Barney’s, out on the edge of Mustang River, in the older part of town. It had been there since the 1950s, and it still served hamburgers, French fries, and milkshakes exclusively. The best in town, in his opinion.
And he had some opinions about hamburgers.
They sat at a table outside, and each had a cheeseburger, a chocolate shake, and a double order of fries.
“Have you ever had a sausage roll?”
The question was out of left field. “What?”
“I take that as a no. They’re really good. It’s like a puff pastry with a sausage in the middle. I wonder if I could make a cheeseburger sausage roll for the bakery.”
He really enjoyed her sweets, and he couldn’t say that he typically wanted anything savory when he went to Juniper and Sage, but it didn’t sound like a bad idea.
“I would eat it. You could test it on me if you wanted to.”
“How nice of you to let me experiment on you.”
Her cheeks turned pink, and she ducked her head.
This time, he didn’t look away from her. From the blush in her cheeks.
There was a grim sort of certainty settling in his bones now. He wanted her.
He really did.
And he had told Cody that he knew him, that he knew he wasn’t the kind of man to make a move like that. To do something like that.
When he knew that he couldn’t give her anything, when he knew that she was someone he would have to deal with on a day-to-day basis after the affair ended, when he knew that she was younger than him, and softer than him, when he knew that he had the potential to break her.
But he had also never, ever told that story out loud to another person who had no idea about it. Only her.
So he couldn’t follow typical patterns as evidence of how he would handle this with her.
And right now, sitting there with her with a hamburger, a milkshake, and French fries, having just spent the night in the woods, having just cut his chest open and showed her everything inside of it, he had no idea what he was going to do.
He only knew that he wanted her.
He wanted her in a way that transcended every other precedent that had ever existed.
He wanted her in a way that wasn’t typical.
He didn’t know if he had the wherewithal to turn away from her. She had touched his face last night, and all he had wanted to do was kiss her, but he hadn’t.
Because everything hurt. Because if he had kissed her, he would’ve lost control completely, he would’ve shattered something in him, and he knew that he couldn’t afford that.
So he hadn’t kissed her then.
But he didn’t feel like there was a damn thing keeping him from doing it now.
“Thank you,” she said, lifting up a French fry and eating it. “For this. All of it.”
She defaulted to thanking him, to being nice to him when she didn’t know what else to do. He wondered if it was because she was having the same problem. That nothing was really stopping her from kissing him.
He didn’t think he was reading these cues wrong. He was pretty damn sure she felt the same heat that he did.
And you’re the older one. You’re the one who carries the responsibility of not being a big idiot.
Except, he was already an idiot where she was concerned. Had been from the beginning.
That was for damn sure.
They finished up their lunch, and then he drove her back up to his place.
He was still wrestling with his need, the proclamations that he’d made to Cody, with his own self, when she got out of the truck and began to head toward her car.
And then, it was like everything fell away. Like there was nothing. Nothing except for her. Nothing except the need that he felt for her, deep in his soul, deep in his gut. A desire that transcended anything he had ever experienced before.
Desire unlike anything else.
Thunder rolled in the distance, a warning, he knew. He didn’t take it.
“Cara… wait.”
She turned toward him, and he wrapped his arm around her waist.
Then he lowered his head and broke his promise.