CHAPTER FOUR
Clem
“All good?” I asked, coming into the kitchen, drying off my hair with the end of the towel. Amity looked like she’d been in the middle of a deep thought when I walked in, and now she looked uneasy.
“Yeah.”
“What’s up, Am?”
“Oh, nothing. I just…god…I left so much over at the cabin. I should go and get it.”
“What do you need?” I asked, throwing the towel over the back of a chair and moving toward her. With every step that I took, I could feel the tension between us sizzling like bacon on a hot pan.
“I…”
“Amity…”
“I need the food I got, okay?”
“I have food here.”
Amity stepped away from me, giving us distance. My pussy was throbbing with need, with want.
“Clem…”
“Why’d you do it? Why did you leave us all behind?” I asked her the question that had been burning in the back of my mind for a year. “You ghosted us. You ghosted me.”
Amity’s eyes held the pain that I’d been feeling for a year.
“It was hard,” she admitted. “I went from having a life where I was happy and content, safe…to not knowing where I belong in the world. I didn’t know how to be friends with AP, not after everything, and being friends with you was hard because you and he were so close.
I didn’t want to be this awkward person you couldn’t talk to because of what happened. ”
“That wouldn’t have happened, Am. Why didn’t you just talk to us?”
Amity shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I just felt like I wasn’t wanted and I needed to figure out who I was.”
“And did you?”
Her words were hurting me. How could she think we didn’t want her in our lives after everything?
“I don’t know. I feel kind of lost, to be honest. I can’t seem to get a job, no matter the qualifications I have, and now I just feel like I’m floating through life. It’s why I came here. I needed…clarity.”
“And now you’re stuck here with me. Don’t worry, I’ll stay out of your way.”
I turned around to start making something for dinner, trying to hide the tears welling in my eyes. A sharp pain lashing across my chest.
“No, Clem…please don’t misunderstand me.”
“What’s not to understand?” I asked over my shoulder, not bothering to look at her. “You came here for clarity and you got lumped with me, forcing you to face up to hard truths.”
“I didn’t know how I could still be friends with AP,” she admitted, and the pain in her voice had me clutching onto the side of the stove. “It hurt. I thought I had my whole life mapped out and then he just decides I’m not good enough…it…”
“That wasn’t what it was about, Am,” I said, turning to face her, noticing the tears tracking down her cheeks. “It wasn’t that he didn’t love you anymore or that you weren’t enough.”
“It felt that way.”
She was looking at her feet now, hiding her tears from me. Moving toward her, I pulled her into a hug.
“He said to me he saw you retreating, like you wouldn’t tell him everything and that he thought you were unhappy.”
She pulled back to look into my eyes. “He did?”
I nodded. “Yeah, you guys were so young when you got together and then you just moved in together. You grew into different people. He didn’t stop loving you, but it was more of a friend’s love and not a romantic love.”
“Yeah, I felt that way too.”
“So why was it hard?”
She turned her back to me, and I felt a sudden shift, almost like I was getting too close to something she wasn’t prepared to deal with.
“I don’t know, it was just hard to be there, watching everyone move on when I felt stuck in the same place.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. She was in pain, I could hear it, but I didn’t know how I could help her.
“Come here,” I said, holding the chair without the towel out. “Sit.”
She nodded and sat down rigidly. I undid the hair tie in her hair and combed my fingers through her strands. It felt like silk running through my rough fingers.
Softly, I parted her hair on either side, and started to braid one half of her hair down the side.
Amity calmed down, her body relaxing under the ministrations I was conducting on her hair.
Moving to the other side, I did the same, braiding until I got to the end and tied it with my own hair tie.
Running my hand down her braids, I felt her shudder involuntarily.
When she stood up, I saw it in her eyes.
There was something here. Something magnetic. Just like it had been back then. A tension we couldn’t name.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice soft as a whisper. “I haven’t had my hair braided in…well, a year.”
I knew she loved having her hair played with, and when I started braiding her hair after learning how to do it on a youtube tutorial late one night, I found I liked the time I got to spend with her while I did it.
Not to mention, the soft little whimpers she’d emit when I played with her hair were enough to fill my spank bank for nights on end. But I could never let her know.
She wasn’t into me like that.
“Come on, let me cook us something and we can play a game of cards later.”
Amity nodded, toying with the end of her braid. I moved back to the pantry and pulled what I needed out before I started making us something to eat.
We talked about summers here at our respective cabins, about her studies, and the job she didn’t get that she had hoped for.
I spoke about the reason why I came here and how much I loved my job, how I loved to go for walks in the woods and sit out there for hours on end, just watching nature go on around me like I was nothing but a minor insignificance.
I’d watch the squirrels run over tree branches, and how they would communicate with each other, even finding humor in the way they would fight over things just like we would as children.
The tension was draining out of us, and we were just Amity and Clem, talking like we’d known each other our whole lives—because we had.
Once we were done with dinner, Amity helped me with the dishes. I washed and she wiped up. Throwing the towel down, she turned to me, a brightness in her eyes that I had been longing to see again.
Fuck me, she was beautiful.
I grabbed the tea towel, not realising she was still holding it, and ended up pulling her toward me.
Amity stumbled, and I dropped the towel end, catching her before she ended up faceplanting on the floor.
Lifting her with ease, I set her back on her feet, my eyes on hers.
Something shifted between us again, something… warm and electrifying.
I tracked how her eyes moved from mine to my lips, and back up. My own eyes did the same path, to her lips and back to her eyes. The unasked question hanging between us.
Do we?
Heat wrapped around both of us, almost as if the storm were a minor insignificance compared to the storm brewing between us now.
Her eyes flicked to my lips again, and I knew it immediately. She wanted this. She was feeling this just like I was.
My hand moved from her waist to cup the side of her face. Amity leaned into the touch, our mouths just inches from touching.
I could feel her breath on my lips, and I was sure she could feel mine. It was almost as if we’d both stopped breathing just as a loud crack sounded above us and the lights went out.