Chapter 12
I feel as if writing these words is a sin, and yet I know it isn’t.
He kissed me tonight in the parlor. He had been drinking, and I worry he thought I was his first wife, or that perhaps he didn’t think at all.
I started to scold him and then his mouth was on mine, and I could not think at all.
He came to his senses and part of me wishes he had not.
P erry had been slightly queasy over her slipup the entire night, and she didn’t really feel better as she sat at the kitchen counter in the little cabin the next morning drinking coffee.
Carson hadn’t said anything about it, not that they had been alone at all after it happened. Not for more than a few minutes. He had dropped the hope chest off last night, but he had scarcely stayed longer than five minutes. She blamed herself.
He had texted her this morning to say that he was coming by at nine, which was going to be very soon, so she needed to stop ruminating.
She had let last night get weird. She had been way too open in her feelings about Jessie Jane; she didn’t know why she cared about her specifically. It didn’t make any sense.
And then he had said …
That he had never wanted to sleep with Jessie Jane. Not in all the time that he had lived in Rustler Mountain, so of course it wasn’t going to change.
That had felt like a stab wound. It had been the worst time ever to make a slipup the way she had. When he had made it so abundantly clear that if he had never wanted a woman, he was never going to.
She knew that. She knew it because … obviously.
Just obviously. The fact that he had never touched her, and never even seemed to want to was evidence enough.
All the evidence she needed.
She sang a very long, high note into the echoing silence of the kitchen before she took another sip of her coffee, as if expelling the sound from her body might do something to disrupt the restlessness within her. The embarrassment. Instead, she just was even more embarrassed.
There was a knock on the front door, and she startled. Then she grabbed her sweater off the back of her chair and drank the last of her coffee on the way to the door. She set the mug down on a side table and jerked it open.
There he was. Tall, broad, his blue eyes still clouded with sleep. He was wearing the kind of battered jeans that haunted her dreams. Soft denim that conformed to his muscular thighs, and all the other details that she tried to never look at.
Operative word being tried .
“Good morning,” he said, sounding gruff.
“Yeah. Great morning,” she said, walking out of the house and closing the door behind her. She locked it ostentatiously.
She looked up at him and saw his mouth twitch.
“Sleep well?” she asked.
“Just great,” he said.
She got into the passenger seat of the truck and waited for him to join her.
She was wondering if she should be the one to say something.
He wasn’t acting weird, so maybe she didn’t need to, but she also wasn’t sure if she could just let what she’d said slip by.
No. She was going to leave it alone. She wasn’t going to say anything.
Because there was no good end to it. She didn’t even know how to articulate what she was feeling, so there was no point trying.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked. “I mean, did I put the bed together right?”
“Yeah. I don’t feel any lumps under the mattress. So, no errant peas or anything.”
“Peas?”
She looked at him, entirely straight-faced. “Because I am a princess, Carson.”
“A pirate princess, maybe,” he said. “And if I recall, you took offense to that back in the day. Because you didn’t understand why you couldn’t just be a pirate like I was.”
“Well. It seemed sexist,” she said. There. They were talking about being kids. Simpler times. Not about whatever last night had been.
“Sorry you feel that way,” he said.
“I don’t think you are.”
She leaned forward and turned his radio on. Then she found the AUX cable and hooked her phone up. “I want to choose the music,” she said.
He groaned. “Please no.”
“It’s a short drive. You’ll live. Though I might make Taylor Swift the soundtrack of the renovation.”
“I like Taylor Swift,” he said.
“Well, then you won’t mind my two-hundred-song playlist.”
“At least it’s not the same song two hundred times, which is definitely what high school Perry would have prepared for me.”
“I do love to ruminate on a song. But I know better than to make you suffer for it.”
“The character development is truly stunning.”
This felt good. It felt easy. It felt like them.
She tried not to get lost in ruminating about how long it had been since they had felt normal.
Maybe there was really no normal. They had been little kids together, and it had been simple.
Her heart had nearly burst every time she’d ever looked at Carson Wilder, but she had assumed that he felt the same.
She had assumed it was friendship. Why would she think it was anything else?
He was her compass when it came to human connection. Her north star, her baseline. He was everything.
So she had assumed that the feeling in her chest, far too full and nearly painful, was just the feeling you had for your very best friend in all the world.
It was only when she started to get breasts, and realized that she was a girl, and he was a boy, and that meant different things when it came to emotions and bodies, that she started to worry that maybe his feelings were different from hers.
When he grew six inches, and she saw him making out with a girl who had her nose pierced in the back of his truck, then she had known for certain.
That not only was he a man, and she well on her way to being a woman, which made them different, but that for him, there were women that he saw differently. She was something else.
But for her, he was the standard. So she had learned to protect herself from those truths over the years. She had done her level best to find a new normal every time something changed.
He’d looked at her once, when they were out at Outlaw Lake and she’d been in a white dress, hoping he’d think she was beautiful.
But he’d seemed almost … angry, and he hadn’t made a move on her, far from it.
The way his eyes had skimmed over her had made her skin feel too tight. She’d run away. Swum away, actually.
Then she’d decided that she could find boys to make out with.
To sleep with.
Who didn’t look at her as if her being a woman was an inconvenience.
When he’d left, she had to find a new version of normal all over again. And then he had brought back a wife, and the world had turned over yet again.
What was normal?
Them being at Outlaw Lake. That was about it.
She was changing that. He wasn’t wrong. What he had said to her last night about her upsetting herself by leaving and then taking it out on him.
No. He wasn’t entirely wrong.
She did not play the same song repeatedly all the way down to town, though she did consider it, just to be irritating.
Sometimes, there was comfort in acting more like a younger sister, someone who could annoy him and get away with it.
Because it felt a little bit more intimate than friendship, and it let her tease him without sounding as if she was flirting.
It didn’t feel right this time.
It wasn’t honest, anyway.
That was the problem. She was beginning to get more and more frustrated with herself.
Because she wasn’t honest with him. She had put together a facade that she had continued to refabricate whenever necessary.
She presented an image to the world of how she felt about him, but she knew it wasn’t true.
She kept her real feelings inside, turning them around like that same song she would play two hundred times because she liked it.
Except she didn’t especially like this.
It was a problem with her in general. She got obsessed with just one thing.
Sometimes she wished she could go back in time and undo the moment she had become obsessed with Carson. But then, the thought of doing that made her sad, because he had given her so much joy.
Didn’t she get so much from who they were together? Even when she was separated from him, it would be different from if it had never been.
No. She would never have survived her childhood without him. She would have died of loneliness. Of a broken heart.
Because living with her parents had been worse than living alone.
Walking on eggshells was a fact of life with them.
“You’re awfully quiet.”
“I’m thinking about my parents, actually.”
“Oh?”
“I haven’t told them yet that I’m leaving.” That was true, and she didn’t especially want to give him the breakdown of the thought ladder she had climbed to get to the topic of her parents.
“Oh. Well. Will they notice?”
“I mean, they already live over an hour away, but this will be even farther. And selling my grandma’s house …”
“Do you think your mom is going to be upset about it?”
“Kind of. It feels completely in line with who she is. She didn’t help take care of her mother when she was dying, and she never acted like she cared about the house at all, but if I sell it …”
“Yeah. That does sound like your mom.” He paused for a moment. “I don’t know what my mom would sound like in any given situation, because I never see her.”
“Aren’t we a pair.”
“I think it’s why we’re a pair.”
“True.”
It was a reminder of exactly what had bonded them. And it wasn’t a bad thing.
She always felt like the being-in-love part, the attraction, was shallow in comparison to everything else. Sometimes she got mad at herself for thinking that, because romantic love was important too.
But it was nothing in the face of a lifelong friendship. Surely. What example did either of them have of the true value of love and romance?
Mae Tanner had not moved out to Oregon for love. She had done it out of a sense of self-preservation. She wanted to find the new thing, the best thing, the thing that she needed most.